Michael Scott | March 29, 2024
Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
To Sprint, or Not to Sprint
After one year, opinions are still split on the value of the Sprint races. Most fans love them. Most riders? Maybe not so much. A few (Jack Miller springs to mind, plus the most frequent Sprint winner, Jorge Martin) relish the chance to go racing twice as often. Others (Fabio Quartararo, for one) believe that—among other negatives—the extra race trivializes what should be a weekend dedicated to one serious contest.
To them, the Sprint undermines the gravitas of the world championship enterprise. (Perhaps, in his context, it should be capped up: World Championship!)
To me, it’s not a given that motorcycle racing should be a matter of gravitas. The thought seems a bit precious. A bit up itself.
It’s just a motorbike race, as the wonderfully matter-of-fact Mick Doohan once told an interviewer whose questions he found a bit airy-fairy.
Last week, however, a lively discussion with a colleague —an avid anti-Sprinter—did suggest the argument is not cut and dried.
His major objection was the matter of safety—more chance of getting hurt. Last year, he asserted, there had been a 300 percent increase in the number of riders missing the Sunday race through injury.
Sounds like a lot, put like that. But it’s a percentage of a very small sample: up from an average of one per race to less than three. In just one misfortunate year, when crashes that might have been benign instead broke bones—like Alex Rins’s nasty leg double fracture at Mugello. The outcome of fast crashes is always in the lap of the gods. To be meaningful, statistics need to be less selective. Or taken from a larger sample. Hurling huge percentages of very small numbers is deceptive.
A second objection blames Sprints for stealing practice time, specifically free practice, when riders can work on race setups rather than just belt out single laps for a crucial grid position. There is a point here. Practice time had already been squeezed anyway, and it got worse last year.
Before then, there were 135 minutes of so-called Free Practice, though in fact all times counted towards selection for the top 10 in Q2, to guarantee a start in the front four rows. Only on Saturday afternoon, there were another 30 minutes of genuine free practice, plus 20 minutes of race-morning warmup.
By the end of last year, Friday’s two sessions, up from 90 minutes to 105, were timed; Saturday morning had 30 minutes of free practice. Race morning warmup was cut to 10 minutes. Thus, total practice time, both timed and free dropped from 185 minutes to 145 (not counting the qualifying sessions).
Given the restrictions on testing away from the races, this pinched saddle time even further. A significant side effect was to emphasize the importance of electronics and the use of AI simulations to short-cut the task of arriving at gearing and chassis/suspension settings. This favored the richer teams.
The Sprint did make this worse, but it was the same “worse” for all.
Then, the matter of trivialization. The compromise to dignity.
The half-point Sprints do muddy the waters, but when you consider that Bagnaia won only four of them to Martin’s nine but seven full races to Martin’s four, you understand why he was the champion. The main races remain more important.
His was clearly a conscious approach. While Martin charged off, Bagnaia used the Sprints to gain further knowledge and ammunition for the main race. All while minimizing the risk by avoiding close engagement when there were only a handful of points on the table.
Apply the same thinking to the rest of the grid, and you might conclude that the Sprints aren’t real races and should not be taken seriously. And you may be right. But then again, an intelligent rider views every race like that anyway, not as an isolated dash for cash, but as part of a championship campaign. So, are any of them real races?
The final accusation: MotoGP was copying F1, which introduced Sprint races in 2021. Perhaps so, but also not quite. F1 has only six rather than at every race, while the car series has actually imitated MotoGP this year by expanding its Sprint points system from the top three to the top eight.
MotoGP’s new marketing chief, Dan Rossomondo, new last year and fresh from NBA, didn’t invent Sprints, but he likes them (surprise, surprise) as “a product that people can use as a trial for our main race.” A sort of less taxing hors d’oeuvre on a Saturday afternoon for those who find the main race too tiring.
Me? I like them, too. Not as “a product” but because they fulfill the basic requirement of a world championship event by being “only a motorbike race.”
And the more, the merrier.CN
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