MotoGP pit-lane wars: it’s spy versus spy

Of course, it works both ways.

The biggest motor sport espionage story of all time happened three decades earlier when Suzuki stole the most important racing information of that time.

Ducati, Honda and MV Agusta raced four-strokes, because that’s what you needed to win a world title in those days. But then the struggling MZ marque – run under the ever-seeing eye of the Communist East German regime – started winning grands prix with its game-changing two-strokes.

Suzuki also raced two-strokes, because (unlike Honda) it sold two-stroke road bikes, but it didn’t have a clue how to extract GP-winning performance from the trickiest of internal-combustion engines.

So Suzuki stole MZ’s two-stroke secrets. It paid MZ’s number-one rider, Ernst Degner, a small fortune to defect, bringing with him MZ parts, drawings and his own expertise.

Suzuki used this information to win its first world championship the very next year (also the two-stroke’s first world title). In 1976 Barry Sheene won Suzuki’s first MotoGP championship aboard an RG500, a square-four two-stroke which was essentially four MZ 125cc engines in a square format.

In recent years MotoGP spy tech has reached by far its highest level.

Videometry software – sometimes called ghost or overlay software – is now a standard feature of factory and team data streams. These videos are shot around tracks on static camera mounts, so teams can compare machine dynamics and riding techniques down to a few millimetres and both adjust their machines and riding techniques accordingly and build computer models. Audio inputs also help, revealing engine firing configurations, rpm, gear position and so on.

An imaginary conversation inside the VR46 garage…

‘Hey, Diggia, you should be 15 centimetres further onto the inside kerb at Turn 7, and try fourth there instead of third, then a metre to the inside of your normal line when you hit the brakes for 9.’

Of course, there are other ways of extracting knowledge from rival factories – manufacturers buy their best engineers, which is why KTM and Yamaha hire people from Ducati, who bring their intellects with them and also all the knowhow they’ve learned in recent years.

So, yeah, a bit of LiDAR scanning in pit lane isn’t a big deal.

The Aprilia engineer was sneaking around Bezzecchi’s GP23 during a pit-lane walk, when each rider’s spare bike is parked in pit lane and most team members are busy elsewhere. Some factories avoid their engineers getting busted in these situations by despatching them to sniff around rival bikes while wearing civvies.

Did Tardozzi need to get angry? Tardozzi is former racer who has spent his entire adult life trying to win races, so he runs a bit hot! Why should he be nice to someone trying to steal Ducati secrets?

And what kind of a crime was the Aprilia engineer committing? Apart from being spectacularly cheeky, his only crime was getting caught. Aprilia, by the way, has apologised to Ducati, insisting that the engineer wasn’t acting under instructions.

In other words, MotoGP is every bit as vicious in the paddock and pit lane as it is on the racetrack. It’s not a game – it’s way worse than that. Always has been.

George Orwell (author of 1984) knew this when he wrote The Sporting Spirit in 1945, after watching a post-war football international.

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,” he famously wrote. “It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”

Orwell also wondered if the whole point of sport is to allow humans to vent to their worst excesses.

And this is one reason why we love sport – because it is war without the shooting, all the way from football players kicking a ball around a pitch to racers racing motorcycle around in circles.

Sport is the original and best reality TV show. We get to see fellow humans pushed to the limit, mentally and physically. We love to see them succeed. We love to see them fail. We love the emotion, the adrenaline, the joy, the anguish.

All the world championship is a stage.

Witnessing gravel-trap behaviour is a personal favourite.

You get all sorts: the rider that stands up, shrugs and walks to the barriers, or those that hurl gravel at their bikes, or the riders that jump up and down on their fallen machines.

(In fact I’ve only seen this once, when Mattia Pasini attacked his Aprilia 125 after its engine had seized, causing him to crash at Catalunya in 2007. I still remember that moment like it was yesterday – and that’s what sport is all about: stories, memories.)

And then there are the riders that throw punches at rivals in the gravel trap. Or the riders that attack marshals.

(In fact I’ve only seen this twice, when Alan Carter threw a punch at a marshal after crashing out of the 1986 250cc British GP and when Eddie Lawson threw a traffic cone at a marshal following an incident during a Belgian GP around the same time.)

Watching racers buzzing out of their minds on adrenaline isn’t the whole story of motorcycle racing but it’s certainly part of the story.

In ancient times, spectators got this kind of thrill by watching gladiators kill each other in coliseums.

The excellent 1975 sci-fi movie Rollerball takes the gladiator theme into the future (in fact, 2018). William Harrison, author of the story, had noticed how sports in the US were getting more violent and how the crowds enjoyed the violence, so he foresaw a future where sport wouldn’t be war minus the shooting but war with lots of killing.

His rollerball creation is a vicious ball game, played to the death in velodromes on roller-skates and motorcycles. (The movie uses heavily armoured Honda CB125s.) Harrison’s vision is Orwell’s taken to the next level.

MotoGP isn’t a soft-play centre. The pressure the riders are under is ugly. The pressure the engineers, mechanics and team managers are under is ugly. They are all trying to screw each other over, that’s how it works.

So a bit of argy-bargy in pit lane is no big deal. Tardozzi arguing with that Aprilia engineer was as much a part of the championship as Pecco Bagnaia locking handlebars with Marc Marquez at Jerez. It’s all part of the game.

So, enjoy the madness. That’s what I’m here for.