2021 Grand Prix of Portugal Wrap-Up

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Fabio Quartararo earned his second victory of the season in the Portugal MotoGP at Portimão. (MotoGP/)

Fabio Quartararo on Yamaha has won the Portugal MotoGPby 4.8 seconds over Francesco Bagnaia on Ducati and perdurable 2020 titleholder Joan Miron Suzuki.

Does this, with Quartararo and factory Yamaha teammate Maverick Viñaleshaving won the two Qatar races, indicate a big step forward for Yamaha? Or is it just another example of random events?

Quartararo managed to increase his pace in the second half of the race and pull away to an impressive win. (Yamaha Racing/)

It’s tempting to believe Quartararo “has the combination,” except for the fact that teammates share data. So Viñales had in hand the potential benefit of Quartararo’s settings. Or what if the “secret” of making tires perform well throughout the whole race is not in the bike settings, but rather in how the rider applies throttle, or where he brakes, or in how he modulates the braking—intense at first, then less? Moderate at first, then more strongly, like Max Biaggi? How does the rider distribute the loads of acceleration across the tire profile?

All of that can be discovered from the data as well. And we know the data are taken very seriously because of the number of times journalists are told, “He can’t talk to you until tomorrow; they’re discussing the data now.”

That tells us it’s at least very difficult to get race-winning insight from the data. And Sunday’s result again showed that one factory Yamaha can win while the other, that of Viñales, finishes 11th.

Here’s how Quartararo described his tire experience: “The good thing was the pace this morning with old tires.” And “I was riding well and easy.”

Monster Energy Yamaha teammate Maverick Viñales attributed his disappointing 11th finish to tire grip issues later in the race, but there can be many other variables in play. (Yamaha Racing/)

Quartararo got a fair start but had fallen to sixth by completion of lap one. He advanced steadily to take the lead on lap nine. Why did he not burn down his tires in a panicked rush to regain positions? Because he had reason to be confident. In FP3 he had run a nice long string of minute-40 laps, and then in FP4 had backed that up with a similar string of minute-39s. Those are lap times he would run in the race itself. Also, he related, he has found a more positive attitude in himself, working with the advantages he discovers in the bike he’s riding, rather than fretting over its problems.

Meanwhile, teammate Viñales on Friday said, “In the morning I had a really great feeling [he topped the session]. Somehow I felt a lot of grip with the tires. But this afternoon, on the other hand, I felt the opposite way. I was sliding a lot, especially with the front, and I never got the good feeling necessary to push.”

And, after the race, “…for sure there was something wrong. Our lap times were very slow. I couldn’t do anything, starting from the first lap.”

Now the contrast: Ducati’s Francesco Bagnaia said, after his ride into second place, “There was a lot of grip and the tires worked well.”

Of special interest was that the leader raised his pace in the second half of the race. The track had improved from Friday’s morning rain, and seems to have become faster yet during the race itself.

Johann Zarco on the Pramac Racing Ducati was one of five riders who crashed out. Chasing the data to gain insight as to why can be difficult. (MotoGP/)

Miguel Oliveira, having set pole and won here last year, should have special knowledge of this track. But he said, “We overheated the front tire very quickly and we got more movement than expected, and I ended up crashing in turn 14.”

He was one of five riders who crashed out, the others being Johann Zarco, Álex Rins, Valentino Rossi, and Pol Espargaró. Although the comments were low-key, it was clear that the track is bumpy. That acts as a filter, affecting riders with harder setups more than those choosing softer. When a tire hits a bump in a corner and “gets air,” that end of the bike steps out. The harder the setup, the more air, and the more sideways energy the stepping-out bike accumulates before the tire returns to the pavement. Enough energy to break traction?

Rins said of his fall, “I checked the data. I braked at the same point in the previous laps, and with the same pressure on the brakes as always. I was at a good acceptable limit.”

Luca Marini (Avintia Ducati, 12th place) said it well: “MotoGP tires are the key. You have to understand how they work and how to use them to make sure they work well throughout the race.”

Yet it’s clear that hardly anyone actually does understand how they work or how best to use them. Why does one Yamaha win and the other finish 11th? Why does one factory Suzuki finish third and the other suffer tire drop and crash out for no immediately discoverable reason?

Zarco attributed his crash to getting first gear when he wanted second, but said, “Bagnaia did a great job today and I can look at his data to understand where I’m losing. My main problem is in the middle of the corner. At maximum lean I’m lacking a bit of stability and as a result the bike gets nervous when exiting the corner.”

Yet at the beginning of the season Jack Millerpraised the Ducati for having greater midcorner grip than in the past, something that Andrea Doviziosohad asked for for five years or more.

In the bad old days of tires whose tread compounds were mixtures, tires behaved in a fairly predictable manner. The harder you pushed early in a race, the sooner the tire would go away, so you had a limited menu of choices: establish an early lead and then, in Mick Doohan’s words, spend the last 10 laps sliding around defending it. Or hang back, hope the others burn their tires down, and then come through to win once the opposition is all spinning and sliding.

This is Quartararo’s second victory of the young season. Does he know something the others don’t? (Yamaha Racing/)

But now, it looks to be winner take all; a very few riders somehow get it right, and the others, including previous winners, suffer early tire drop. In the second half of the race Quartararo actually increased his pace from 40s to 39s!

I strongly suspect that Michelin techs are very busy trying to improve their understanding of how the new tread rubber technologies behave. Instead of being just mixtures of polymer, carbon black, and extender oils, they now contain networks of silica particles primed with compounds such as silanols, chemically bonded to functional groups that have been attached to the ends of rubber chains. In mixture-based tread rubber, reinforcing particles of carbon black were attracted to rubber chains by the van der Waals force alone, no actual chemical bonding. Particles of reinforcing material, carbon black and silica, are initially present in clumps, but the manner in which the rubber is stressed tends to disperse such clumps, altering the behavior of the rubber and the manner in which it generates grip.

Charles Goodyear’s original 1839 method of converting syrupy rubber into an elastic solid employed sulfur and heat to create chemical cross-links between rubber chains. Other novel means of cross-linking have also been developed, but their cross-links may display a “melting point,” just as friction modifiers used as oil additives will, above a certain temperature, detach from the surfaces they are designed to protect; friction modifiers consist of long hydrocarbon chains ending in functional groups that bond to metal surfaces, covering them with a protective “grass.”

When a mixture-based tire tread of the 1970s to early ’80s had been run hard until it “turned to grease,” resting the tire could not reverse the chemical change; that tire was permanently done for. But today, teams may run as many as 35 laps on a tire spread over several practices, in an effort to understand tire behavior or to discover useful methods of prolonging tire performance. And riders now speak of “resting the tire for a couple of laps” to prevent it from overheating irreversibly, becoming “bouncy” and useless.

Marc Márquez made his return to MotoGP at Portimão and recorded a seventh place finish. (HRC/)

Now we move our curiosity forward to Jerez, a track that has in the past favored Yamaha. Last year Quartararo won both Jerez races, making him the man of the hour. Yet in fact Quartararo’s accomplishment was not a trend, as Mir became champion.

The more races Quartararo wins this year, the more it will appear that he now knows something the others don’t. But, as happened last year, he could again be among those saying, “My tire dropped from lap eight and there was nothing I could do…” while some other rider enjoys magical grip and takes the checker.

Marc Márquez made his return to MotoGP, saying that the bone he broke is now strong and pain-free, but the muscles need time to regain full strength. In the race he found it hard to accept being passed, saying he “did not know his place” and was riding in a strange style. But as laps passed, he found his place and rode his race, finishing seventh. He said he was pleased to be only 13 seconds away from first place.

Welcome back.

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