How close is MotoGP? The worst motorcycle on the grid is just 0.4% slower than the best!

So let’s make the differences more tangible by converting race times into percentages. The winner’s race time is 100% – maximum performance – and every rival’s race time is a percentage of that performance. This way you get a better idea of how the different motorcycles compare.

I took a sample of half of last year’s 18 dry races – including races won by Aprilia, Ducati, Yamaha and Suzuki – and converted the race times of the top-finishing rider of each brand into percentages. I tried to choose races where each manufacturer’s best rider finished the race, because he was the one extracting maximum performance from his machine.

The results are astonishing and underline how insanely close MotoGP machinery is at the moment, although ironically that doesn’t always provide great racing. Indeed the proximity of performance is one reason there’s less overtaking now. The law of unintended consequences and all that.

“The bikes are so evenly matched,” affirms KTM’s Brad Binder. “The days of seeing a guy get completely past another rider while braking are gone…”

These are the percentage performance results from last year, bike by bike.

No surprise that Ducati’s Desmosedici came out top and what a shame that MotoGP’s second-best machine – Suzuki’s GSX-RR – is no more.

KTM’s RC16 comes bottom, with an overall race performance just 0.36% worse than the Ducati and 0.04% worse than Honda’s RC213V, largely because of its qualifying issues. The 2022 RC16 couldn’t take as much advantage of the extra side grip offered by a new rear tyre as some of the other bikes, so the few tenths it lost in qualifying pushed it down the grid, costing valuable time in the race.

So when you hear people saying that the KTM or the Yamaha or the Honda are rubbish, they aren’t even close to the reality. All those machines are only fractionally worse than the best.

And when you hear more and more riders say, “I need to work on myself,” this means they acknowledge the similarity in machine performance, so they must find the difference within themselves.

Of course, just because these numbers reveal that the losing machines are only a few fractions of a per cent slower than the winning machine doesn’t mean that the losing factories can feel any better about getting beaten. Losing by 0.2% is no better than losing by 2% if both gaps are just as difficult to bridge, which they are. Nowadays riders are looking for hundredths and thousandths, not tenths, like they used to.

We ,know why all MotoGP bikes are so similar in performance. Over the past decade and a half right-holders Dorna have frequently rewritten the technical regulations to make all the motorcycles basically the same – four-cylinder engines only, maximum 81mm bore, spec tyres and spec electronics – to create closer, more TV-friendly racing.

Most of all, it’s tyres that decide race performance because, however good your engine, chassis and brakes, they are nothing if the rider cannot put that performance to the ground through the tyres. And because tyre technology is usually fairly equal among the frontrunners in each era, so the difference between the best race times by each brand are smaller than you might think.

So how closely matched were grand prix bikes of the past: 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago?

Let’s take a sample of races from the inaugural 2002 season of big-bore MotoGP, which was ruled by Honda’s RC211V, winner of all but two of the 16 races. Utter domination with a percentage score better than Ducati’s Desmosedici last year. And yet in terms of race performance the other brands weren’t far behind. Even Aprilia’s fatally flawed Cube lagged less than 3% behind the RC211V.

Going back a further ten years takes us to 1992, when Honda’s NSR500 two-stroke – the most successful premier-class GP bike of all time – was powered for the first time by Honda’s game-changing big-bang engine. That year’s NSR was only 0.01% off perfection, although Suzuki’s RGV500 and Yamaha’s YZR500 were only fractions of a per cent behind.

Another decade brings us to 1982, the ‘King’ Kenny Roberts versus Freddie Spencer era, when Honda returned to GP racing for the first time in 15 years. Suzuki won the championship with its ageing RG500 square-four, the last of the bike’s four world titles, so it’s no surprise that the NS500 and Yamaha’s 0W61 were so close. Kawasaki’s KR500 never really made the grade.

And finally to 1972, half a century ago, when Count Domenico Agusta had the only factory team in 500cc GPs, so it’s no real surprise that the company won every race it contested, its overall performance well ahead of rival machinery, ridden by a motley crew of mostly skint privateers.

MV Agusta won 14 of the first 15 races with its booming four-stroke triple and didn’t bother turning up at the last round, allowing Chas Mortimer to win Yamaha’s first premier-class GP, riding an over-bored 350cc twin. These machines were very popular with privateers and therefore rated as the second best of the year, ahead of the German König, powered by a flat-four two-stroke outboard motor. Kawasaki’s H1R used a two-stroke triple road-bike engine.

One final observation… how much shorter are modern MotoGP races?! In 1972 all but a couple lasted for less than an hour, with the Isle of Man Senior TT taking two hours and ten minutes. In 1982 half the races lasted around 50 minutes. Last year most MotoGP races lasted around 41 minutes, which is 20 minutes, a third less entertainment, than 50 years ago!

So perhaps MotoGP’s new, half-distance Saturday sprint races are just a way of giving back the time the fans have been missing out on for so many years.