Assen MotoGP: Perfect Pecco, but was he a bit lucky too?
MotoGP
Pecco Bagnaia ruled Assen, but would he have done so if Jorge Martin – the fastest rider in the race – hadn’t made a hash of qualifying? And what about the green-paint horrors of Brad Binder and Pedro Acosta?
Bagnaia leads, Binder chases hard, while Bezzecchi closes the gap on the KTM
Pecco Bagnaia was perfect Pecco in Sunday’s Dutch Grand Prix but perhaps the defining moment of the weekend came at 11.19 on Saturday morning, when Jorge Martin got too greedy on his first flying lap of qualifying and crashed at the Turn 5 hairpin – Assen’s number-one accident blackspot – before the back straight.
No doubt the reigning champion would’ve had to fight a lot harder for his fourth win of the season if Martin hadn’t made that silly mistake, which came with a big price.
The fall relegated the German GP winner to the fourth row of the Assen grid, which is pretty much like starting from the back row a few years ago, before technical developments transformed MotoGP.
“Starting from tenth it was impossible to win – I knew that before the race”
When Sunday’s GP started, Martin found himself deep in the jungle, inside the mad pack of riders jostling for position: colliding, pinging each other’s brake guards and breaking aerodynamic accoutrements.
By the end of the first lap he had a huge amount of work to do – ten riders ahead and he trailed the leader by 2.2 seconds.
Getting out of the jungle took Martin a while. By lap four the 25-year-old Spaniard had fought his way to fifth, behind Bagnaia, Brad Binder, Marco Bezzecchi and Aleix Espargaró, whose Aprilia had a poorly front wing after coming off worst in a jungle clash. But Martin was now 3.5 seconds behind the leader, because passing riders in MotoGP is so damn difficult.
And following riders, while you’re trying to line them up for a pass, overheats your front tyre, especially when the track temperature is over 50 degrees. Martin’s front was boiling by the time he’d got past Miguel Oliveira into fifth, so even though he now had a clear track in front of him – a 2.3-second gap to Espargaró – it took four laps for the tyre to cool and allow him to get into his stride.
Bagnaia did everything right on Sunday – he takes a nice 35-point lead over Martin into the summer break
Ducati
Martin was faster than Bagnaia for 14 of the last 18 of the 26 laps, but his progress went mostly unnoticed on TV: eking half a tenth here, a tenth there and setting the fastest lap of the race on lap 13.
From there his front tyre was mostly done, after he’d tortured it so much, but he kept inching closer to Espargaró, coming within nine-thousandths of a second of his countryman at the chequered flag. And within 1.9 seconds of Bagnaia.
Would Martin have won the race if he’d qualified on the front two rows, like he’d done at five of the first seven GPs? We’ll never know, but Bagnaia almost certainly would have had to fight harder, just like he’d done at the Sachsenring the previous weekend.
“Starting from tenth it was impossible to win – I knew that before the race,” said Martin, who’s still second in the championship, 35 points down on Bagnaia and one above Bezzecchi, with 408 points available at the last 12 rounds.
With no Martin to worry about, Bagnaia rode the perfect race. The 26-year-old Italian knew front tyre temperature would be everything in the scorching heat, so when he was beaten into the first corner by Binder’s lightning-starting KTM, he wasted no time taking the lead from the South African, with a beautifully timed move into Turn 8 on the third lap.
From there Bagnaia had to work super-hard to keep never-say-die Binder from repassing him, until the KTM rider’s soft rear tyre – all the other top runners chose the medium rear – lost its edge and he was able to build a gap and control the race.
Martin was the fastest man in the race and would’ve challenged for the win, but for a silly mistake in qualifying
MotoGP
“I tried to pass as soon as possible, for the front pressure and temperature,” said the reigning champion, who had switched to settings similar to Bezzecchi’s after his VR46 buddy had beaten him into second in Saturday’s sprint race. “When you are so close behind it’s very easy to pick up temperature, and also the front tyre was a bit too soft.”
Bagnaia, like all but two lower-ranking riders, had chosen the hard front, but who builds a front tyre for Assen expecting a track that’s halfway to boiling point?
Reigning MotoGP king Pecco Bagnaia was in a class of his own at Mugello, extending his championship lead, so how did he make the difference, why were his main rivals between heaven and hell and what on Earth is going on at Yamaha and Honda?
By
Mat Oxley
During the second half of the race Binder may have been out of rear grip, but he wasn’t out of fight, because he never is. Bezzecchi was all over him but couldn’t find a way past. Why? Firstly because Binder is a demon on the brakes, secondly because “he’s an animal” (a compliment from Bezzecchi, not an insult) and thirdly – of course – because of front tyre temperature.
Unlike Bagnaia, Bezzecchi was unable to find a quick way past Binder, so his front tyre overheated, stealing the grip he needed to make an attack. “I struggled with front temperature and pressure,” he said. Finally he made it into second on lap 17, after 14 laps in Binder’s scalding draft.
And then some mystery rear vibration. “I was scared because I couldn’t lean the bike in the fast corners,” added Bezzecchi. “I tried to manage it with the mapping and I was pushing every button I have but nothing improved it. Fortunately I survived because I was scared I could lose the podium.”
The last place in the prosecco party went to Espargaró, his first since Aragon last September. This was richly deserved, because his damaged downforce aero was pushing him wide in left-handers, so he had to fight harder than ever for the podium.
Bezzecchi seemed happy enough with second on Sunday, after winning Saturday’s sprint race
VR46
In fact the Spanish veteran didn’t cross the finish line in third but was promoted because Binder had touched – more like caressed – the green exiting Turn 8 on the last lap, exactly as he had done in the previous day’s sprint.
It seemed a strange mistake to make twice, but Binder was out of rear tyre and hanging on for dear life to his bike and third place. Exiting the corner the rear tyre was spinning, taking him just millimetres into the green.
Rules are rules, as they say, and Binder was philosophical about losing two podiums in two days. “To be honest, I can deal with this situation, but I feel really sorry for my entire team,” he said.
The racing is crazy, which is how we like it, but the penalties being handed out now are even crazier, which is why MotoGP’s stewards and race direction are losing the trust of riders, team managers, factory bosses and fans
By
Mat Oxley
Assen was another race full of tension, with riders hounding each other, looking for a way past, but rarely able to find one, for all the usual reasons: front tyre temperature/pressure, dirty air and the fact that all the bikes basically have the same performance, so it’s mostly impossible to find enough speed to pass a rival.
In this year’s seven dry GPs there have been only two overtakes for the lead during the last ten laps (Martin on Bagnaia and vice versa at Sachsenring) and only three more in the top three (Bagnaia on Binder at Jerez, Martin on Marc Márquez at Le Mans and Johann Zarco on Luca Marini at Mugello).
This dearth of battles is easy to fix, but we’ll probably have to wait until the next rewrite of the technical regulations, due four seasons away, in 2027.
And what about the FIM stewards? Did Binder really deserve to lose two podiums? Even he said, rules are rules, but big penalties for tiny indiscretions can leave a bad taste in the mouth, a bit like VAR in football.
Pedro Acosta’s penalty and/or lack of penalty during the preceding Moto2 race was a bigger talking point at Assen.
Binder leads Bagnaia, Bezzecchi, Espargaro, Marini and Oliveira after the start
KTM
The teenage prodigy saved a huge front-end slide at the chicane and rode over the off-limits green zone and gained time while battling for the lead with Ai Ogura and Jake Dixon. Even though he slowed slightly when he returned to the track he didn’t lose enough time, so he was given a long-lap penalty.
Many fans didn’t think he deserved this sanction, because he only ran wide because he was saving a crash.
But this is the philosophy behind the green no-go areas… Previously, purpose-built racetracks were bordered by grass, then gravel, then astroturf, so if you ran off the track you either crashed or lost a lot of time regaining control and regaining the track.
Therefore, because the green paint represents a safer version of these older track borders, you must pay a penalty for using it, but in doing so you pay a much smaller penalty than you would’ve done in the old days.
The fact that he was trying to save a crash is irrelevant to the current rules, because otherwise he most likely would’ve lost control, on the grass or in the gravel.
Acosta duly took his long-lap penalty but clearly ran onto the green while doing so, which immediately calls for a repeat long-lap penalty.
But then the stewards managed another of their remarkable what-the-f**k-do-you-think-you-are-doing feats of bewilderment and bafflement.
They ignored their own rules and didn’t give Acosta another long-lap penalty. Presumably because they’d been arguing among themselves after giving him the first sanction and changed their minds. So their way of making up for – thinking (if that’s the right word) – that they had made a mistake with the first penalty was not giving him a second one.
Moto2 prodigy Pedro Acosta – this time just shy of Assen’s no-go zones
Red Bull KTM Ajo
And in case you are wondering why all the rules are so tight now, it’s because the racing is so tight. If you gained a tenth of a second in a GP a decade or three ago, it didn’t matter, because there was usually several seconds between every rider.
As race director Mike Webb told me a few years ago, “We are quite proud of where MotoGP is now, especially the [closeness of the racing] racing, but this brings downsides: all the squabbling and people doing anything to get an advantage and misbehaving, which is a factor of the racing being so competitive.
“It’s like the penalties for jumping the start; when I go back to New Zealand [Webb is a Kiwi] I sometimes visit Hugh Anderson [a four-times world champion in the 1960s] who tells me that if he won a race after jumping the start it didn’t matter, because he was winning races by 30 seconds!”
I suppose the good thing is that we’ve got five weeks to argue about this before the next MotoGP round, at Silverstone, Britain, on the first weekend of August.
