MotoGP surprise: sprint races are slower than GP races

How can this be, because it’s about as counter-intuitive as it gets?

First, let’s look at the data, gathered by MotoGP fans and data analysts Dimitri and Yanna Stathopoulos.

Eight of the 11 riders that completed both races at the season-opening Portuguese GP were faster in the GP than they were in the sprint. At COTA, all eight riders that finished both races (without crashing and remounting, as did Brad Binder and Fabio Quartararo) were faster in the full-distance race than in the short race.

At Jerez, 14 riders completed both races and only one of them was faster on Saturday, although differences in track temperature played a part here. Crash-strewn Le Mans was different, with only ten riders finishing both races – half of them faster in the sprint and the others faster in the GP. Jorge Martin’s average lap time during his sprint race victory was almost half a second per lap slower than his ride to second in the GP.

That’s 47 finishers of both races from four GPs, with 42 of them slower in the sprint. Also interesting is that roughly only half the riders have managed to finish both races so far.

There are always reasons for what happens in racing, so what are the reasons for this?

The new weekend format, written to fit the sprint race into Saturdays, has entirely changed grand prix racing. MotoGP is a prototype championship, using massively complex machines that demand a huge amount of set-up work by riders and engineers.

The new schedule has taken away a lot of the time required to get these 300-horsepower, 225mph (360km/h) motorcycles working at their best.

The sprint race replaces Saturday afternoon’s FP4 session, during which riders and teams finalised bike set-up and tyre choice, with data and feedback directly applicable to Sunday afternoon’s race.

And not only has FP4 been lost. Friday’s two sessions – now named P1 and P2 – are essentially pre-qualifying outings, with everyone focusing on the fastest-possible lap to get into Q2, because if a rider doesn’t go directly into Q2 his weekend becomes much more complicated.

Mechanics now throw in soft tyres towards the end of the first session, after just half an hour of track time! And again at the end of the afternoon outing. The Saturday morning session is the weekend’s only free practice session, when lap times don’t count towards qualifying, but it starts at 10am, so it holds little relevance to race-time performance.

So, this is the first point: by the time riders go out for the sprint race they’ve spent most of their efforts on time attacks, instead of getting into the groove to reel off lap after lap at – hopefully – race-winning speed, like they used to. And their engineers are still working to get the bikes right.

When they go out to race on Sunday the riders are really in the groove and their engineers have made more improvements to the bikes, based on feedback and data from the sprint.

Rubber down is always a big thing. Generally, tracks get faster, day by day, during a weekend, which is why Sunday’s lap times are blown to smithereens whenever MotoGP riders get to test on the Monday. And although Sunday’s GP race starts with Moto2 Dunlop rubber down, which reduces grip, there’s more Michelin rubber down from quarter-distance, so the pace gets faster.

And rear tyre wear over GP distance isn’t the problem it was before Michelin introduced its current rear slick at the start of 2020. Some engineers reckon rear slicks are usually only 60% worn at the end of a GP race, so the pace rarely tails off in the later stages.

“You’d definitely expect the sprint to be faster,” says KTM crew chief Paul Trevathan, who currently works with GASGAS Tech 3 rider Pol Espargaró and his replacement Jonas Folger. “But after the sprint race you usually change the bike again, because you’ve not had enough time to set it up properly for the sprint. So you take the rider’s comments and you try to make the bike better.”

“Plus, everyone is nervous in the sprint race, because it’s the first race of the weekend, so they make mistakes, they block and they attack and they do stupid things. In the long race the riders are more like, ‘Okay, let’s get through the first couple of corners and the first lap and see where we are’.

“When they race on Sunday they’ve figured things out: they know the track better, they know the lines, they know what they want to do and they know where the other guys are stronger, so they become better. In a way, riders are also machines: they take in information, they recalculate and they do things better.”

The new weekend format has also made things much harder, more stressful and more complicated for teams, engineers and mechanics, which will have its own ramifications, further transforming MotoGP in the coming years. And it’s increased the stresses and risks placed on riders, who in recent years were already crashing more often than ever before and now have to race their motorcycles on Saturdays before they’re fully set up. Last season’s premier-class crash rate was more than double what it was a decade and a half ago!

“It’s painful, but it’s the same for everyone,” adds Trevathan. “In P1 your rider does maybe 12 laps, then, just in case the track is weaker in P2, you’re already putting in a soft rear tyre at the end of P1. Are you serious?! You’ve got a brand-new motorcycle, you’ve never been to this track with it and maybe Michelin has different tyres here…

“So you start P1 with the harder rear, because you only have so many softs, and you go out on the worst front, because you know you’re going to need the better fronts which you don’t have enough of. Then at the end of P1 you spend ten minutes on a soft rear with a bike that’s completely not going to be what you race.

“Then you go into P2 and you know that the soft rear could be the tyre you want to use in the sprint, so you want to put some laps on it, so you use the used soft rear [from the end of P1] with the front tyre you want to race, because the temperature is good, and you get only one or two runs, then you do two time attacks with two softs. That’s the reality of what we’re dealing with.

“If you bring a new chassis component or a new fairing you try it in P1, but of course the conditions aren’t right and the tyres aren’t right, so you want to recheck it in P2, so you have to do that on a tyre that’s already getting old and then you have to go into the time attack.

“After that, you’ve just got to take what you feel in your heart and what the rider looks you in the eye with and says, ‘This is good enough’, but have you made a better motorcycle? No way.

“Then you go to Saturday morning free practice, which is the only time you can really try something race-tyre wise. But it’s only 30 minutes and then you go straight into qualifying, so you can’t make two really different set-ups for this session, because if you crash one bike you have to use the other in qualifying. And if it’s really different your rider won’t be fast in qualifying.

“One thing with the Michelins is that if you have a tyre that worked well in one session, but the track evolves before the next session, the first thing you do in that next session is check the tyre, not the bike, because if you check the bike, and the track conditions have evolved, then you get lost. The problem now is that we don’t have the chance to do that – this is gone.

“The need for information is so painful and the need for the rider to be fast is super-painful, so both sides struggle. But this is what everyone has to deal with.”

Formula 1 engineers say the same thing about F1’s sprint races.

“They’re a joke – zero chance to test or set up anything,” one F1 engineer told me.

And F1 has sprint races at six of this year’s 22 rounds, not at every single race.

Less and less practice time and less and less testing time means only one thing for MotoGP: a shift towards more computer-modelling and computer simulations, then using AI and machine learning to find answers in the virtual world, not on the racetrack.

This is what’s happened in F1, since practice and testing time was reduced and then sprints introduced.

MotoGP’s new format also increases the advantage enjoyed by the factories with the most bikes on the grid and amplifies the problems suffered by those with the fewest, because less practice time means even less data for them.

Which brings us to the factories that are struggling…

The new format allows no room for development and testing is severely restricted, so how do the engineers dig themselves out of their holes?

Obviously, right now, this is Honda and Yamaha. How do they fix their problems if they’re not allowed to do development work with their full-time MotoGP riders?

If Dorna would prefer not to lose another manufacturer or two from the grid the company should probably have a rethink about its testing restrictions, about the format, about the technical regulations, anything, really.

Every action has a reaction. The action in this case is sprint races but we don’t yet know what the ultimate reaction to the new format will be.

Thanks to Dimitri and Yanna Stathopoulos, who have created MotoGP stat apps for TV commentators and teams, for their help with this story.