Pecco Perfect in Mugello

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Francesco Bagnaia won both the Tissot Sprint Race and the GP in Mugello. (MotoGP/)

Francesco Bagnaia (factory Ducati) looked and rode like a champion in winning Mugello against the persistent probings of Jorge Martín and the strangely calm Johann Zarco (both on Pramac Ducatis). He now leads the championship by 21 points.

He said, “Today Jorge was pushing a lot and so I put a lot of effort into not giving him the chance to be close enough to try to overtake.”

The margin of victory was 1.067 seconds. On a medium tire “I pushed a lot at the start [to open a gap] and maybe sacrificed a bit the rear tire for the last laps.

“It was finished completely. I was dropping tenth by tenth but it was the best strategy.

“I knew that… [my] medium would have a longer life than [his] soft one.”

Starts are exciting (that is, dangerous) because everyone rushes forward hoping to have the pace to hold or improve upon whatever position they crowd into, but the need for pace soon shakes this out. In this new “sprint format,” practice time is sacrificed to present more action and one result is that fewer riders can bring a well-worked-out setup to the start grid. After Bagnaia, the gaps to the following riders opened up quickly: one second to Martín, two to Zarco, then 4.6 to Luca Marini; nine seconds back to Brad Binder.

Another aspect is that Bagnaia, in winning Saturday’s sprint race, gathered essential understanding of the tire choices.

Bagnaia has on occasion seemed fragile, as though he can’t really believe he’s as fast as he is, and begins to overthink rather than play his music from memory. Eddie Lawson once said to me, “The more I think about it, the slower I go.”

Jack Miller has some mid-race “words” for Alex Márquez. (MotoGP/)

Everyone has noted that the new format emphasizes the ability to pop out a fast lap on demand. That in turn calls for a bike whose lap time has a strong foundation (the Ducati) rather than being dependent upon having everything just so. For the moment, that’s hindering the otherwise very fast bikes from KTM and Aprilia, both of which look like winning a race some time soon if all their good qualities can be brought to the grid at the same time.

We’re now used to MotoGP having become European-dominated, thanks to Marc Márquez’s injuries and surgeries, and to Yamaha’s so-far inability to give Fabio Quartararo a bike better than the one he rode in 2021.

Part of this, as I’ve suggested earlier, comes from Europe’s embrace of aerodynamic downforce as the right way to suppress wheelies. The old way—electronic anti-wheelie—responds to a lifting front wheel by cutting power to bring it back down. The aero way uses surplus engine power to generate a downforce on the front of the bike, keeping it steering and allowing the rider to accelerate harder.

Quartararo commented on this after last year’s post-Valencia test. “With the new aerodynamics we do not lift the front wheel as much when accelerating although I wonder if these aerodynamic packages make us lose top speed.”

Yes, top speed is lost in the sense that the wings employed have a lift-over-drag ratio (L/D)–the force required to push the wing array through the air is the downforce being generated divided by L/D. To have a useful amount of downforce at corner exit speeds, quite large drag force will appear near maximum speed. What might be 10 pounds of drag during an 80 mph corner exit will become eight times greater at the new MotoGP record 227 mph top speed set by Binder’s KTM in the Mugello sprint race—of the order of 16 hp, which is significant.

Pecco Bagnaia crossed the line just over a second ahead of Jorge Martín. (MotoGP/)

While Yamaha’s aero package at the Valencia 2022 test was large and Ducati-like, Quartararo has since decided his best bet is to revert to a 2021 combination.

It’s been said that a major incentive to Quartararo’s signing for this year and next was Yamaha’s hiring of Marmotors S.R.L., the consulting firm of F1 engine specialist Luca Marmorini (twice ex-Ferrari, ex-Toyota, ex-Aprilia, etc.).

How can an F1 engineer help Yamaha, when so many MotoGP-F1 collaborations have ended in misunderstanding of the kind of power delivery required by motorcycles? We know that the longer crankshaft of Yamaha’s transverse inline-four is more vulnerable to torsional oscillations at high rpm than the much shorter cranks of the V-4s that all other MotoGP bikes have. When such oscillations are transmitted by the cam drive to the camshafts, the result can be momentary lobe speed variations that toss or break valves. Suppress the oscillations and be rewarded by stable operation. OK, for more than 50 years now F1 has been placing a torsional damper in the cam drive, and has added such things as gearing both ends of paired camshafts together or placing dissipative dampers at their free ends.

All this can be seen in “Development of Valvetrain for Formula One Engine” by Shuichi Hayakawa and other Honda engine men. Google and read.

Marmorini has been working in this field for a long time and surely has valuable hardware experience to share and avenues of friction reduction to suggest. A rumor whispers that a prototype engine could not be made reliable enough to race this year and will appear in 2024. Will it remain an inline? A V-4? Wait and see, as Quartararo is now doing so disconsolately.

Yamaha’s executive manager for platform body development unit, Toyoshi Nishida, apologized to Quartararo for the performance shortfall. Very embarrassing.

Fabio Quartararo finished in 11th place on Sunday. (Monster Energy Yamaha/)

Many hope that the brilliant Marc Márquez will win next weekend on the many “small” turns of the Sachsenring. His extreme point-and-shoot riding style works well there, but poorly on the long, fast turns of Mugello.

It is known that as a top rider works to improve his lap time, small mistakes appear, many of which require corrective measures that lose time. The harder he pushes for lap time, the greater the number and seriousness of the mistakes. Lapping quickly—especially for the 23 laps of Mugello—can easily reach a “mistake density” that results in a fall. But in qualifying the results are better, even miraculous. Marc qualified second at Mugello, just .078 of a second short of Bagnaia’s pole lap.

Márquez crashed out of Sunday’s race on lap 6.

The experienced rider Sylvain Guintoli commented, “He’s over-riding. He’s able to, in qualifying, produce miracles.

Márquez crashed out of Sunday's race on Lap 6. (MotoGP/)

“He has to make up time in the braking zone. He went a bit wide in the dirty part of the track.”

Márquez said, “I was trying to control myself during the race. I put on the soft tire but I didn’t attack in the beginning, just to keep the tire…

“But I had a big shaking. Already in the first lap I had a big locking on turn 10 that I nearly crashed…

“Then I had another locking on that final turn on the brakes. I went wide and that was when I made my mistake. I didn’t lean more than usual but it was more dirty off the line and I lost the front.”

He summed up by saying, “…we are crashing too much.

“…the problem is that you will crash more and more times because we’re pushing more than the others to be on the lap times”

The Hondas on which Marc Márquez won his championships were tightly designed around his stop-and-go style: tall CG and short of wheelbase to achieve prompt weight transfer allowing strongest initial braking and acceleration. The bikes were stiff to respond instantly to his muscular turn-in—not softened in hope of gaining a point here or there from Honda’s other, less stylistically focused riders.

The question is now: Does what Ducati and the other European makers have recently achieved in the way of all-around performance turn that classic Marc Márquez bike into something of a one-trick pony?

His own estimate early in this weekend is telling: “My target here is not the win, not the podium, but that gap between the top 5 and the top 10. We need to be honest and we cannot expect a lot more.”

Next weekend at Sachsenring comes Márquez’s best opportunity to win, and his fans are expecting it. The result will tell us a lot.

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