How significant is the air-stop issue? At that speed it’s huge. Air-stop is the reverse of slipstreaming, when riders use the low-pressure bubble from the machine ahead to increase their acceleration. When you’re on the throttle and you find your way into that bubble the reduction in air resistance is startling. It feels like you’ve pressed a turbo button – your engine increases revs dramatically and you charge past the machine ahead so rapidly that sometimes you nearly clip its rear end.

In other words, the Phillip Island incident was a perfect storm: air-stop and sidewinds. Bezzecchi wasn’t stopping and when he took an extra handful of brake the front tyre locked because it had less downforce – and therefore less grip – and he cannoned into the Aprilia, both bikes and riders tumbling off the track and into the gravel trap.

Nonetheless, Bezzecchi was hit with a long-lap penalty in the grand prix, for “riding in an irresponsible manner causing a crash”.

Bezzecchi wasn’t riding irresponsibly. Neither was Viñales, although the stewards could also have hit him with a penalty for breaking the unwritten agreement between riders that you shouldn’t make a pass and cut in front when braking from high speeds, due to the air-stop issue.

“You should always leave some clean air to the guy behind,” said Pol Espargaró last year. “Because when you pull in front of the other guy, the speed increases quite fast for the other guy, so he can hit you from behind.”

In reality, Bezzecchi and Viñales were victims of circumstances largely beyond their control. Both riders may not have been 100% perfect in their riding but that’s a lesser factor than the air-stop and sidewinds.

Current MotoGP bikes – with their numerous downforce-generating aerodynamic appendages – create a huge wake at high speeds, much bigger than pre-downforce machines. This is caused by the airflow separating around the motorcycle and breaking up into turbulence and whirling, buffeting vortices that create a low-pressure bubble behind the motorcycle, the so-called dirty air that riders hate so much.

The high-pressure wake and the low-pressure bubble have opposite effects on any rider that comes within their range. The wake pushes the rider away and the low-pressure air sucks him in. And one follows the other in a millisecond, so one moment you’re pushing against the wake, the next you’re pulling against the dirty air. All this at around 210mph.

At this speed, with other riders around, the motorcycle is already shaking and wobbling from all the turbulence, so it’s difficult to keep control, let alone put your bike where you want to put it. The riders are battling forces far greater than themselves.

The MotoGP stewards examined data from both bikes and noticed that Bezzecchi had reopened the throttle after Viñales swept past. But at this point Bezzecchi was fighting to stay on the track. And every racer knows that you’ve little control of your motorcycle’s direction of travel with the throttle off – if you want control you need the throttle on.

All the riders know about the air-stop problem – they’ve all had scary moments getting sucked into the bike in front. It happened to Bezzecchi at Silverstone last year when he was chasing leader Pecco Bagnaia at the end of Hangar Straight. Although he was much further away from Bagnaia than he was from Bezzecchi, the air-stop still cost him too much braking power, so he locked the front and down he went, without taking Bagnaia with him.

“I went into the slipstream of Pecco, so instead of slowing down I was accelerating, so I had to brake more but the front was already on the limit and I lost it,” explained Bezzecchi at the time.

The last two races of last year also gave perfect illustrations of the air-stop problem. Luckily, the entries to Turn 1 at Losail and Valencia are less critical than Turn 1 at Phillip Island.

In Qatar last year, Bagnaia tried to attack Fabio Di Giannantonio at the end of the Losail start/finish straight, got sucked into his air-stop bubble and missed him by centimetres.

“I got scared,” said Bagnaia. “Because at one point I said, ‘OK, I’m going to hit him and it’ll be a disaster, but finally I managed to make the bike slide, which helped me push more on the brakes to stop the bike. The last laps I was completely scared and very slow.”

The following week at Valencia, Martin tried to attack Bagnaia at the end of the start/finish straight and the same thing happened.

Over the past few seasons I’ve spoken to many riders about this issue. Of course it concerns them, but being racers they try not to waste energy on things they believe to be out of their control. So they just get on with it and try to adapt to the situation.

Here’s Jonas Folger – who replaced the injured Pol Espargaró at six GPs last year – talking about air-stop.

“When you brake [behind other riders, in the race] at the same point you braked in practice [alone] you go totally straight, because you don’t have the air-stop.

“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.”

And here’s Pol Espargaró talking about dirty air at Misano last year.

“Especially at [the ultra-high speed] Turns 11, 12 and 13 the air in the group is super-dirty, so it’s super-dangerous.”

Did you get that? “Super-dangerous.”

And Martin, talking about Catalunya last year, when he got sucked in by Viñales’ Aprilia and nearly took out his countryman at Turn 1.

“Behind the Ducatis it’s complicated, behind the Aprilia now it’s even worse.”

Marc Márquez had no doubt about what was to blame for the Phillip Island pile-up.

“You don’t want to go to the middle of the track because you know with these bikes that if you go in front of the guy you’re overtaking, the slipstream sucks in the second guy,” he said. “So you never want to be in front because you know it’s a dangerous situation for you. But today the wind was pushing across the track, so I think Viñales couldn’t avoid that movement while Bezzecchi couldn’t avoid the sucking.

“Guys, we are riding at 320km/h [200mph], shaking, and it’s windy at the end of the straight, so for me it’s a racing incident.”

What Márquez was saying is that whether you hit another rider in an air-stop situation isn’t so much down to you, but the conditions around you.

“Stoner said the Viñales/Bezzecchi crash is the result of aero”

Six-time Phillip Island MotoGP winner Casey Stoner agreed. “This [the Viñales/Bezzecchi crash] is the result of aero,” he wrote on social media. “The wake caused by them at that speed is too much.”

If I was a cynic or a conspiracy theorist I might think there was a deeper reason for sanctioning Bezzecchi for the accident. If MotoGP hadn’t penalised a rider, this would have been an admission that it was the motorcycles that were responsible for the accident.

The current technical regulations remain in force until the end of 2026, when downforce aerodynamics will be trimmed, in the hope of reducing these problems and improving the quality of racing, because riders needing to stay away from each other for the sake of their safety isn’t the best way to create exciting racing.

The only way the rules can be changed without agreement from the factories is for safety reasons. Everyone in the paddock – from the riders to the engineers to those in the control tower – is fully aware that the current situation is dangerous, even super-dangerous, but no one seems prepared to do anything about it.

It’s not complicated – all the people in charge need to do is announce that the 2027 aero changes will be brought forward to next season. If they don’t make this decision they are shifting their responsibility for rider safety onto the shoulders of the riders, while fully aware of the dangers and having all the power in their hands to reduce those dangers.

The idea that we must wait until 2027 to make a straightforward technical change to improve rider safety is insane.

It’s difficult to think of a more dangerous situation than air-stop incidents at 200mph, especially because these accidents most likely involve multiple motorcycles. The superhuman abilities and reactions of MotoGP riders have prevented many of these crashes and the excellence of modern riding gear saved Viñales and Bezzecchi from serious injury on Saturday, but when you crash a motorcycle at that speed, with other fallen motorcycles cartwheeling around you, you’re very much in the lap of the gods.

So it seems like the only thing MotoGP’s bosses are doing right now is crossing their fingers, hoping ‘the big one’ won’t happen, which isn’t the greatest safety protocol.

Motorcycle racing will always be dangerous. Indeed that’s always been one of its attractions. But when there’s an easy way to make it safer (which would also make the racing better, to the benefit of all) why not take it?