MotoGP title fight: it’s better to be the hunter than the hunted

“For some reason when you are behind on points and you have to win it’s easier to win,” he said. “When you are in front you have to think too much – it’s not helpful.”

Of course, both men ride Ducati Desmosedici GP24s, but since Misano they are using different aerodynamic packages. Both tried Ducati’s 2024 aero upgrade at last month’s Misano tests. At the Emilia-Romagna GP race-winner Enea Bastianini and runner-up Martin used the new aero, but Bagnaia didn’t. At Mandalika only Martin used it, so the last two GPs have been won with the new aero.

The package includes a revised lower fairing, with larger diffusers – the bulging ducts at the bottom of the fairing. These have large inlets at the top and smaller outlets at the bottom, so they accelerate the air that flows through them. This creates the all-important area of low pressure under the fairing, called ground effect. Nature abhors a vacuum (or partial vacuum), so the higher pressure above the motorcycle presses the tyres into the asphalt, which increases grip.

The upgrade also includes rear-wheel ground-effect devices, to match the front-wheel ground-effect devices used by Ducati for the last year or so. Both these devices do the same thing – they’re designed to be very close and parallel to the road at full lean, so air flow is accelerated beneath them and the asphalt, creating areas of low pressure for more grip.

And, hey presto, you can ride through corners quicker. And the higher the speed the more effective the ground effect, so it’s most useful through fast corners, which is where you can make the most time.

By the way, ground effect is different to downforce, which creates more grip via wings that create extra load on the motorcycle and the tyres.

Martin says the new set-up makes him faster, but it’s not all good.

“It feels like the bike turns a bit worse but I feel I can enter corners a bit faster,” he said at Mandalika. “I can go faster into corners, but then I struggle to stop the bike in the last part of braking and I can lose the front a bit more than with this fairing. It’s not about feeling, it’s more about the lap time.”

Maybe this new kit has allowed Martin to regain some of the speed he lost after crashing out of July’s German GP at Sachsenring – his second crash in three weekends. At the next race at Silverstone his engineers used a new geometry setting, which put more weight on the front tyre.

“With this setting maybe I have a bit less performance but I don’t have these crazy crashes anymore,” he said recently (before he slipped off on Saturday).

In other words, Martin is on a highwire, not only when he’s riding, but also when he’s in the garage – the new aero seems to make him fractionally faster but it comes with risks, which is why Bagnaia isn’t using it.

“Jorge uses it for fast corners, but for me it’s worse,” he said. “I feel much better when the bike moves a bit, which gives you feedback. With this aero package you get less movement, and I prefer to feel everything.”

This is one of many areas where race bikes are different to race cars. Cars need to be rigid, bikes don’t, which is why engineers spend so much time playing with the black art of chassis flex. When the bike reacts to an input, a bump, or whatever it needs to move a fraction of a millimetre, which the rider takes as an early warning system. This is why riders always talk about feel and it’s why, for example, upper triple clamps are slotted, to create a tiny amount of flex. If the bike is too rigid the rider gets no warning of impending doom.

Ducati wasn’t the only factory at Mandalika playing with its once-a-year aero upgrade. KTM has had a horrible few months trying to get even close to the Ducatis. At Misano the previous weekend Pedro Acosta and Brad Binder did give chase but they both crashed out trying to keep up.

Acosta’s Mandalika race was his best result of an already stellar rookie campaign. He qualified on the front row – which is at least half the battle in MotoGP now – got a great start, moved into second place and started hauling in Martin. Surely this was impossible?! But the kid did it anyway, halving his disadvantage from 1.2 seconds on lap three to six tenths at half-distance.

“But a moment arrived after lap 16 or 17 when I said, ‘OK, today maybe second is better than a crash’,” said the 20-year-old who dominated last year’s Moto2 race at Mandalika. “We need to be happy, because battling with the Ducatis isn’t easy. And we need to be happy because we are getting closer and closer.”

KTM has only scored five GP podiums so far this year and Acosta has achieved all but one of them. So what was his secret at Mandalika, which was his strongest race so far – just 1.4 seconds behind the winner and his fastest lap better than Martin’s best.

“We’ve found something we really needed – now we need to make some final tuning and understand how to use this improvement,” he said mysteriously.

So what was that something?

Part of it is his aerodynamic update, which he raced for the first time the previous weekend at Misano – the shark-tooth swingarm aero device, which KTM test-rider Pol Espargaró used during August’s Austrian GP. This device increases downforce for more rear grip and is part of a range of improvements – mostly set-up tweaks – that have made his RC16 feel more planted, so he can ride faster, more safely.

Sadly, Acosta ended his best MotoGP race yet under a cloud: after his crew had congratulated him in parc fermé they had to tell him he was under investigation for a tyre-pressure infringement, with his front tyre below the 1.8 bar minimum for more than 60% of the race.

Acosta always says what he thinks, or in this case, burps what he thinks. During the podium anteroom gathering – when the top three watch a few minutes of race highlights and chat to each other in Italian or Spanish (so the vast majority of viewers have no idea what they’re talking about) – he drank a can of fizzy pop and gave out a big burp, then another, then another. This was high-pressure Acosta telling us what he thinks of the low-pressure rule.

On the podium he didn’t pop his bottle of prosecco, because he’d look a fool if he celebrated like mad, only to find out he hadn’t finished second after all.

The Acosta tyre-pressure investigation went on for ages, because multiple checks have to be made to confirm the veracity of the front tyre’s pressure monitoring system. Finally MotoGP’s technical staff announced that Acosta would receive no penalty because his front wheel rim had been leaking, so his crew hadn’t set the pressure too low.

I always thought when the air-pressure rule was finally enforced that the people at the top of the championship wouldn’t let it influence really big results. For example, let’s say two riders are battling for the championship at the final round, separated by four points. The rider who’s second on points wins the race, so he wins the title by one point. What a glorious end to a championship – what an awesome spectacle on the podium!

But wait… His front-tyre pressure is under investigation. One hour after the race has finished and after the media conference, during which the champion – all watery-eyed – tells us about the greatest day of his life, the steward’s report appears. The winner was 0.01 bar under pressure and all the checks confirm that the monitoring system functioned correctly, so he gets a 16-second penalty and he’s not the champion after all.

Call me a cynic, but I just don’t believe that MotoGP’s big bosses would let that happen. They’d stand over the technical staff – who are only doing their job – and tell them to quietly forget about the winner’s infringement, because dethroning MotoGP’s new king would simply be far, far too damaging for the championship.

Acosta didn’t win the race or the championship on Sunday, but he’s hugely popular and a big fan’s favourite, so it would have been a nightmare for MotoGP if they’d hit him with a penalty. There’s nothing that angers fans more than this kind of thing – and has them reaching for the off-button on the TV remote. So was the leaking wheel rim simply a convenient way out and a command from up on high? We will never know and I will probably get in trouble for suggesting such a thing.

But this situation is very serious. If MotoGP wants to retain its credibility and its attraction to fans the championship needs to fix this tyre pressure issue very soon.

This will require Michelin to introduce its new front slick next year, not in 2026. The French company isn’t entirely to blame for this tardiness. MotoGP has allowed Michelin just 30 minutes to test the new tyre with the entire grid, at the recent Misano tests. Thirty minutes?! How much can Michelin engineers learn in 30 minutes? It’s ridiculous.

There should have been at least two all-day tests with the front tyre to accelerate its development, because this is literally the biggest headache hanging over the championship at the moment. It’s also hideously unfair to riders, teams, engineers and manufacturers. And I’m not sure the people in charge understand that.

When Pirelli wants to try a new tyre in F1, the championship designates free practice sessions at races to mandatory use of that tyre. That mileage delivers a lot of data and feedback, so improvements can be made quickly. It’s probably too late to do that to get MotoGP’s new front ready for 2025, but it should have happened earlier. So don’t only blame Michelin for this shocking mess.

Bagnaia’s ride to third at Mandalika on Sunday, after winning the sprint, was superb. The world champ made a poor start – his GP24 kangarooing away from the grid – and took ages to get past his VR46 mates Franky Morbidelli and Marco Bezzecchi, whose GP23 has a bit more corner-exit traction than the GP24. Finally he made it past Bezzecchi and his move past Morbidelli into third place was superb and a typically cleverly thought-out overtake from MotoGP’s professor.

Bagnaia made the pass exiting the flowing Turns 8 and 9. He doesn’t usually use his rear ride-height device there but this time he did and it was like a Formula 1 driver engaging DRS.

“It all depended on my exit from those corners,” he explained. “If I exited with more angle it was useless to use the device because it can make the wheelspin worse, but that time I exited super-well, so it was a good help.”

Those extra three points could mean a lot as the championship moves into its final stages.

Two other good things happened to Bagnaia in Sunday’s race: two of his three title rivals failed to finish, so now the title fight is a straightforward duel: him versus Martin, just like last year.

It took just 13 minutes to remove Bastianini and Márquez from (all but mathematical) title contention. First, Márquez’s engine broke. The bike almost immediately caught fire, suggesting that a conrod had come through the crankcases along with a few pints of oil, which were ignited by the exhaust pipes. His GP23 was badly destroyed by the flames, because marshals weren’t equipped with the correct fire extinguishers.

A few laps after Márquez was on fire, so was Bastianini, but in a different way. In the first few laps the Emilia-Romagna GP winner had dropped from second to fifth, because his brand-new rear tyre was so grippy it was pushing the front, which kept tucking. When his front/rear grip balanced out a bit everything changed.

Like team-mate Bagnaia, it took him a while to get past Bezzecchi and Morbidelli, but once he was into third, with ten laps to go, he started reeling in Acosta, from 2.9 seconds to 1.5 in only four laps. On lap 20 he set the fastest lap of the race and the very next lap he was down, losing the front at Turn 1. A demise similar to Bagnaia’s seven days earlier.

Neither Bastianini nor Márquez seemed particularly bothered by losing their outside title chances. Márquez went into 2024 with different goals, with his eyes focused more on the 2025 championship. And at Mandalika his hopes of another great result were compromised by two crashes in the Q2 qualifying session – the third weekend in a row that he had crashed in Q2.

“I’m sad but my target was already done,” said Márquez, who won his first races since 2022 in last month’s Aragon and San Marino GPs. “After that my next target was to find consistency in the races – that’s what I’ve been doing in the last races. The next step is to improve qualifying – I will be super-concentrated at the next races to be on the first three rows in a consistent way, that’s my next target.”

So Márquez is all about 2025, while Martin and Bagnaia are all about 2024. Four more out-of-Europe races, from Motegi, where rain is forecast, to most likely freezing cold Phillip Island, to burning hot Thailand and finally back to autumnal Valencia. There’s a lot that can happen.