‘MotoGP bikes aren’t easier to ride now, they’re harder to ride’

You can very easily override the bike or underride it and it’s very, very difficult to get the timing of everything right. For example, when you have to reach so many degrees of lean angle with what percentage of throttle and when to reach a certain lean angle with how much brake pressure. So it’s a very, very, very narrow line in which these bikes are working. This makes it very technical, very unique and very hard to understand.

When I rode the M1, or when I ride a superbike, you can jump on them and use a more natural way of riding – you can ride them with so many different styles. Now it feels like every bike functions more or less the same way, so everyone is closer together.

So with a modern MotoGP bike you can’t create anything, you have to do what the bike wants?

Exactly, this is the way. Something new arrives that makes the bike faster, so the rider has to adapt to that and put that new feature into his riding and accept it. This makes it really hard.

The competition is getting tighter and tighter and at the same time all the bikes are getting closer, which makes it more dangerous because the riders are all together, riding at a higher level and at higher speeds, so you no longer have any room to give to another rider.

Downforce aero basically glues the bikes to the ground, which makes them harder to manoeuvre, so how does this affect how you attack or exit corners?

That’s the timing I mentioned before. You cannot just throw the bike from one corner to another like you used to. You have to connect everything – using the throttle connection to make the bike mechanically lighter for changing direction, and using the throttle or rear brake to make the bike light or heavy.

To get the bike to pitch and transfer load between the tyres?

You don’t get that natural pitching during acceleration and braking anymore. The bikes are now much more static, with all the aero and downforce, so they’re more and more like go-karts.

How does that affect how you ride? You’re used to braking, which pitches the bike forward and loads the front…

It’s just a completely different feeling and you have to understand that. You feel the acceleration and deceleration and you feel the pressure, so you know what the tyres need, but you don’t have that transfer, so in corner entry you rotate the bike at the rear [i.e. sliding the rear] to take load off the front tyre and then turn in with the rear tyre.

The RC16 looks to be very good at that…

Yes, especially with Brad [Binder]!

While the Ducati is more wheels in line?

You don’t see it so much, but they also slide.

So the best way is to get the bike sideways and make it drop into the corner?

A normal rider would say a motorcycle brakes better fully straight but not these bikes. They don’t work so well braking in a straight line anymore – they want some lean angle and that’s how you brake, you brake with lean angle, so you rotate the rear on the brakes, to get some lean, which puts more rear tyre on the road.

For example, when you see videos of Brad, you always see him make that movement [skidding the rear] and then he brakes. He never brakes straight, he rotates the rear and then brakes, which takes load off the front. The front is already heavily loaded, with all the downforce, so you try not to load it anymore by not braking just with the front. So it’s a very thin balance that you need to understand.

The starts sound crazy, because basically you’re riding a 300-horsepower hardtail, so what’s it like riding to the first corner with no suspension?

It’s super-strange. It feels like something is broken. With the holeshot devices you have no suspension, so everything is really hard and harsh, like you’re sitting in a go-kart.

Then you have to really smash the brakes and suddenly the bike comes back up. It’s a strange feeling! And I’m still getting used to the system.

Le Mans was the weirdest, because you wouldn’t get through Turn 1 [a super-fast corner with no brakes required] without suspension, so you have to set the system specially for Le Mans, to have a higher bike at the start, even though you’d make a better start with a lower bike. Then you need a certain amount of brake pressure to unlock both the rear and front devices when you brake into the first left.

Many riders say it’s very difficult for the rider to make the difference in MotoGP now, so it seems like we’re going down the Formula 1 road: if you don’t have the right car or bike you’re screwed because you can’t magic anything, because the aero and the devices do the magic, so you can’t find an advantage by climbing around the bike and playing with the throttle to find traction and so on.

Yes, it looks like if you have a rider like Marc [Márquez], who is talented in so many ways and can ride around problems, this doesn’t work anymore. I’m sure he will find a way but at the moment it’s not easy for him to solve his bike issues by riding around them. It seems like you can’t do that anymore.

When you raced the M1 could you ride around problems?

Yes.

Whose data do you use the most: Binder’s or Jack Miller’s?

It’s interesting, because even if you have different riders with different riding styles they can arrive at the same place. It’s difficult to explain. As I said before, you have this one way to ride these bikes, but you can use different styles to get to that point where the bike works, which is very interesting to see.

“It’s getting more dangerous. It’s definitely not getting easier”

And also difficult to see. When I compare data I want to pick out things that I can use for myself and I think this is the way to do it. But then I see other riders doing it in a different way and getting to the same point, so all this makes it not so easy!

So you can ride sideways or another way?

Yes, and you can ride sideways in one way and you can also ride sideways in another way.

Maybe one guy is sliding by using less lean angle and more rear brake, while the other guy is sliding with more front brake and a different engine-brake set-up, so there are a thousand ways to get to that point which the bike likes.

What about when you’re with other riders in a group – the whole dirty-air thing – how does that affect you?

I’ve not been in a position to fight in a group, so it’s hard for me to say how it is over a race distance.

But from what I’ve experienced, the first laps are really incredible. Especially when you start from last place and you have 20 guys in front that create such a mess in the air that when you brake at the same point where you braked in practice you go totally straight because you don’t have the air-stop. [When you’re behind other bikes you’re in a partial vacuum, so there’s much less air pressure helping you stop].

This is something really incredible, which I didn’t expect to be so extreme.

I guess if you are fighting in a group of maybe five other riders this is really challenging for the rider, the brakes and the tyres. If you want to attack you need to use the slipstream, but if you use the slipstream your front tyre overheats, so it becomes very complicated. Everything is more difficult!

We hear some fans saying, ‘Oh the bikes are so easy to ride now’…

Hahaha! No, totally not! The bikes aren’t easier to ride now, they’re getting harder to ride, it’s the opposite. People think it looks easier maybe because the bikes look more stable because of the wings and so on but they are getting more difficult to ride.

Because the riding is so technical?

Yes, how to ride the bike in that certain way, how to reach that particular area where the bike needs to be to perform.

Also, you cannot overtake people so easily anymore because, as I already mentioned, things are getting tighter, so it’s also getting more dangerous, so it’s definitely not getting easier. Definitely not.

I know it’s nice for the fans to watch the sprint race on Saturdays, but this is something that makes it double risky. I’d say for the safety part I’d go back to the old system – race on Sunday and the rest is practice and qualifying

What about the new format, which has riders doing time attacks on Friday morning?

In the end, it’s racing, but this is another thing that makes it more difficult, because riders are already pushing at 100% on Friday morning, so they’re not getting there step by step and preparing the bike for the race, because you have the first race on Saturday, so this makes it more difficult.

Everything has changed so much. I didn’t speak to Toprak [Razgatlıoğlu, 2021 World Superbike champion] after his MotoGP tests with Yamaha but I think he wasn’t expecting what he found. I can imagine what he felt, because I felt the same way when I jumped on the KTM for the first time last year. I think he was totally surprised and not only in a good way, because he was expecting the bike to feel like a bike, not what it feels like now.

And the Yamaha is probably the most conventional bike on the MotoGP grid?

Yes, exactly.

To me it seems like Honda and Yamaha are still going motorcycle racing while Aprilia, Ducati and KTM are racing two-wheel F1 cars…

They use every detail, every technique, to improve their bikes, because in the end these should be the fastest bikes on Earth and they are.

In F1 they tweak the rules most years because technology is accelerating so fast…

Yes, it’s rising so much – you have these big changes in technology.

To do that here you’d have had to make strict changes to the rules – say, no winglets – then things wouldn’t have changed like they have.

But now these bikes are built on downforce, even the tyres only work with downforce. If you ride without wings the bike won’t work anymore, so the whole bike from zero to 100%, from the tyres to the suspension and chassis and from the engine to the electronics, everything is based on downforce, everything works around the aero. If we go back they’ll have to completely change the whole bike again and I don’t know if that’s the way.