Desmo Dovi is no more. The eight-year partnership between Andrea Dovizioso and Ducati Corse will come to an end when the flag falls after the last race of the 2020 MotoGP season.
The news was made official by Dovizioso’s manager Simone Battistella, after a final meeting with Ducati management to try to agree terms. Battistella told broadcaster Sky Italia that they had been unable to find common ground to continue.
We nearly got away with it. The clouds hung heavy over the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg for much of the morning, but it stayed dry for all three classes, and the Red Bull Rookies practice as well – I will leave it to the imagination of the reader as to why the Red Bull Rookies are racing in Spielberg this weekend.
But halfway through FP2 for the Moto3 class, at the beginning of the afternoon, the heavens parted and the deluge began.
The weird thing about the rain is that it was so incredibly localized. The Red Bull Ring is a relatively compact circuit, not elongated like Assen, or spread out over a vast territory like Silverstone, so to have a downpour in Turn 3, the track completely soaked and water running across the track, while a few hundred meters downhill, along the front straight and at Turn 1, the track was completely dry, made for impossible conditions.
A few Moto3 riders nearly got caught out as they hammered up the hill toward Turn 3, then found themselves unable to brake for the corner and forced to run wide.
And so MotoGP lost out on FP2 almost completely. The track was neither one thing nor the other, soaking wet at the top half, between Turns 3 and 4, and desert dry down the bottom near the pits.
It was way too dangerous to go out on slicks, and a waste of time to go out on rain tires and burn up the limited sets they have. The wet parts of the track were wet enough for the soft wets, the dry parts of the track were capable of destroying even the medium wet within a few laps.
A short hop over the Alps – or rather, a short drive south, and then west between the Alps, to avoid the slow but spectacular progress over the mountain passes to the north of Spielberg – and the MotoGP paddock reassembles at the Red Bull Ring in Austria.
From one of the best tracks on the calendar, plagued by financial problems, to one of the best-funded tracks on the calendar, plagued by the fact that, well, frankly, it’s not a very good circuit for motorcycle racing.
The setting is spectacular, nestled at the foot of the hills rising from the valley of the river Mur and heading up to snow-capped peaks a couple of kilometers skywards.
The circuit sits on a slope at the bottom of those hills, making for a surprisingly steep climb up to Turn 1, then up the hill to Turn 3, along the hillside to Turn 4, before rolling down through a huge Omega right-left-right combination to get back to the bottom of the hill, and the straight which runs along it.
But the circuit belies its heritage, as a spectacular but treacherous mountain circuit crossing hills and woods.
And like many mountain circuits, there is little room for mistakes, with runoff limited at Turn 1, Turn 3, between the barriers from Turn 3 to Turn 4, and at the bottom of the hill into the final corner. In the dry, it is all just about manageable. But in the wet, it can be a terrifying place.
Every MotoGP round has a lot going on, too much to capture on a Sunday night. But the Brno round of MotoGP was even worse than usual, with ten times the usual surprises, and a month’s worth of stories and intrigue.
On Sunday, I covered Brad Binder’s win, KTM’s journey, the state of the championship, Yamaha’s engine situation, and Ducati’s problems since the start of the season. Below is a round up of things I didn’t get around to writing about.
It goes without saying that Brad Binder’s victory was the biggest story to come out of the MotoGP race at Brno.
If ever there were a day where qualifying and practice told two very different stories, it was Saturday at Brno. The tales were linked and related, interwoven in many ways, but the differences outweighed the common threads.
The grid tells a tale of heroism, surprises, and the cruel application of sensible rules. Practice is a story of dark foreboding, of the grim war of attrition that awaits on Sunday afternoon. Qualifying was tough; the race is going to be much, much tougher.
Qualifying is always the highlight of Saturday afternoon, though the final free practice session, FP4, is what matters most. With nothing on the line but race setup, and conditions close to what they will face at race time on Sunday afternoon, teams and riders show what they are really capable of.
Even then, the story told is not in the overall result, but tucked away in the analysis timesheets, where teams send out riders on old tires, to see how they hold up once they get a lot of laps on them.
The MotoGP paddock has its first confirmed case of COVID-19.
A cameraman, employed by Dorna but assigned to work with the French broadcaster Canal+ tested positive for the disease during a routine test taken during the Brno round of MotoGP, in preparation for the Austrian race at Spielberg next weekend.
Fortunately, the cameraman has no symptoms of the disease at the moment.
What did we learn from the first day of practice at Brno? Not much, but that in itself is valuable. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that the Automotodrom Brno circuit has not seen much action, so there is very little rubber on the track.
The circuit has always been fairly low grip, but it is much worse now than it has ever been. It needs rubber down on it before any conclusions can be drawn.
That makes figuring out what is going on rather tricky. The track is changing session to session, as bikes deposit a thin smear of Dunlop and Michelin rubber on the surface of the track and in the crevices between the grit particles used in the aggregate.
That leads to big changes in grip levels: Fabio Quartararo’s fastest time in FP2 was over eight tenths faster than the best lap set by Takaaki Nakagami in the morning session. Quartararo’s best time from Friday was nearly three quarters of a second slower than the best time at the end of the first day in 2019.
With the times so far off the pace – Quartararo’s time is two whole seconds off Marc Márquez’ outright lap record, and half a second slower than the race lap record – and grip still changing, conditions were just to inscrutable to draw any conclusions from, or at least any conclusions which might last beyond Saturday morning.
Trying to work out which tire will work best was almost possible on Friday. There are still too many unknowns.
With MotoGP heading to Brno for the first of three races, a new chapter opens for the championship. The two season openers at Jerez were somehow anachronistic, races out of time, and out of place.
The searing heat of an Andalusian summer turned the Circuito de Jerez into an alien space, the searing heat punishing riders, bikes, and tires. It proved costly, too, Yamaha losing three engines to the heat in two races, Ducati losing one, that of Pecco Bagnaia.
Those lost engines are likely to have long-term consequences for Yamaha, though it seems as if Ducati have escape a little more lightly.
The COVID-19 pandemic has once again reshaped the 2020 MotoGP calendar, though this change had long been expected.
Today, Dorna and the FIM announced that the three races outside Europe still on the calendar – in Argentina, Malaysia, and Thailand – have all been canceled. Taking their place at the end of the season is one extra race, officially unspecified as yet.
A few days after the events of the Andalusian Grand Prix, with time to let what happened in Jerez to sink in, there was a lot that missed in my Sunday race notes.
If you want to know about Yamaha’s high hopes and deep concerns, Rossi’s podium return, the Ducatis, KTMs, and what it might mean for Brno and Austria, first go back and read it on MotoMatters.com. Here’s what I missed the first time around.
He came. He tried. But in the end, it proved impossible. Even for a man whose ambition and competitive drive burns as fiercely as Marc Márquez’.
After riding with fewer problems than he feared on Saturday morning, the fracture in his right arm started to swell in the afternoon, and made riding impossible.
Marc Márquez was forced to face the limits of human endurance and willpower, and accept that racing on Sunday would not be.
Saturday afternoon was the first time that the media had had a chance to actually speak to Márquez since his crash last Sunday.
He hadn’t spoken to the media after the race – for the obvious reason that he was injured and needed medical attention – nor had he spoken to us on his return to the track.
His mind was focused laser-like on Saturday morning, when he would get a chance to ride – skipping Friday was part of the deal he made with HRC before they would even allow him to get on a bike – and he wanted no distractions.
But on Saturday afternoon, after his body had forced him to throw in the towel, Márquez finally told us exactly what happened a week ago, when he crashed out of the race, and kicked off the roller coaster ride which ended with him pulling into his garage after a single lap during Q1.