Catalan GP: MotoGP dodges another bullet

What Fabio Di Giannantonio did at Catalunya on Sunday afternoon was extraordinary.

At twenty past two, he came within centimetres of what might have been the end. At twenty to four, he was celebrating his first MotoGP victory in two and a half years, still wearing his scuffed-up leathers and holding the hand he had injured little more than an hour before.

To do what they do, motorcycle racers must believe in that old motto: it will never happen to me.

When Alex Márquez crashed in front of Di Giannantonio, after tailgating Pedro Acosta’s dead-engined KTM at maybe 180mph, it very nearly did happen to the Italian.

A 15-kilo bouncing bomb – the front wheel and half the suspension from Márquez’s exploding Ducati – slammed into Di Giannantonio’s Ducati, hurling him to the ground.

Di Giannantonio was unlucky to be the only rider in the worst place possible, unable to avoid the carnage, but also lucky that the bomb didn’t strike a few centimetres higher. Likewise, Márquez was lucky, surviving his terrifying fall with a broken collarbone and a marginal fracture of a vertebra.

In those moments, that carefully constructed act of self-delusion – it will never happen to me – was surely shattered. And yet Di Giannantonio put it all back together, never mind his injured left hand, and went back out like nothing had happened.

“I needed to do a click,” he said later. In other words, switch off those nagging fears and turn back on your shield of impregnability.

Every motorcycle racer eventually meets the moment when the off switch no longer works, even 1993 MotoGP king Kevin Schwantz, arguably the bravest of the brave.

In fact, it took two big moments to fully dismantle Schwantz’s carefully crafted work of self-delusion. First, Wayne Rainey’s career-ending accident in September 1993.

“That’s when I realised: f**k, you’re really not bulletproof, you’re not 10 feet tall,” he told me.

Then 18 months later…

“The real moment of truth came during testing for ’95,” he added. “I lost the front going into Hayshed at Phillip Island, tumbled off the track, came to a stop and rolled over. Then KERRRPANNG! The bike landed two feet away from me. Whoa! What if I’d rolled over that way instead of this way? I was like ‘What are you f**kin’ doing?’.”

Accidents like Sunday’s are inevitable, because motorcycles will always break down, or at least they’re inevitable when the rules are written to make all the bikes perform the same, so they race centimetres apart, to keep us entertained. And are we not entertained?

Some of the riders — including Acosta, who was so lucky to escape unscathed — weren’t happy that the race was restarted after a pile-up like that. Should the second race have gone ahead? Half of me says, yes, the other half, no.

The second pile-up — at Turn 1, which had Johann Zarco tangled up in Pecco Bagnaia’s cartwheeling Ducati — was less unexpected than the Márquez/Acosta accident.

When that race was red-flagged and the remaining riders were sent out for the third start, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one questioning my love of motorcycle racing. Are we just sick perverts, with a warped concept of how to enjoy ourselves?

When bikes and bodies are flying in all directions, the riders are in the lap of the gods

I don’t know. All I do know is that football, tennis, cricket, golf and all those other games do nothing for me. I need more than that, I need to feel that edge, I need to look over the precipice and shudder a little.

If the Márquez/Acosta incident was just one of those things, the Turn 1 pile-up that put Zarco in hospital with a badly mangled knee wasn’t.

Turn 1 pile-ups have been happening forever at Catalunya. Indeed, this year’s Catalan GP was the 20th anniversary of that monster accident that claimed a quarter of the grid at the start of the 2006 Catalan GP.

Multiple rider accidents are hideously dangerous, because when bikes and bodies are flying in all directions, the riders are in the lap of the gods. So how to at least make Catalunya Turn 1 disasters less likely?

First, it’s a long way from the grid to the Turn 1/Turn 2 esses, so the bikes aren’t far off 200mph when riders hit the brakes. Second, holeshot devices increase the likelihood of a multiple collision, because all the riders make perfect starts, so they arrive at the first corner together, jostling for position. Third, modern aerodynamic accoutrements create turbulence and areas of low-pressure, which make it very complicated for riders to avoid each other and brake safely.

Why hasn’t the grid been moved closer to Turn 1? Because it would no longer be beneath the grandstands. Is that a good enough reason? Not if you care about the riders.

Why haven’t holeshot devices been banned? Well, they will be banned at the end of this year. Why weren’t they banned before? Because we all know they increase the danger of the most dangerous moment of a motorcycle race? Who knows? Holeshot devices have been in MotoGP for eight seasons or so. Changing MotoGP’s rules to improve safety is a straightforward procedure, so it’s ridiculous they weren’t banned years ago.

When MotoGP returns to Catalunya next year, will the grid be in a different place and will Turn 12 – where Jorge Martin had a crash that was pretty much identical to the Catalunya crash that killed Luis Salom 10 years ago – have been changed? Who knows?