Assen MotoGP: when the going gets weird

MotoGP

Quartararo crashes and Bagnaia wins to reignite the MotoGP title fight, rookie Bezzecchi and Espargaro amaze and the Japanese factories are nowhere. Somehow Assen never disappoints

Fabio Quartararo crashes out of the 2022 MotoGP Assen TT

Quartararo crashed twice in the first ten weekends of 2022 – at Assen he crashed twice in a few laps

Patrick Goosen/Getty Images

Mat Oxley

Weird stuff often happens at Assen. Perhaps it’s something to do with what drifts in on the breeze from the coffee shops of the nearby town.

Or maybe it’s the circuit itself – one of MotoGP’s weirdest and most wonderful layouts.

The most cataclysmic Dutch TT of all time happened exactly 30 years ago last weekend and changed the face of Grand Prix racing.

In qualifying Australians Wayne Gardner and championship leader Mick Doohan crashed. Those two accidents ended one career and very nearly another.

Gardner was knocked out. “At hospital they put me into one of those body scanner things and I was still blacking out. I was really scared, I thought I was dying. After that I told myself, ‘You know what? I’m not enjoying this any more’. Assen finished me off.”

“Whatever those guys are smoking, I want some”

The 1987 500cc world champ retired at the end of that year.

Doohan’s crash nearly finished him off too. Local surgeons botched the operation on his right leg and were on the verge of amputating the limb when Dr Claudio Costa arrived in a Lear jet ambulance and kidnapped him. It took multiple surgeries and 13 months before Doohan started winning again.

The following day Eddie Lawson and Kevin Schwantz collided while battling for the lead and both crashed. They’ve barely spoken since. A young Spaniard called Alex Crivillé won the race and the American/Australian domination of 500cc racing was finally over.

Yesterday wasn’t quite as chaotic but it was certainly dramatic.

World championship leader Fabio Quartararo crashed and barged closest title-rival Aleix Espargaró into the gravel, then crashed again, flicked over the handlebars in old-school 500cc style. His Yamaha’s traction control wasn’t working because a TC sensor cable had been severed in the first fall. The Frenchman, who had hardly put a wheel wrong all year, had crashed twice during the previous ten weekends and then doubled his crash tally in a few laps.

Pecco Bagnaia with elbow down corning in the 2022 MotoGP Assen TT

Bagnaia was a sight to behold at Assen, using his super lean-off technique to devastating effect

Ducati

A few hours later MotoGP’s stewards hit Quartararo with a long-lap penalty for his indiscretion, to be served at the next race; never mind the fact that they had considered Takaaki Nakagami’s Turn 1 crash at Barcelona three weeks earlier, which wiped out two other riders, a racing incident and unworthy of punishment.

And weeks before that the stewards had considered Bagnaia taking out Jorge Martin in Qatar and Jack Miller knocking down Joan Mir in Portugal as racing incidents. Either they were all racing incidents, or they weren’t because they were all basically the same accident.

As Schwantz once said of those in charge, “Whatever those guys are smoking, I want some”.

Quartararo’s first DNF in 18 months changed everything. His 34-point lead was reduced to 21 by Espargaró, who fought back from his gravel-trap excursion like a man possessed, from 15th to fourth.

And Pecco Bagnaia’s third peerless victory of 2022 shrunk his title deficit from an apparently hopeless 91 points to a game-on 66.

What happened to Quartararo at Turn 5 on lap five at Assen was exactly what had happened to Bagnaia at Turn 1 on lap four seven days earlier at Sachsenring.

In Germany Quartararo was the hunted, while Bagnaia was the hunter and got it wrong. On Sunday, Bagnaia was the hunted, Quartararo was the hunter and got it wrong. The Frenchman had already made a couple of daring passes when he made an over-optimistic move on Espargaró at Turn 5, the first real left-hander in seven corners.

“I will punch myself for two days, it was a stupid mistake,” he said after his first no-score of 2022. “I saw an opportunity but I braked too strong and couldn’t stop.”

Bagnaia led from start to finish, the way he likes to do it.

On Friday the 25-year-old Italian told us what he had learned from his costly Sachsenring tumble.

Marco Bezzecchi in the pit garage at Assen

Bezzecchi and crew chief Matteo Flamigni are working well together

VR46

“The three times I’ve crashed this year (Qatar, France, Germany) I was pushing, trying to recover positions,” he explained. “Each time I said to myself: stay calm, come back and then I crashed, so maybe when you’re not pushing so hard on the tyres it’s easier to crash.

“So it’s easier to keep pushing, also for the concentration. And maybe thinking to be calmer and to breathe is not a thing that helps me. If I look at the races where I started first and I pushed I didn’t have this problem, I was just controlling the gap. Not a problem.”

This time, however, life wasn’t quite so easy for Bagnaia because he had failed to score points in three of the previous four races.

Related article

“I was terrified of crashing again,” he said.

And then, if he wasn’t already worried enough, the usual Assen rain arrived, two thirds of the way through the race. Not enough water on the asphalt to reduce lap times but enough for Bagnaia to remove his tear-off, because rain gets between the tear-off and the visor, impairing vision.

That lost him half a second to stellar Marco Bezzecchi who revels in those tricky conditions. “When the rain came I liked it and shifted up a gear,” said Bezzecchi, the VR46 Ducati team’s first MotoGP podium finisher.

No doubt Bagnaia was doubly lucky that the first two riders in the championship had had their Dutch TT hopes dashed so early. Espargaró was convinced that he and his Aprilia RS-GP had the pace to fight Bagnaia and his Ducati Desmosedici.

“For sure Aleix could’ve fought with me,” agreed Bagnaia.

Espargaró’s comeback was old-school: shit or bust, rostrum or hospital, from eight seconds down on Bagnaia on lap five to 2.5 seconds down at the chequered flag.

Alex Espargaro passes Brad Binder and Jack Miller at the 2022 MotoGP Assen TT

Espargaró nails Brad Binder and Jack Miller at the final chicane

Aprilia

“I had nothing to lose,” said Espargaró. “After Fabio pushed me out I saw P15 on my board, so my race was done. I thought, ‘Nothing will change in the championship if you score two or three points, so you need to go for more than ten. And if you crash, you crash.’”

But how could Espargaró pass so many riders at a time when overtaking is so difficult in MotoGP, due to front-tyre pressure problems? Because Assen is cold and very fast, so there are no front-tyre issues. He was also helped greatly by Aprilia’s new ground-effect fairing, which he raced for the first time.

The crowning glory of his race came at the last chicane on the last lap, when he passed Jack Miller and Brad Binder, another three vital points in one go.

“Marco’s in love with racing, he’s in love with the bike and he’s in love with the team”

Bezzecchi’s ride was also astonishing. Assen is probably the most complicated track of them all and yet the 23-year-old MotoGP rookie, who had never made the top three at Assen in Moto2 or Moto3, finished runner-up after just one dry day of practice.

The young VR46 rider has been gaining pace all year. Second on the grid and fifth in the race at Mugello, after leading the early laps, was his previous best weekend.

Crew chief Matteo Flamigni, Valentino Rossi’s data engineer for 18 seasons, is mightily impressed.

“Marco started this year very calm, trying to understand MotoGP,” he said. “He is clever and the thing I like the most is that he arrived at a certain point and since then he keeps improving, he never goes up and down, step by step always better and better. So today is the result of his hard work over the last five months. Now he better understands the bike, the tyres, the brakes and the electronics, working with the engine-brake and the torque delivery.

Maverick Vinales celebrates a podium finish with Aprilia in the 2022 MotoGP Assen TT

Aprilia celebrates Vinales’ first podium – they’ve got a good team spirit going

Aprilia

“He was very quick learning how to save the tyres and the edge of the tyres, by picking up the bike quickly. And he’s very fast in fast sections, like here and at Mugello.

“Marco is passionate – he’s in love with motorcycle racing, he’s in love with the bike and he’s in love with the team. He’s a very nice guy.”

Maverick Viñales’ first podium with Aprilia – exactly a year after his relationship with Yamaha was collapsing – was also important, even if he profited from Quartararo’s faux pas.

Related article

Perhaps moving from a Japanese team to a Latin team really has helped the Spaniard’s head, which always seemed so all over place during his four and a half years with Yamaha.

“It’s fantastic,” he beamed. “I am the happiest man in the world and maybe at the tracks I like, like Silverstone and Misano, I can fight for victory.”

Viñales’ ecstasy was well-deserved. But just as important had been his behaviour when he pulled into pitlane the previous Sunday, after his shapeshifter had malfunctioned during the race. In the old days Viñales would have stormed into his garage, angrily shaking his head. On this occasion he climbed off the bike, fist-bumped all his crew, then walked calmly into his garage.

Even if the Assen race wasn’t a classic of multi-rider battles for the podium, there was so much going on that many failed to notice something very significant taking place.

Alex Rins leads Joan Mir in the 2022 MotoGP Assen TT

Mir (No36) is about to overtake team-mate Alex Rins to become the top finishing rider on a Japanese bike in eighth

Suzuki

There were no Japanese motorcycles in the top seven at Assen for the first time since 1969 when the top ten was all Italian and British machinery: MV Agusta, Matchless, Metisse, Aermacchi, Linto, Norton, Seeley and Paton. (By the way, Giacomo Agostini won that race by two minutes and 35 seconds and the only riders he didn’t lap were those in second and third.)

In case you need further evidence that this was a long, long time ago, The Beatles were number one, petrol cost 35p a gallon (that’s 13p a litre) and a pint of beer 18p.

The world never stops changing.

The previous weekend at Sachsenring there wasn’t a single Honda points scorer for the first time since the 1981 British GP at Silverstone, where Freddie Spencer ran fifth aboard the 22,000rpm, oval-piston NR500 until the engine expired.

On Sunday at Assen there were no Yamahas in the points since (funnily enough) Assen in 1985, when reigning champ Eddie Lawson crashed out of the rain-lashed race.

Next year there will be six Japanese machines and 16 European bikes on the MotoGP grid, with no Suzukis, two Yamahas and four Hondas.

The last few seasons of MotoGP have not been easy for the Japanese factories. The global pandemic has played havoc with supply lines, freight, staff travel and so on, affecting the Japanese much more when the championship has been played out mostly in Europe.

On the other hand the Japanese factory teams need to consider other factors. By nature the European factories are less conservative and have shorter chains of command, so they can push forward harder and faster, which makes a huge difference when MotoGP is so tightly fought.

The battle between riders and factories resumes at Silverstone in early August. And as always anything could happen.