Joan Mir Wins MotoGP World Championship at Valencia

[Admin]

Joan Mir’s season-long consistency paid the ultimate reward: winning the 2020 World Championship. (Dorna/)

Joan Mir, on Suzuki, became the 2020 MotoGP champion by finishing seventh at Valencia 2 today. Through consistency that developed during the year, he accumulated points sufficient to lead the championship going into last weekend’s Valencia 1. There he led a Suzuki 1-2 to win his first MotoGP race.

Race winner was Franco Morbidelli (Petronas Yamaha) who was 11th last weekend but today led every lap, fighting off a powerful final-laps challenge by Jack Miller (Ducati). Each time Miller pushed past, Morbidelli came back under him, holding him off to the flag.

Franco Morbidelli turned quick qualifying into a solid race win ahead of Jack Miller. (Petronas SRT/)

“It was a wonderful fight against Jack,” Morbidelli said. “It’s always nice to fight with him, win or lose, so I enjoyed the battle and congrats to him, he was just as good as me.”

The weekend began with fast changes in top practice times. In FP1 Morbidelli was second, but by the afternoon the high-power bikes, with their strong braking and acceleration (Ducati, KTM, Honda), had refined the promise they’d shown a week ago and held the top seven places (last week, a solid bloc of eight high-power bikes finished behind the winning Suzukis of Mir and Álex Rins).

Álex Rins raced to fourth place, three spots ahead of his championship-winning teammate, Mir. (Dorna/)

Where were the Suzukis? Now that the championship was within Mir’s reach, it would have been foolish to take unnecessary risk. Rins would finish fourth behind Miller and Pol Espargaró and ahead of Brad Binder. Mir wisely let the numbers do their work as he finished seventh.

Clearly, Morbidelli’s setup had been considerably refined compared to the week previous. While Fabio Quartararo and Maverick Viñales struggled with “the Yamaha problem” (if the bike is perfect, it wins; if not, it’s nowhere), Morbidelli qualified on pole and was able to say, “I felt great with the bike, so I was able to take the necessary risks.”

Pol Espargaró greeted his excited team as he made the podium again, finishing third. (Dorna/)

To make money at cards, it’s not taking the risk that counts so much as estimating and managing the odds. On a machine that gives good feedback—feel—to the rider, risk can be estimated accurately, giving more latitude. Even so, Morbidelli said, “I chose the hard front,” as very few did, “because I didn’t think the medium would last. I adapted my riding. I lost the front several times but I was able to manage it.”

He had important help in the person of veteran crew chief Ramon Forcada: “The key was [Forcada’s] immense knowledge.”

Where was that knowledge last week, when Morbidelli finished 11th? Rain and mixed conditions had made the finally dry Sunday morning warm-up the only source of setup information.

What is a “real” championship? The one where a rider, in this case Mir, gets the most points by doing the best job managing a season of racing. (Dorna/)

Even now, fault-finders are complaining that Mir is “not a real champion” because he won only one race. Let’s consider how it’s possible to win the title without winning several races. Why do you suppose points are distributed the way they are, with 25 to win, 20 for second, and so on? If winning were so essential to championship status, you’d think points for second place should be half of those for first, or less. But if that were done, a top rider winning just a few races could quickly put his total out of reach, allowing him to cruise around the circuits as a no-risk backmarker in late-season events, or not to enter at all—a situation that was once common.

Racing is a business, and what it sells is suspense. Spectators come to see the top riders do extraordinary unpredictable things. That dictates the points award scale we have today, in which second place is reckoned as being 80 percent of the achievement of first, third 60 percent, and so on. And that being so, the championship can be won through consistency, while winning very few races. The riders don’t make these rules.

Another factor is the number of bikes a manufacturer has in the series. Ducati, by putting strong riders on six bikes, reduces the chance that any one of them can accumulate significant points. Suzuki, with just two bikes, plays that part of the game differently.

The strange nature of this year’s season, with its unpredictable elements of Michelin’s controversial softer-carcass rear construction and the rapidly varying transitional autumn weather, have favored whoever happens to best guess a workable setup. This has given us a season in which nine different riders have won a GP, as opposed to the much-admired situation in which a single top performer wins 10 races and the championship, as Casey Stoner did twice.

Valentino Rossi (46) was still trying to find his post-COVID-19 footing and finished 12th, while teammate Maverick Viñales (12) finished 10th. (Dorna/)

Others complain that the 2020 MotoGP championship is not “real” because their favorite, Marc Márquez (Honda), could not take part after his unfortunate injury at Jerez 1. But did they say that Nicky Hayden was not a “real” champion in 2006, when Valentino Rossi’s Yamaha was stopped by severe chatter and Ducati riders Sete Gibernau and Loris Capirossi were out with injuries? No, they did not, for chatter and injuries are a part of racing; they can happen to anyone. So it is that Márquez’s humerus injury and whatever has slowed his recovery from it are also, like it or not, part of racing. Racing is what it is, and it is not governed by our preferences or fantasies.

Now that Andrea Dovizioso has announced he will take a sabbatical year off from racing, and the candid Cal Crutchlow has replaced Jorge Lorenzo on Yamaha’s test team, the changing of the guard in MotoGP is complete save for Rossi, who will leave the Yamaha factory team for a satellite bike next year. He is at present trying to come back to form following his COVID-19 illness.

Mir and a champion’s celebration. Just six years ago, Mir was racing the Red Bull Rookies cup. (Suzuki /)

Further change is evident among manufacturers, with three KTMs in the top six this weekend (third, fifth, and sixth) and Suzuki taking its first GP world championship since Kenny Roberts Jr. won the 500cc title in 2000. This suggests that, in high level motorcycle racing as in other things, a fresh look may reveal things that years of staring cannot. From the things riders say, it seems that certainly Yamaha and probably Ducati as well exert pressure on their riders to adhere to established setup “protocols.” Both companies have been in the series a long time and have vast bodies of information that should be valuable. Is it? The fact that Yamaha satellite bikes so often outdo the factory entries suggests that experience can be a synonym for fossilized thinking. Ducati, from 2008 onward several years, seemed more determined to develop the motorcycle its way than to develop it to win races.

New manufacturers and satellite teams, on the other hand, having less stored data to guide them, must rely on the here and now for setup clues. Yet here is Dovizioso, having asked for more apex grip for more than five years, being allowed to leave the sport because higher-ups pressured him to be less analytical and more “instinctive.” Many would at present argue that it has been precisely Dovi’s analytical approach that has made recent Ducatis as strong as they are.

The new forces in MotoGP are earning their way forward through fresh evidence-based thinking, while those they are pushing aside cling to ideas, even traditions, that don’t work enough of the time to win championships.

View the full article