Silverstone MotoGP: Bagnaia the winner, Quartararo the loser, Espargaro the hero

MotoGP

The 2022 title fight is now a three-way battle after a red-hot weekend at Silverstone, where Aleix Espargaro was the hero after a huge Saturday highside. The question is: why didn’t his TC save him?

Ducati rider Francesco Bagnaia celeates winning the 2022 British GP at Silverstone

Bagnaia bounced back from two difficult days of practice to beat Maverick Vinales by a fraction. He has now won more races than anyone else this year

Dorna

Mat Oxley

Pecco Bagnaia atoned for his Ibizan sins at sun-baked Silverstone on Sunday with a perfectly judged ride to victory, following his runaway win at Assen, before MotoGP went on its five-week mid-season holiday.

At the same time world championship leader Fabio Quartararo’s title defence faltered for the first time, due to a long-lap penalty incurred at Assen (for punting title-rival Aleix Espargaro into the gravel) and a very rare incorrect tyre choice.

Silverstone was even worse for Espargaro. The Aprilia rider started what he had called “the most important three months of my career” with a terrifying 120mph highside during Saturday’s FP4 session, which brought back memories of the good old days/bad old days of 500cc two-strokes.

Amazingly he didn’t break anything but he was in a bad way, barely able to walk and spent a grim Saturday night with his injured heels encased in medicinal clay and Sunday morning undergoing laser treatment, ice treatment and physio with Clinical Mobile medics.

Aprilia MotoGP rider Aleix Espargaro battles at the 2022 British GP at Silverstone

Espargaro rode a heroic race, here ahead of Mir, Oliveira and Bastianini, who raced Ducati’s crazy new rear aero

Aprilia

Bagnaia’s first back-to-back victories since the end of last year and his rivals’ Silverstone woes have transformed the 2022 title fight. In Germany seven weeks ago the 25-year-old Italian crashed out for the third time in four races (not always his fault), dropping him to sixth overall, 91 points down. Now he’s third, 49 points down on Quartararo and 27 on Espargaro, with Ducati’s happiest hunting ground coming up next (the Italian factory has won five of the last six races at the Red Bull Ring), then Misano and Aragon, where Bagnaia won last year.

The most crucial event of the weekend happened at 1.30pm on Saturday when Espargaro went out to try the hard-option rear slick for the first time. It was so unusually hot for Silverstone that the hard had to be evaluated, even though Bagnaia’s team-mate Jack Miller had some scary moments with it during FP2, when the rear kept stepping out off-throttle, especially in left-handers. Silverstone has fewer lefts, so it was more difficult to get heat into the hard rear and keep it there.

Espargaro was on his third lap, accelerating through the track’s high-speed Turn 12 left-hander when the rear came around and the bike spat him to the moon. When he landed he stayed down a long time, writhing in pain, and was later stretchered off to the medical centre.

So, why didn’t his Aprilia’s traction control work?

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Because although Espargaro was pushing too soon with the hard tyre he wasn’t yet up to full speed. Before MotoGP spec software was introduced in 2016 most factories had adaptive traction control, so the motorcycle measured grip many times per second and adjusted its anti-spin programme accordingly. The current TC isn’t adaptive, so teams write the maps to make the TC work within certain parameters for the best-possible race performance, usually using as little TC as possible. And Espargaro wasn’t within those parameters when the rear let go.

No surprise that Espargaro needed painkillers for the race, but MotoGP doesn’t use some of the more controversial (and possibly more effective) painkilling treatments it once did. Riders are only allowed NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen and naproxen), via pills or injection.

Mesotherapy, which uses multiple micro-injections into subcutaneous fat (not muscle) specifically around the injury, was once MotoGP’s favourite way to reduce pain, but not because it’s nice. As Valentino Rossi once said, “I have very much fear of the mesotherapy needle.”

Espargaro was undoubtedly the hero of the race, which proved, as places like Silverstone, Philip Island and Assen usually do, that fast tracks make for great racing. He finished ninth, 3.9 seconds behind Bagnaia, in the second-closet top ten in more than seven decades of grand prix racing. Just 6.6 seconds separated the winner from tenth-placed Marco Bezzecchi.

MotoGP riders battle the 2022 British GP at Silverstone

Quartararo takes his long-lap penalty at the Loop – it was the start of a nightmare for the champion and championship leader

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“I didn’t have much pain,” said Espargaro, who almost certainly has a very different pain thermostat compared to you and me. “But I couldn’t move freely on the bike, I couldn’t help make it turn and I couldn’t be aggressive, so I didn’t make one overtake in the race, while everyone overtook me where I crashed, because I didn’t have any speed there. Now I feel pain everywhere: my legs, my back, my neck.”

The fact that team-mate Maverick Vinales, whom Espargaro has out-performed at every track (apart from COTA, his bogy circuit), finished second at Silverstone, attacking Bagnaia for the win on the last lap, suggests that Espargaro would’ve won if he hadn’t been in such a state.

“Today I missed a good opportunity to close the points gap on Fabio,” he added. “But this is racing…”

The only positive for the 33-year-old Spaniard was that he took the chequered flag right behind Quartararo, who chased early leader Johann Zarco until his long-lap penalty, which dropped him back into the mire of the pack, from which he was unable to escape.

Last year and at the first 11 races of this season Quartararo and his crew chief Diego Gubellini didn’t make a single mistake on tyre choice. But yesterday they did. The hard rear was obviously a tricky tyre, so they never dared try it in practice, preferring to focus on the medium. However, the hard turned out to be the right tyre for the race, with the first four finishers all using this compound.

Quartararo built his championship lead with strong qualifying performances and blisteringly fast starts, which got him out front, so he had the space to use the Yamaha’s superior corner speed and the cool air to keep his front tyre from overheating.

In the pack with Bagnaia, third-finisher Miller, fourth-placed Enea Bastianini, Jorge Martin, and others he had tyre overheating problems, but unusually with the rear tyre, not the front.

“We should have tried the hard in practice – it was a mistake,” said the reigning champion. “With one bike in front of me it may have been OK, but with three in front the rear tyre got so hot, plus I ride totally different to the others [on V4s, not inline-fours, like Quartararo’s YZR-M1] that overtaking was a nightmare.”

When Zarco crashed out of the lead on lap six – because on the grid he had switched from the soft front to the medium, another mistake – Quartararo had already done his long lap and was fourth, right behind Bagnaia, but he had no answer to the superior straight-line speed of the Ducatis, Vinales’ Aprilia and Miguel Oliveira’s KTM, which pushed him all the way back to eighth.

MotoGP riders Francesco Bagnaia, Jack Miller and Maverick Vinales celebrate on the podiu of the 2022 British GP at Silverstone

Three Italian V4 riders on the podium – winner Bagnaia (centre), runner-up Vinales (right) and third-placed Miller

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Espargaro was stunned by Bagnaia’s Sunday speed, because the factory Ducati rider had struggled in practice: 11th on Friday and 21st in FP4.

“Both [factory] Ducatis had zero pace, so I don’t understand how they found the pace, they did an extraordinary job,” said Espargaro. “Also there was a KTM in the lead group and Bastianini, who was mostly out of the top ten in practice and was one of the strongest guys. I really don’t understand what happed today but this is MotoGP – it’s nice and it’s close.”

The secret to the Bagnaia’s new-found speed was a last-gasp change during morning warm-up – giving up with the medium rear he had used through most of the weekend and trying the hard compound, which gave him the stability at a track where riders use lots of throttle at high lean angles.

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“This morning we found something better with the hard rear tyre,” he said after taking the lead on lap 12 of 20 for his fourth win of the year, one more than Quartararo and three more than Espargaro.

Even though the fastest riders used the hard rear they were all running out of grip during the closing stages. Bagnaia, who had Ducati’s 2007 MotoGP champ Casey Stoner message him on Sunday morning, advising him how to find more traction from the rear, therefore had to switch to his more usual style of using the front tyre much more and braking super-late to keep Vinales behind him.

Vinales might have won the race but for two things. First, his rear holeshot device didn’t engage before the start, which dropped him from second on the grid to seventh after the first few corners. Second, he lost the rear at Turn 1 at the start of the last lap, while 0.082sec behind Bagnaia, then ran wide twice more as he fought desperately to get close enough to attack.

Nevertheless this was Vinales’ best result with Aprilia and his first back-to-back podium (he finished third at Assen) since the start of the 2020 season. No doubt, he seems happier at Aprilia than he was at Yamaha.

Start of the 2022 British GP at Silverstone

The start – pole-sitter Zarco in the lead and Vinales going backwards after his rear holeshot device failed to engage

Dorna

“The atmosphere inside the team is very important to me,” said Vinales, who had an ugly split with Yamaha halfway through last season. “With four laps to go I started losing the rear. Maybe I pushed too much, but it nearly worked and we are going up in a fantastic way.”

Vinales crossed the finish line four tenths behind Bagnaia and two tenths in front of Miller, the only one of the podium finishers that used the soft front instead of the medium.

“Six laps from the end I had a few moments with the front, especially through the fast rights, so I was having to rely on the rear to get the bike to turn,” said the Aussie, who used Ducati’s wild new seat-hump aero device.

Bastianini rode a blinder of a race, after losing half of his upper aero in a first-corner collision. The winner of the Qatar, US and French GPs was 11th on lap one, but got stronger as the race went on, using some spectacular athletics to keep his lopsided motorcycle on course, finally snatching fourth from Martin with three corners to go.

KTM had its second good race in a row – both at fast, flowing circuits – with Brad Binder fifth at Assen, 2.7 seconds behind the winner and Oliveira sixth at Silverstone, also 2.7 seconds behind the winner. Like Bagnaia, Oliveira’s secret was switching to the hard rear on Sunday morning, which took him from the fifth row of the grid to within two seconds of the podium.

“In practice it looked like it was too cold on the lefts for the hard rear, but our great last few laps were the result of the decision to race the hard,” said the Portuguese rider. “Qualifying is still the factor that holds back our results. In the race the KTM is quite OK, but 100% we need a better bike to qualify.”

Gresini Ducati MotoGP rider Enea Bastiannini celebrates finishing fourth at the 2022 British GP at Silverstone

Bastianini grabbed fourth on the last lap in his best win since he won May’s French GP. The result also made him top independent-team rider

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If Espargaro was confused by the day’s events, he wasn’t half as confused as Alex Rins, Silverstone winner in 2019 and second last year. The Suzuki rider was on fire in the early laps, storming through from the fourth row to take the lead when Zarco slid off. But then he went backwards.

“When I was P1 I was riding so smooth, controlling the throttle, being smooth with the rear tyre, then I was spinning a lot, it wasn’t normal,” said Rins, who used the hard rear. “Then lap by lap it was worse and worse.”

Rins finished seventh, between Oliveira and Quartararo, while team-mate Joan Mir crashed out of that same position with six laps to go, because his front tyre pressure got too high.

Espargaro should be fully fit for the Austrian GP on August 21, where Quartararo will be dreading the revised Red Bull Ring’s long straights and Bagnaia relishing them.

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