MotoGP isn’t just about riding fast – subterfuge was always part of the game

No surprise that Sunday’s COTA grid turmoil has had many fans up in arms — were Marc Márquez’s controversial delaying tactics pure genius or reprehensible? Some insist the former world champion should’ve been penalised for leaving the grid, others weave comedy conspiracy theories around the incident and others marvel at his 360-degree mastery of MotoGP, from elbow down to memorising the rulebook (mostly).

The grid procedure section of the 2025 edition of the FIM Grand Prix World Championship Regulations runs to almost 5000 words. Back in 1999, 1200 words were enough. These things never get simpler because people exploit loopholes, so new clauses and sub-clauses are added. It’s a never-ending story.

Márquez was playing mind games at COTA. The fact that so many of his rivals ran after him into the pitlane tells us a lot about MotoGP’s current psychological hierarchy.

And yet I’m not 100% sure I believe his post-race explanation that his plan was always to trigger a grid exodus to delay the start, so he could switch to his dry bike without cost. His grid chat with crew chief Marco Rigamonti and team manager Davide Tardozzi focused entirely on swapping to his dry bike before the warm-up lap and thinking (wrongly) that he would start the race from the back of the grid with no further penalty. And what rider would lie to his crew?

Also, Márquez was the first to ride his dry bike to the end of the pitlane, where he sat at the head of the queue of riders waiting for the warm-up lap to start. Those weren’t the actions of someone trying to make sure the race didn’t go ahead as planned.

Who knows? Was he bluffing, double-bluffing or triple-bluffing? That’s the thing – everyone is wondering what’s going on inside his head, so he’s already got everyone psyched out.

And yet, maybe he wasn’t being as clever as he thought he was, because here’s a rule hidden deep in the rule book’s grid procedure section: ‘Any person who, due to their behaviour on the grid is responsible for a ‘start delayed’, may be further penalised’.

Would that have applied to Márquez? I don’t know.

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that these kind of cunning stunts never used to happen in the good old days of racing, when the MotoGP grid was populated entirely by gentlemen who lived according to the Olympic spirit — competing is what matters, not winning.

Like the 1990s world champion who wanted to destabilise a troublesome rival, so he offered $10,000 to anyone who would sleep with the rival’s girlfriend. Classy.

Or four-time 1980s MotoGP world champion Eddie Lawson, who fooled everyone to win the 1989 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, which was stopped and restarted due to rain.

The American was one of MotoGP’s old-school gunslingers, along with Kevin Schwantz, Wayne Rainey, Mick Doohan, Wayne Gardner and others. These were so-called men’s men who would never dream of pulling a low-down sneaky trick like running off the grid to confuse their rivals, or stealing time while their rivals are slowing down in dangerous conditions.

Except that’s what Lawson did.

Back then, the people running MotoGP didn’t usually stop races if it started raining. They just left the riders to the mercy of the gods. Understandably, riders didn’t like this, so by the late 1980s the bigger stars had taken matters into their own hands. If it started raining during a race, the leader would raise a hand, ease off, followed by everyone else. Then they’d ride around, waiting for the old boys in the ivory control tower to look out of the window, put down their double brandies and bring out the red flags.

Sometimes this took quite a while, sometimes more than a lap, because trackside TV coverage, CCTV, marshal communications and so on were pretty basic.

Like Spa in 1989.

“I think Erv [Kanemoto, Lawson’s crew chief and team owner] and I are the only ones who know that I snookered them in that race,” Lawson told me many years later.

“It started raining, so I held up my hand [Lawson was leading], and of course Kevin [Schwantz] and Wayne [Rainey] put their hands up too. So I’m looking behind and I’ve got my hand up, but I’m grabbing a handful of throttle and gassing it. I knew they were going to stop the race and time it [decide the result by combining times from the original race and the restart], so I pinned it and got a four-second gap on them.

“That happened at Silverstone in ’83 and I got screwed – Kenny [Roberts] knew to gas it and so did Freddie [Spencer] but I didn’t. That wasn’t going to happen to me again. Sure enough, it worked out. I ended up winning the race because of it.’”

That was subterfuge, just like Márquez’s COTA caper. And subterfuge is one of racing’s most important weapons. Racers use all kinds of deceit to help them win races – they lie about anything and everything to confuse and misinform rivals.

Roberts’ great 1970s rival Barry Sheene was renowned for his creative trickery. Those were the days when most teams worked on their bikes in the paddock, outside in the sunshine or under an awning when it was raining. Anyone could wander by and watch as mechanics prepped their bikes. Including rivals.

Sheene had an evil habit designed to fool rivals into using the wrong engine set-up for races, because setting up a finicky 1970s two-stroke was a kind of magical process of harmonising carburettor jetting, ignition timing, cylinder compressions and much else. Knowledge and wisdom were required.

So Sheene scribbled the main-jet sizes he wanted in his Suzuki RG500’s carburettors on a piece of duct tape, which he stuck on his RG’s seat, like a note for his mechanics. Except the numbers were wrong. Most 500cc riders rode RGs at the time and would’ve followed Sheene’s way, just like so many followed Márquez’s last weekend.

This could be dangerous because fitting main jets that are too big will feed too much fuel into the engine, which will cough, splutter and smoke like crazy. And you will finish last. But fitting main jets that are too small will feed too little fuel into the engine, which will overheat and maybe seize, which will lock the rear wheel and hurl you into the nearest guardrail.

I like to think Sheene’s misleading main-jet sizes were always too big.

Of course, there are even better ways of beating your rivals – you just steal their motorcycles.

That’s what happened to the factory Kawasaki team when it made its first big push into grand prix racing in the late 1970s, with its KR250 and KR350 tandem twins. (To continue the theme of chicanery, the KRs were powered by engines that were shameless copies of the MZ 250 designed by the legendary Walter Kaaden.)

The team arrived at Caracas airport for the 1978 season-opening Venezuelan Grand Prix and went to collect their bikes from the cargo area.

“We went to the customs warehouse with our carnets,” recalls mechanic Stuart Shenton, later crew chief to Schwantz and others. “But we were told, ‘Very sorry, your motorcycles aren’t here, we don’t think they ever arrived’.

“We made phone calls, sent telexes and, yes, the bikes had been on the plane. We had a local guide from Kawasaki who was driving us around. He said if they’re not here, someone’s taken them and I know who.

“We got back in his car, the guy reached under the seat, pulled out a gun, checked it was loaded, put it on the dash and said, ‘Let’s go and get the bikes’.

“We said, ‘Is there going to be any shooting?’. He said, ‘Well, there might be’. It was a bit like a film scene. He drove us down the back streets of Caracas and into this compound with the horn going, waving the gun out of the window. I guess we were lucky he had more front than the others. This was the yard of Ippolitos, the local Yamaha importers, and sure enough, hidden away in a corner, were our crates…”

Neither was Kawasaki averse to nefarious dealings. During a machine homologation check before the 1975 Formula 750 world championship, Kawasaki staff had to prove to FIM officials they had built enough of the new KR750 to qualify for the series. They told these officials that they had so many motorcycles that they’d had to store them in two different warehouses, so the officials visited the first location, after which they were taken to lunch, during which Kawasaki staff feverishly moved the few bikes they had from the first warehouse to the second warehouse. The ruse worked but was the 1975 KR750 event legal?

A decade earlier, factory Yamaha riders Bill Ivy and Phil Read went into the 1968 125cc and 250cc world championships with no worthwhile opposition, so even before the racing had started, Yamaha management gave them team orders: Read would win the 125 title, Ivy the 250.

But Read couldn’t resist double-crossing his team-mate. Both rode according to team orders, until Read secured the 125 title at Brno, Czechoslovakia, with three rounds remaining. A few hours later came the 250 race, in which Read was expected to leave Ivy to take victory.

“As we lined up for the 250s, I said to Bill, ‘Okay, if you think you can beat me when we’re riding to orders, well, now you’re going have to race me for it’. He said, ‘Ah, f***in’ ’ell, Phil’. So we raced, I won and he was second.”

The matter wasn’t over yet. Read also won the final 250 round at Monza, to take that title as well. But Ivy wasn’t prepared to admit defeat. He filed a protest, claiming that Read’s number plates didn’t comply with regulations.