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Nicky Hayden Will Replace Dani Pedrosa at Phillip Island

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American MotoGP fans, along with MotoGP fans in general, will be pleased to hear that Nicky Hayden will swing a leg over a MotoGP bike once again. Replacing the injured Dani Pedrosa, Hayden will race at Australian GP with the Repsol Honda team.

Pedrosa is expected to miss the rest of the flyaway races, after breaking his collarbone during the Japanese GP. With Hiroshi Aoyama replacing the HRC rider at Motegi, Hayden will now fill in at Phillip Island.

Fans will remember that the Kentucky Kid has already had some seat time on the 2016-spec Honda RC213V race bike, substituting for Jack Miller during the Aragon GP.

Now with more experience with the Michelin tires, we expect Hayden to improve upon his 15th place finish in Spain.

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Saturday MotoGP Summary at Motegi: Highsides Return

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If anyone was nostalgic for the days of 500cc two strokes, they got a glimpse of what the dark side of that era was like this weekend at Motegi.

Rider after rider has been flung from his bike, spat into the air as a rear tire slipped then bit again, snapping the bike around, suspension compressing and then explosively decompressing, catapulting the rider into the sky.

It has kept the medical helicopter busy: Eugene Laverty and Jorge Lorenzo have been flown to and fro for medical examination, with the second helicopter kept on standby having to take its place.

On Friday, the victims had been Eugene Laverty and Dani Pedrosa. Pedrosa had paid the heaviest price, snapping his right collarbone and flying home to Spain for another operation – his fourteenth, by all counts.

Laverty had escaped relatively lightly, but was still forced to sit out the morning session on Saturday as a precaution. Jorge Lorenzo was even more fortunate. He was launched at Turn 3 at the end of FP3, and had to be flown to hospital for checks, before being allowed to return and take part in FP4.

He feared he had damaged his left ankle, but checks revealed it was just bruising.

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Friday MotoGP Summary at Motegi: Highsides, Tires, And The Speed of Marquez

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What is the biggest downside of the flyaways? The three back-to-back races are crucial on the way to the end of the championship. This is the time you need to perform, where you can make the difference by pushing that little bit harder.

The downside, of course, is that if you push too far you can lose everything. “Three races in a row is always complicated,” Valentino Rossi told the press conference on Thursday. “You can have a small problem in the first race and pay a lot.”

The first day at Motegi was a concerted attempt to prove Rossi right. The afternoon session turned into a concerted effort by several riders to hurt themselves, sometimes successfully.

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Dani Pedrosa Fractures Collarbone During Motegi FP2

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Dani Pedrosa has suffered more bad luck at Motegi. For the second time in his career, he has crashed there and broken a collarbone.

The Repsol Honda rider suffered a huge highside at the end of the afternoon FP2 session, being flung high into the air at Turn 11. The Spaniard immediately got up holding his collarbone, and was taken on the back of a scooter to the medical center. There, he was diagnosed with a fractured right collarbone.

Pedrosa is to fly back immediately to Spain, where he will undergo surgery to fix the collarbone. Officially, the Repsol Honda team have only ruled him out of Sunday’s race at Motegi.

However, it is extremely unlikely that the Spaniard will return before Valencia. Dr Xavier Mir, one of the official doctors for MotoGP, told Spanish reporters he did not expect to see Pedrosa back until the final race of the season.

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Preview of the Japanese GP: Punishing Schedules, Punishing Braking, And Winner #9?

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MotoGP is about to enter the toughest stretch of the season. Three races on three consecutive weekends is tough enough.

But three races separated by three, seven plus hour flights, kicking off with a race in a time zone seven hours ahead of the place most riders live. So riders, mechanics and team staff all start off a triple header struggling with jet lag and facing a grueling schedule.

And they are thrown in the deep end from the very start. Only the MotoGP riders can afford to stay at the Twin Ring circuit near Motegi. Most of the team staff stay in Mito, an hour’s drive from the track, meaning they have to travel for two hours a day.

Up in the hills in the middle of Japan’s main island, and sufficiently far north for temperatures to drop in the fall, Motegi is notorious for poor weather. It is usually cold, often damp, and sometimes ravaged by typhoons.

It is not just challenging on the riders and teams, however. The road circuit which sits half inside, half outside the oval course, giving the Twin Ring its name, is like Le Mans on steroids.

A series of straights of varying lengths, connected by a series of precisely engineered corners, as befits a circuit designed specifically as a test track.

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Sunday MotoGP Summary at Aragon: How Championships Are Won & Lost

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Momentum. That’s what the last race before the Australasian triple header is all about. Momentum heading towards the end of the championship. Coming out on top and carrying it forward to Motegi, Phillip Island, and Sepang is vital.

The deal may get done on one of the flyaways, but Aragon is the place where the riders put their chips on the table.

All three races on Sunday had a huge impact on the MotoGP championship. In the first race of the day, a title was settled. In the second race of the day, the championship was blown even further open.

The final race of the day saw another brick hammered into the wall of Marc Márquez’s third MotoGP title, and further cemented his legacy. It was a good day’s racing.

There are a lot of ways to win titles, but the way the 2016 Moto3 championship was settled was about as fitting as it could be. At the end of a classic Moto3 race, where a strong group battled for control until the final four laps, four men broke away from the pack.

That group consisted of Brad Binder, the two men who could still mathematically challenge Binder for the 2016 title, Enea Bastianini and Jorge Navarro, and rookie revelation Fabio Di Giannantonio.

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Saturday MotoGP Summary at Aragon: Marquez’s Revenge

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Motorcycle racing is the cruelest form of addiction. What racers need to feed their habit is to win, but winning is hard, one of the hardest things of all. To do so, you have to go beyond yourself, push beyond your limits, exceed what you thought was possible.

That creates a paradox: if you want to win a championship, sometimes you have to accept you can’t win a race. Too much of that servility, though, and ambition will chafe at the bit. The temptation to have a go is hard to resist, with the risk of ending in gravelly ignominy.

That has been the fate of Marc Márquez so far this season. Wins have been few this season, just three in thirteen races. Even podiums have eluded him, Márquez ending off the box in three of the last four races. There is only so much a young man bursting with ambition can take.

That ambition looks set to burst forth at Aragon. If Misano was a track which Marc Márquez had marked down as a place he could risk losing a lot of points, he had comforted himself with the thought that Aragon followed.

Aragon is a Honda track, a Márquez track even. It is a track where he has won. But also a track where he has crashed trying to win.

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Friday MotoGP Summary at Aragon: Tire Preservation, Honda Race Pace, & Allowing Riders to be Human

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Could there be a ninth winner in nine MotoGP races? On Thursday, the massed ranks of MotoGP riders had elected Andrea Dovizioso for the role.

“I’m happy they said my name,” Dovizioso told us journalists on Friday, “but they have put a lot of pressure on me. Because I have to win this race, and today wasn’t the best day for me to try to think about winning…”

The Ducati rider had struggled with a lack of grip on the track, adding to the fact that this is not a great track for Dovizioso.

“This track doesn’t have the best characteristic for my style,” he said. Dovizioso’s strength lies in hard braking and quick turning, and there is not enough of that to suit the Italian. Add low grip to that, and he faces an uphill struggle.

Dovizioso also faces Aragon with a new teammate. Andrea Iannone has once again been forced to withdraw, the T3 vertebra he injured at Misano causing him too much pain to continue. He could manage three or four laps, before needing to return to the pits and get some rest.

With 22 laps coming up on Sunday, Iannone quickly understood that would be too much. Michele Pirro was already on standby, and once FP1 made it clear that Iannone would not be able to ride, Ducati’s test rider was put on the bike.

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A Question of Trust: Matching Riders to Crew Chiefs

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The music has stopped for the MotoGP riders, with all of them now having taken their seats for next year. That does not mean that contract season is over, however. We are in the middle of another migration, this time of crew chiefs and mechanics.

It all started with Jorge Lorenzo. The Movistar Yamaha rider’s move to Ducati for next season left him needing a crew chief. Once his current crew chief Ramon Forcada made the decision to stay with Yamaha, and work with Maverick Viñales, who takes Lorenzo’s place, that precipitated a search for someone to work with the Spaniard at Ducati.

It was a search that took some time, but which saw Cristian Gabarrini tempted back to Ducati. The quiet, reflective Italian had been set somewhat adrift after the retirement of Casey Stoner, with whom Gabarrini won MotoGP titles at Ducati and Honda.

First, he acted as engineering advisor to Marc Márquez and his crew chief Santi Hernandez, but Márquez made it clear he wanted only to work with Hernandez. Then he was put in charge of Honda’s Open Class project, and managing the bikes.

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Paddock Pass Podcast #38 – Misano

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Episode 38 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and covers the fantastic racing at the San Marino GP in Misano.

Holding down the fort for  this edition are David Emmett and Neil Morrison, who brought a fistful of notes back from Italy regarding the happenings of MotoGP, Moto2, and Moto3.

The guys start their talk about Dani Pedrosa, who is the eighth MotoGP race-winner in eight straight races – a healthy statistic for the 2016 MotoGP Championship.

Of course, one can’t talk about Misano without also talking about Valentino Rossi, and there is plenty to talk about, with The Doctor coming to a head with his teammate Jorge Lorenzo, both on and off the track.

Before turning to the Moto2 and Moto3 paddocks for an update, the guys also discuss the progress of the MotoGP Championship race, with Marc Marquez looking more and more likely to be this year’s winner as each race passes by, for a variety of reason. We think you’ll find the show very interesting.

As always, be sure to follow the Paddock Pass Podcast on Facebook, Twitter and subscribe to the show on iTunes and SoundCloud – we even have an RSS feed for you. If you like the show, we would really appreciate you giving it a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening!

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Sunday MotoGP Summary at Misano: In the Lion’s Den

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There are few more intimidating atmospheres in motorcycle racing than the MotoGP race at Misano. Unless, of course, you are from what the regional government refer to as Motor Valley, the area which stretches from the Adriatic coast and the up the Po Valley towards Milan.

The fans are fiery, passionate, and vocal. If you are not a local, to come here and race is to enter the lion’s den.

The irony is that since 2010, Spaniards have won every MotoGP race held in Italy, with the exception of the 2014 race at Misano, which was won by Valentino Rossi. The enemy has come into the heart of Italy, and left victorious. It is a grave wound to Italian pride.

For the second time this year, it looked for a long time that Valentino Rossi would heal that wound. At Mugello, it was Yamaha who broke the hearts of Italian fans, after turning up the revs on the Yamaha M1 just a little too far, and causing the engine to detonate, leaving Rossi dejected at the side of the track.

At Misano, Rossi took the lead with a firm pass, exploiting a minor mistake by Lorenzo and diving through the barn-door sized opening Lorenzo had left on the inside of Turn 14. There would be fall out from that pass, but not until the press conference.

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