Austrian MotoGP: Perfecco all the way!

I surely don’t need to tell you that this is not an easy thing to do. More than ever, riders must use both tyres to stop the bike, making sure not to overload the front during straight-line braking, then slightly skidding the rear to destress the front as they tip into the corner, so they’re on a knife edge all the time, even though it may not look it.

Bagnaia’s Red Bull Ring disappearing act was reminiscent of Jorge Lorenzo in his pomp, which is no coincidence because Lorenzo also rode that knife edge, using a similar style of super-late braking, then throwing the bike into the corner at devastating speed and using lots of mid-corner speed, so when he opens the throttle he stresses the rear tyre less, because he’s already carrying lots of speed.

This was particularly crucial at Red Bull Ring, where Michelin equips riders with a harder-casing rear tyre to cope with the layout’s many brutal low-gear acceleration zones.

Bagnaia was therefore gentler than ever with the throttle for two reasons.

First, to avoid wheelspin as he rode out of corners, which would destroy the rear tyre.

Second, because not only does the Austrian track murder rear tyres it also makes engines drink fuel, so he was saving every drop.

“That’s why my sighting lap was very, very slow,” said the 25-year-old Italian, who set new lap and race records. “I put the bike into neutral on the downhill run towards Turn 4 and I stopped the engine exiting the last corner, arriving to the grid very slow.”

Bagnaia didn’t leave the grid very slow, getting both holeshots, showing that Ducati has found something significant in its launch performance, easily beating Binder to Turn 1. So the KTM is no longer MotoGP’s fastest bullet from a gun.

I did ask Dall’Igna what Ducati had done to regain its starting advantage, but he just grinned and ate a celebratory bombolini Italian doughnut. Further investigation suggests a revised holeshot device (there’s a new trigger in the Desmosedici’s fairing) and almost certainly other detail changes.

“It helps me in the first part of acceleration, which is where I was losing [to the KTMs],” Bagnaia explained. “Thanks to my starts I had a great chance to win both races.”

Bagnaia rode his fastest lap of the GP on lap three and by half-distance he was more than a second ahead of Binder, which gave him the luxury of shifting gears at lower rpm to save fuel.

There was no such luxury for Binder. He was within half a second of the No1 Ducati for the quarter of the race, which was both good and bad. Good, because staying in Bagnaia’s draft saved him fuel. Bad because the oven-like blast from the 300-horsepower Desmosedici and the high track temperatures cooked his front tyre.

“Four or five laps in, the front started locking,” explained Binder. “You get the first warning, a floating feeling from the front tyre, but I kept pushing and lost the front a few times. Then you think, ‘We know how this ends…’, so you have to be clever.

“As soon as Pecco had a gap my front tyre cooled down a bit, so I felt safe, but by then the rear tyre was in trouble. We are missing grip on the straights, so this harder casing we’ve got here doesn’t work for us at all. When we pick up the bike and start shifting gears we spin a lot. But this weekend I was a second quicker in qualifying than last year, so our bike has made such a huge step forward, so I cannot complain by any means.”

Last weekend was, of course, the first time that MotoGP’s controversial tyre-pressure rules were enforced, requiring riders to keep the front tyre above the 1.88 bar/27.27psi minimum for at least half the race. The problem is that the front tyre offers less grip once it exceeds 2.0 bar/29psi, because the higher pressure changes its profile, reducing its footprint, both in straight braking and while cornering.

The new regulation and the front tyre design combine to give riders a margin of around 0.12 bar/1.74psi to play with, which isn’t a lot, especially considering tyre temperature and pressure can be wildly different if you are alone or in the pack.

This was without doubt the biggest concern of most riders at Red Bull Ring. “This track is one of the tracks that puts the most force into the front tyre and the pressure is the most critical,” added Binder. This is why he had no real chance of attacking Bagnaia once he’d been chasing him for a while.

Even Bagnaia, who had clean air ahead throughout both races, thanks to his missile-like starts, didn’t have it easy. “I was alone, but the front pressure was still over 2 bar and the bike becomes more difficult to ride over 1.9,” he said.

Bezzecchi had the same trouble as Binder, chasing fellow GP23 rider Alex Márquez for most of the race, the pair close one minute, then further apart, then closer, then further apart, like they were joined by a bungee cord.

“The tyre pressure was difficult to manage,” admitted Bezzecchi, who had been one of the victims of the Turn 1 pile-up at the start of Saturday’s sprint race, caused by Martin. “It’s something that’s not completely under our control because it depends a lot on how your race goes. I was not too bad but then I was behind Alex and I started to struggle, so we made a lock of ‘elastics’.”

Everyone in the MotoGP paddock has been aware of the pressure problem for several years and there have been minimum-pressure rules for several years, but now that those rules are being enforced the racing may suffer.

Before enforcement, teams could run below the minimum without fear of sanction. Now they face time penalties and eventually the plan is to disqualify anyone who runs below the minimum. The reason riders do like to go low, of course, is because the lower the pressure the more the tyre deflects (squishes), which expands the footprint to create more grip and faster lap times.

“We started with like a flat tyre. Then we reached our front-pressure record so it was crazy, locking in a straight line”

Teams have asked Michelin to allow them to run the front (the rear isn’t really an issue) below 1.88 bar but the company refuses for safety reasons, even though riders have been winning with lower pressures for years. I suspect this decision has come from on-high, perhaps from a company director and his lawyers, who don’t want a tyre blowout case on their hands, despite plenty of evidence that the front can run safely below the legal minimum.

The real irony is that since the rule enforcement, riders are starting races with the front tyre at a crazy low pressure, to give them a few laps before it reaches problematic high pressures.

“We started the sprint at lower than 1.5, like a flat tyre,” said Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaró, who had a grim weekend, struggling with brakes and running low of fuel to finish the GP in ninth. “Then we reached our front-pressure record, more than 2.2, so it was crazy, locking in a straight line, unbelievable.

“In the first laps the bike becomes another bike, super-heavy [to steer], but after a few laps the pressure stabilises.”

In other words, due to the new rules, the front tyre goes from ridiculously low pressure to ridiculously high pressure in just a few laps. And this forces riders to attack rivals more aggressively than ever in those early laps, because once the front tyre reaches around 2 bar riders don’t usually have enough grip to make an attack successfully, which is why there were so few changes of position after the first few laps.

So far this year there have been just two races in which there’s been a change of lead in the last ten laps of a GP: Sachsenring and Silverstone.

“For sure the tyre pressure can make races less intense,” said Bagnaia.

Some people blamed the lack of action on the Red Bull Ring’s layout, but between 2017 and 2020, four of five races were won by three tenths of a second or less. True, the track has changed, with the new chicane introduced last year, but the bikes have changed much more.

Except the Yamaha and especially the Honda. Yamaha’s top Sunday finisher was Fabio Quartararo in ninth, 19 seconds down on the winner. Honda’s top finisher was Marc Márquez in 12th, 23 seconds down.

Márquez has definitely changed his attitude since July’s German GP, where he crashed five times, since transforming himself into more of a test rider than a racer, because you don’t develop a motorcycle by crashing it.

Honda introduced a major new aerodynamics update in Austria, with KTM-like upper and lower wings and a bigger version of the seat duckbill, first tried during Jerez testing in May. During practice Márquez kept swapping back and forth between the new and old aero kits, as well as trying numerous chassis and electronics settings, trying to find a direction of Honda’s hole.

It was probably the lowest-key weekend of the eight-times world champion’s career: never up front and never on the floor, well, only once, when he toppled over in a gravel trap at walking pace on Friday.

Márquez’s comments about Honda’s new aero package illustrates how much work Honda engineers need to do to master this relatively new and totally crucial area of performance.

“The positive is better stopping on the brakes and less wheelie,” he said. “The negative is that you have more air resistance, so this makes it more demanding for the rear tyre to find grip [because while the tyre is trying to make the drive the bike forward the drag is holding it back]. This creates even more wheelspin, so then the rear grip drops a lot.”

Immediately after Sunday’s race Pramac Ducati announced that Johann Zarco will leave the team after three years riding the best bike on the grid. The French veteran will go to LCR Honda, where his deep Ducati knowhow may help Honda engineers improve the RC213V, although what Honda really needs to do is hire some high-ranking engineers from the faster European factories.

Meanwhile Bezzecchi, who may yet turn out to be Bagnaia’s biggest title rival, only has to think about which Ducati team he will race with next year. If he goes to Pramac he will get a latest-spec GP24 but if he stays with Valentino Rossi’s VR46 team he will have to make do with an updated GP23.

Most likely Bezzecchi will stay where he is, because he loves the team. “And Valentino is pushing a lot to keep me and not many people have the GOAT pushing them like this.”

Bezzecchi is MotoGP’s new funny man, always laughing, always cracking jokes, trash-talking his great friend Bagnaia and generally lighting up media conferences.

He ended yesterday’s post-race media conference thus.

“Pecco is giving me a plane [private jet, he means] ride back home this evening… because he has a lot of money!”