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Sunday MotoGP Summary at Sachsenring: No Stopping #9

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It is a truism in MotoGP that though they hand out the trophies on Sunday, the race is often won on Friday and Saturday. Practice is when riders and teams can find the setup tweaks they need to go faster, evaluate tire choices, and plan a strategy.

Which tires offer the most potential? Which area of the track can we gain most while sacrificing the least in other points? Is there more to be gained by pushing hard early and trying to manage, or by being patient in the first half of the race, hoping to have an advantage in the second half?

The wide range of tires offered by Michelin make practice even more important. Michelin’s remit from Dorna is to produce three front tires and three rear tires that can all be used during the race.

That requires a certain amount of compromise: labeling tires soft, medium, and hard does not mean that Michelin make three tires with an equal step in between the three different tires. It is more like an indicator of how well the French tire make expects each tire to cope with the heat and stress of a race, and the trade off in terms of grip.

So a soft and a medium tire may use the same rubber on one side of the tire, or on opposite sides of the tire. Or they may use the same compounds with a stiffer carcass, to reduce flex and therefore the amount of heat being generated.

Understanding how all these factors work together, and what that will mean for the race, is what the teams spend their time doing in practice. The team and rider that does this best on Friday and Saturday gets to spend Sunday evening celebrating their victory during the race. If all goes to plan, of course.

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MotoGP

Dani Pedrosa – A Look at His Career, And His Retirement

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After weeks of speculation, Dani Pedrosa has announced that he will end his active racing career at the end of the 2018 season.

The Spaniard had been mulling his future for some time, after it had become clear that there was no place for him left in the Repsol Honda MotoGP team, and after discussions with other teams throughout the first part of the year, Pedrosa made his decision some time after Assen, and announced it at a special press conference held ahead of the German round of MotoGP at the Sachsenring.

“Next year, I will not compete in the championship, this means I will finish my career this season in MotoGP,” Pedrosa told a packed press conference room at the Sachsenring.

“This is a decision I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and it’s a very hard decision because this is the sport I love. But despite having good opportunities to keep racing, I feel like I don’t live racing with such an intensity as before and I now have different priorities in my life.”

“I would like to express how fortunate I feel to have had this opportunity,” he said. “It’s been an amazing life to be racing for such an important team and in front of all the fans. So I can say I achieved way more than I expected and I’m very proud of everything I’ve done in the sport.”

“I fulfilled my dream of becoming a racer and this is something I didn’t expect as a kid watching on TV.” It was an emotional press conference, the normally taciturn Pedrosa fighting to control his emotions.

The announcement had not come as a surprise. It had become clear in the week heading into the Sachsenring that Pedrosa had decided to retire.

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MotoGP

Dani Pedrosa Is Retiring from Motorcycle Racing

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“Next year I will not be competing in the Championship” was how Dani Pedrosa started his retirement announcement today at the start of the German GP in Sachsenring.

Confirming the retirement suspicions that swirled ahead of the press launch, Pedrosa thanked Honda, his sponsors, and Dorna for the 18 years of support that they have shown him in grand prix racing.

Set to be named a MotoGP Legend at the season finale at Valencia, Pedrosa has been a force to be reckoned with in Grand Prix racing. Though he never won a MotoGP title, he was one of the original “aliens” when that phrase was coined, and has always been a contender when on the starting grid.

As such, Pedrosa holds the third-most podiums in grand prix racing (153), along with 54 race wins, and three World Championship titles (one in 125GP and two in 250GP).

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Dani Pedrosa’s Retirement Expected at Sachsenring

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The MotoGP website is currently counting down to a live press conference that will feature Dani Pedrosa. The time on the clock is T-minus 15 hours, and at T-minus 15 hours plus one minute, the MotoGP paddock expects the 32-year-old to announce his retirement from motorcycle racing.

The rumors leading up to the German GP have gone both ways for Pedrosa, with some suggesting that the Spaniard would retire this season, while others thought he would take a ride on the newly formed Petronas Yamaha team.

We expected an announcement, one way or another, from Pedrosa first at the Catalan GP, then at the Dutch TT, but now we know that Germany will be the spot – a track that Pedrosa has carved out as one of his places of two-wheeled dominance.

To that end, Roadracing World has published that their sources have revealed to them that Pedrosa’s plan is to end his career at the end of the 2018 season, rather than try his hand on the satellite Yamaha in 2019.

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MotoGP

Sunday MotoGP Summary at Assen: Another Monument to the New Golden Age

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When it comes down to it, it is always individual races which define an era. Silverstone 1979 defined the late 1970s, with Barry Sheene coming up just short of Kenny Roberts, a milestone in the American takeover of Grand Prix motorcycle racing.

In 1983, at Anderstorp in Sweden, Freddie Spencer brought the Roberts era to an end, by beating the triple world champion with an outrageously late braking maneuver on the final lap.

In the 1990s, what we might now refer to as the First Golden Age, Hockenheim 1991 typifies the battles between Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey, where quarter was neither asked nor given.

The wild scenes at Eastern Creek and Jerez in 1996 marked the rivalry between Mick Doohan and the man came closest to stopping him, Alex Crivillé.

Valentino Rossi’s arrival in MotoGP may have been spectacular, but his win at Welkom in South Africa in 2004, his first race on the Yamaha since leaving Honda beating arch enemy Max Biaggi, was a watershed in his career. That was the point at which Rossi truly transcended the sport.

When we look back at this period, which will surely be called the Second Golden Age, then Assen 2018, along with the 2015 and 2017 races at Phillip Island, will be the races that fans and pundits point to as the ones which defined the era.

Mass battles between multiple riders, hard and close passing in which contact is frequent and accepted, a healthy mix of riders and bikes, of factory and satellite. Battles which rage almost from start to finish, with frequent lead changes, and an almost uncountable number of passes.

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MotoGP

Saturday MotoGP Summary at Assen: Deceptively Tight

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How close is MotoGP right now? At the end of FP3 on Saturday morning, the top five bikes were separated by 0.062 seconds. The top three had just six thousandths of a second between them.

And the difference between Marc Márquez and Maverick Viñales, first and second in FP3? Just one thousandth of a second. If they were both lapping at the same time, it would have needed the special finish line camera to separate them.

It was pretty close behind the top five as well. There were sixteen riders within nine tenths of Márquez, gaps between them counted in hundredths of seconds, rather than thousandths of seconds.

Qualifying was much the same: the difference between pole and eleventh place on the grid was just half a second. If you made a mistake in two corners, costing you a tenth or so in each, you would have ended up starting from the third row, rather than the front row.

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MotoGP

Friday MotoGP Summary at Assen: Spectacular Saves, Hard Tires, & New Parts for Ducati and Suzuki

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Another Friday, another save that would have seen any other rider rolling through the gravel. And at Assen, with its collection of terrifyingly fast corners, rolling through the gravel often ends up rolling into the back of an ambulance, and X-rays, cat scans, and metal plates holding your bones together.

But Friday wouldn’t be Friday without Marc Márquez folding the front completely, jabbing his elbow into the tarmac, and hanging on long enough for the front to catch again and stay upright, or what passes for upright if your name is Marc Márquez.

This time it happened at the Ruskenhoek, the very fast left hander after the Veenslang back straight, where the bikes flick right, then long left, and then right again for the short run towards Stekkenwal.

Márquez was traveling at something approaching 200km/h when the front went, but he caught it, stayed on board, and ended up running just off track and clipping the gravel. “I didn’t expect it, and I didn’t want to have a ‘safe’ crash in fourth gear at a very high-speed corner,” Márquez explained.

Holding your line is difficult because of the track changes direction at very high speed, so being precise is of the utmost importance, Márquez said.

“Here at Assen, the speed is so high and to take the correct lines is difficult but we were already in FP2, but in the first run it is always difficult to understand the lines and to be precise. A small mistake is a big mistake here: you cannot adjust with the brakes or the gas and you need to keep the speed during all the lap.”

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MotoGP

MotoGP Preview of the Dutch TT

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The tale of the TT Circuit at Assen is really the tale of Grand Prix motorcycle racing.

That is hardly surprising, given that the race has featured on the calendar since Grand Prix racing was born, or rather, since the FIM Motorcycle Grand Prix Road Racing World Championship was established, back in 1949. And like Grand Prix racing, it has roots which go back a long way before that.

The first race took place in 1925, a year after the Dutch government passed a law permitting racing on public roads. It ran over cobbled roads and sand tracks between three villages to the east of Assen: Rolde, Borger, and Schoonlo.

The next year it moved south of Assen, again over public roads, between De Haar, Oude Tol, Hooghalen, Laaghalen, and Laaghalerveen. It stayed there until 1955, when the first sections of what would become the modern circuit were built.

The roads were closed and the circuit was separated from the world, an isolated loop of tarmac, where racing was safer, easier to organize, and, not coincidentally, easier to monetize.

The inaugural Grand Prix season in 1949 took place mainly on circuits set out using public roads, which made for long tracks taken at high speed (Bremgarten in Switzerland and Monza in Italy were the two purpose-built circuits on the calendar, but Bremgarten, in particular, was a spectacularly dangerous circuit which wound through a forest).

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