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Welcome to Motopop, the internet radio show all about motorcycle road racing. This is episode number 738 for July 26th, 2023. To help me go over the news and to go through listener feedback is my good friend, Richard Jott. Richard, in the UK tonight, you backed from Silverstone and all the good stuff with good interview with, I wanna say Steven Pringle, but that's not Stewart Pringle. There it is, I got it.

So what else is going on then? Cause you are a busy man, sir. Yeah, well, it's been a productive few weeks. Hopefully listeners have enjoyed the stuff that we captured at Donington Park for the World Superbikes. That one went out a week and a half, two weeks ago, I think.

And then yes, very lucky we were invited up to Silverstone last week for a kind of a relatively low key media introduction to the event. Stewart Pringle, who's the managing director of Silverstone Circuit, really on a, well, a promotional, not a charm, a promotional offensive, trying to get as many people there. Cause for those that have listened to the interview or will do by his own admission, it was a thin crowd last year, as I reported at the time, for various reasons. And they're really putting out all the stops. So yeah, it was great to be invited to that.

Dave Neal, ex-show host who has his own podcast off track now, Dave was there. So it was nice to meet up with Dave again. And Maddie Patterson was there with Simon. So it was nice to meet those guys in the flesh at long last. Toby Moody was there.

I could sit down and have a rap session with Toby Moody that would just go on for like days. Yeah. I love that guy. Who else did we see? Michael Day, who's a well-known journalist here in the UK.

Certainly, I think he writes for Motorcycle News now. And Lewis Duncan, he writes for Autosport. So yeah, there was a good few people there. So it was nice to meet up with some fellow people and really, as I said, great that Motorpod is starting to have a few doors opened. Also by Dawna, just again to sort of bang that drum.

I don't wanna be too much of a sycophant, but they are starting to help us out with accessing towards Superbike and tentatively a few things come in with regards to MotoGP. As I've mentioned, I think I said on the show last time that we hopefully will get some access in at the round coming up in Qatar. So I'm trying to juggle how I go about getting out there and doing that, combine it with a bit of work. So yeah, lots of good stuff going on and I'm going on holiday at the weekend. So I haven't packed anything, I haven't thought about it.

Completely discombobulated, trying to keep on top of work and all the usual stuff, Jim. So yeah, lots going on. That's a lot. So before we get to the news, if you guys could help us out, do us a little favor. Go to where you get the podcast, leave a review, leave a rating, that'd be really great.

That'd take us back up to the top so more people could see the show. And if you're so inclined, if you could donate to the show, you can do it through our website, www.modopodcast.com. There's a little donate button there for PayPal one time or for Patreon as well. And if you give that, that would help us get rich to Qatar a little bit. Well, that's gonna be an expensive trip.

Yes, I know. That's on me probably. That's all, it always will be. But every little bit helps so we can at least have more server space and all the other things that we need to do to get you guys the content that we're trying to get to. Cause I will be going to Pittsburgh for Modo America.

That's in middle of August. So with all that, man, there is some serious news going down, Rich. There is, it's crazy what is being said. Really, I think we're just gonna just dive in this. We'll dissect it as we go along.

It may not be in the most chronological order of events, but I do think that it does, there's just no way we could do this without spoiling one bit of news for another bit of news for another bit of news. But we'll start with this. The hot rumor, and again, these are rumors, and I got all this information that I have. All came from the race. This is where I got it from.

So just so we quote who we were using here. The question is, could Honda actually leave Modo GP? Now they are having a horrendous season. Marquez is having a horrendous season. Renz is having a horrendous season.

So is Mir having a horrendous season. We'll put it out here and we'll cover these sort of in depth as we go along folks. But Marquez obviously wants out. Renz wants out of LCR. And Mir wants out of the Repsol team as well.

So the only one who's sort of left is Nakagami. There is this potential that Honda will just pack it in and say, no, we're done here. Now, some people have said, look, they have a contract with Erda. Well, Rich, as you famously know, Suzuki had a contract with Erda and that didn't mean squat. They still left.

Now, whether Suzuki had to pay some fine or, I don't know what the get out clause was for that, but you got to assume that Honda would have a similar get out clause somewhere as well. I don't think they're going to leave. And I say that only because of the fact that they are the biggest builder of motorcycles in the world. Nobody builds more bikes than them. If you, I mean, even here in the States, you look around, there's a Honda everywhere.

And if you're looking in like Southeast Asia, India, there are tons of, I don't want to call them scooters, but let's call them smaller motorcycles that are dressed in Repsol livery that are sold by the tens of thousands. Now, Honda ethos, their reason for being is to race solely. In fact, they're so committed to racing. They have a thing called HRC, Honda Racing Corporation. Now they've dabbled in and out of Formula One over the years.

They've been in, they've been out, they've been in, they've been out, but they've never ever left motorcycling. They may have left World Superbike, which is true, but the premier class has never, really hasn't not had Honda in it since 50, I want to say 54, but don't quote me on any of that. I know it's just, they've been there for the long haul. Long time, yeah. Do you think there's any truth to any of that, Rich?

I personally don't think they will leave. I just can't see that. As you say, Jim, they are a racing company through and through, and it's not as if they could say, well, we're going to go and focus on the World Superbike thing, because that's not doing terribly well either. So, that would just be out of the frying pan and into the fire. It might be that they're trying to juggle too many balls at the moment.

And we've talked a lot about why the respective Japanese companies are in differing levels of difficulty, let's say. And let's not forget, I mean, I think it bears mentioning that Honda's woes at the moment, there are plenty of other precedents for Honda getting into a hole. I mean, look at all the years that Rossi at Yamaha and Lorenzo at Yamaha were dominant, and Honda were really struggling, particularly when the 800s came out. I mean, Honda did not have a good bike at that point in time. It took them quite a long time to get back to a level of reasonable competitiveness.

I think it's just the tidal wave of social media and coverage that we have now is really shining a much brighter light on the problems that Honda are in. But I don't think they're, I mean, maybe they are worse now than they were, say, in the early noughties or when the 800s came in, particularly after Rossi had left and so on. So, I mean, they are in a deep hole at the moment. Of that there is no doubt. And we're gonna sort of talk a little bit more about the rider situation.

I mean, sure, they could buy their way out of the contract. I'm sure they absolutely could. And probably it would be cheaper to do that and to keep paying Mark Marquez 20 million euros a year or whatever he earns and so on, nevermind the other riders. And God knows what they spend in R&D and just through season development and so on. I mean, tens and tens of millions of euros, dollars, whatever it would be.

So could they afford to get out? Yeah, I'm sure Suzuki must have paid something to get out of their contract. But so the short answer, no, I just don't see it. How they get out of the trouble that they're in, obviously it's a different question. That's a different conundrum, but they will.

Yes. They just need to, in certain respects, if they did lose Mark Marquez and a couple of the other headline riders that they got, and even if they lost a satellite team, which we're gonna talk about in a moment, that kind of clean sheet of paper, start from scratch, might just be the antidote that they need really to start to rebuild, bring in the resources that they're lacking, et cetera, et cetera. So sometimes you have to take a few steps back to take many steps forward. So maybe that's where we're headed to with Honda. But leaving, no, I don't think so.

I mean, I am a Honda man. I love their bikes. I love their cars. And to give you some point of reference, here in America, Honda has not won a motocross championship in like over 20 years. It's ridiculously long time.

Like they literally, it's kind of funny, as much as Honda loves four strokes, they were like sort of the last people to build a four stroke motorcycle to race in the 450 supercross class or outdoors. But when they built one, it was a wicked machine and they won their championships. Now they're all like on a 20 year gap and they've got a kid named Jet Lawrence who's gonna probably have a perfect season in motocross. So it might take time. And I'm not saying it's gonna take 20 years for Honda to write themselves at the top level of MotoGP, but they're not going to, they didn't walk away from motocross, they're not gonna walk away from this area here.

It just doesn't seem logical. Now what may happen, sorry Rich, you've got something to add. Well, all I was gonna say Jim is we've got, when does the next big reg change come along? 2026 is it? Yeah, or 20, maybe 27, which is a few years out, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Honda are deep in discussions around what those regulations are going to look like.

And maybe we will see the eradication of certain things that from a certain perspective, some people will argue are blighting the sport at the moment. And certainly from Honda's point of view, they would be the first people that would like to see the back of things like Aero, for example, and I'm not suggesting that Aero will go in the new regs, but there will be lots of talks going on. So a company like Honda, huge, huge company, they will be from a strategic point of view, looking many years down the line and getting prepared. I mean, let's not forget when the four strokes came along, the absolute weapon that they produce with the RCV 211 V. So, we focus on the short term a lot, because obviously that's the new cycle that we tend to be focused on, but they will be looking very long-term on this, I expect, and looking to find ways out of this, both in terms of the current set of regs, and certainly with the new regs that are coming down the tracks.

So I don't think it's totally bleak, but it's in the short term, yeah, it is. Yep. Well, the bleakness may still be getting even worse because it's not official, but LCR looks likely to abandon Honda and be taken on by KTM. Now, LCR, Luca Cicchinelli says they have a contract with Honda for next year. They're in no way, shape, or form wanting to break that contract, and they're gonna have Honda motorcycles.

Though on the flip side here is, think about this from KTM's standpoint. KTM needs a place for Pedro Acosta. Now, they did try to put two more KTMs on the grid in the spot that Suzuki had. Dornistead fastly said no to them because it is for a factory team. I don't know where they're gonna find another factory to fill those two spots.

That's a whole nother subject and topic, but if you're denied that, what are you going to do? You need to find another satellite bike. Well, who's gonna ditch, the talk was that we're gonna go to KTM, was going to buy Grissini. Why? Grissini's got a Ducati.

There's no reason for Grissini to even remotely begin to stop this, right? It's like, no, we're not going to do that. You're surely not going to get Rossi to move. He's got a Ducati. So none of the Ducati satellite teams would leave, realistically.

No. Aprilia has their second team, but they're struggling and I hear that they're actually in financial trouble again. Now, you know, Kate, I don't know if that's true. It's just, that's what's being reported. That means that Aprilia would either could dump it or they've got to put money into it, one or the other.

They need to be supported, right? The logical choice then is definitely LCR. You've got a good team that's there. And that paves the way for Acosta and Marquez to be on a KTM equipment, but call it a Husky, which is what we said. We said there's going to be a Husky team.

In fact, they actually, KTM actually said that when they wanted the two spots, their argument was to have the two spots that were left vacant by Suzuki. Their argument was, we are going to be a factory team. It's going to be a Husky Varna. Now that's sort of sidestepping the rules, but I give KTM credit for that one. Yeah.

So the question then is really, is that going to happen? Well, Jim, as you say, Chechenero is very much denying that that is going to happen in the sense that they've got a contract with Honda. But again, contracts- Made to be broken. Are always there to be broken if the commercial circumstances or whatever fit. And it goes back to what I said a minute ago.

I mean, from certain respects, Honda might find themselves in a similar situation or bit by a slightly different route to Yamaha with the satellite situation. Whereas it actually kind of favors them to drop it and just focus purely on the works team to rebuild. And then a year or two down the line, go looking again for another satellite to dump the Ducati or the KTM or the Priory, whatever it might be at that point in time. And who knows what the field of play looks like two or three years from now. So, I mean, as we're going to come onto a minute, it looks like Rinds is on his way out of there.

Nakagami by most people's estimation probably would be out of there in a, not a just world, but just on a pure performance basis. It looks like Nakagami's time as a frontline Moto GP rider is sort of winding to a close. So it is a, again, it's a clean sheet of paper for everybody. And yeah, I mean, like you, Jim, you do sort of say, well, Dawner's insistence on reserving those two slots for a factory team, where's it coming from? I mean, the talk of BMW never seems to go away.

And I personally could envisage it because they're the sort of behemoth of a company that would take that sort of a plunge, but they've got other problems in the short term and well, super bike to sell. Which they might solve next year with Top Rep Razz Gattioglu going there. That might be the final thing that they're looking for. Who knows? I mean, that's another speculation.

I don't think BMW comes to play until the new regs are settled for 2026. And that might be what Dawner are holding out for. If Dawner knows and they have that conversation with them, they look, hey, we need to know what you're gonna do as far as the technical regulations for 2026, then we're gonna make a decision. So we don't know. Those conversations are very tight-lipped and no one's talking.

Now, as we get closer to that. And don't forget, with these great big corporations, what, 2026, what, we're talking three years away? I mean, when you're talking about expenditure and budget, these guys are looking like 10 years out probably. So BMW coming in at that point and a set of regs that might favor them or suit them in terms of upfront cost and things like the synthetic fuels and things that will play to them. A lot of the strategy that these big companies go with.

So you can sort of see that and why Dawner don't want to occupy those grid slots just to please KTM in the short term. So I get all of that. Yeah, it's there. But will it happen? No, I'd.

Well, yeah, $64,000 question, isn't it? I would not be surprised if it did happen. I mean, the recent, very sort of relevant example of this would obviously be Tech3 and Herve Pontreal, dumping Yamaha after being a customer team for many, many, many years and going to the KTM. So, and KTM have a big problem at the moment in terms of where, as you said, where do they put a cost to? And if Marquez is really serious about wanting to jump out of Honda and Honda are willing to let him go, which was the sort of murmurings that Alberto Pucci himself was giving a few weeks back, then they're not gonna wanna let that chance slip by from a marketing point of view.

I mean, it probably would almost pay for itself probably. So I think it will happen. At the moment, I'd be inclined to say LCR KTM. LCR Husky. Next year.

Well, okay, yeah, with that brand. KTM is not going to limit themselves that way. They are going to have another, they're gonna put that other brand there. It'll be a sub brand. It's gonna be.

100%. And we've been. They're dumb not to. We've been speculating on that for a long, long time. If I'm a betting man, there's two white bikes on the grid.

They are ran by LCR and KTM or Red Bull may be the ones, because both Acosta Marquez are Red Bull contracted riders. The Red Bull simply just write the check, here Honda, have a site, move them over there, and it'd be, you know, you can see it now. Husqvarna would, you know, be kind of cool though. Kind of like get yellow wheels and nevermind. Speculation.

I could just see. I mean, just slightly joking, I suppose. But the only problem from KTM's point of view is that an Acosta Marquez Husqvarna team would completely take the spotlight off their own works team, wouldn't it? In terms of the marketing queue that that would represent. Correct.

Well, that takes us to this other point is like, well, where's Marquez gonna go? If LCR doesn't happen, right? We don't have two more KTM's thrown to the grid. Comes to be like, well, where is he going to go? Well, there's talk that he's in talks to go to Grissini and ride a Ducati, which means he'd be with his brother because they would take away DG Antonio, right?

Leaves him out, puts Mark in. I'm like, I don't see that one happening. I don't see that. No, I don't see that. There was so much drama when it was both Marquez's and Honda that Grissini is gonna be like, no, thank you.

So that's there. Now KTM again, go ahead. So Joe, I just don't think there's the appetite within Ducati for Mark Marquez to go onto that bike. I ask the biggest problem he's got. So I think if the KTM thing doesn't, or the Husqvarna thing, as we're gonna say, doesn't happen.

And I think Mark Marquez just stays put for the last year of his contract. And then he can do kind of what he wants because there's a lot of contracts up at the end of next year. But the interesting thing is that KTM says, hey, we take him, but we're not changing our factory team of Bender and Miller because we like them together. Well, the more somebody denies something, the more usually it's true, right? So dude, I mean, I could see them taking Miller out of the factory team and putting him next to Acosta in an LCR team.

Take it for what it's worth, don't know. But then that's, where else can he go? It's KTM or Honda, I think at this point, Jim. I don't see any other options, no. So for Marquez to stay put at Honda, I think there's, this is again, the race laid this out.

There's three things that become very critical to this. Whether he stays or whether he goes, comes down to one, where can he go? He really doesn't, the only maybe possible option that exists is the KTM, right? We agree there. So then it comes down to, well, what's gonna happen at the test at Mazano in September?

Honda has roughly a month, maybe close to two, to build something to prove to Mark that they're gonna climb back to the top again. If that's the case, then that's late in the game for Mark to even come up with another ride, unless it's on the LCR team, right? Because KTM is gonna be a part of that team if they do, and more than likely, they're going to buy LCR. And I think they'll buy Lucianelli out. He may still run the team, but he's not gonna own the team.

Because KTM is gonna wanna, I believe KTM, that's what I'm saying, this is me speculating. Because KTM wants to control what happens, and they will control who are on their motorcycles. In return, they're a fully supported works team with the latest upgrades, latest parts, latest bin pieces, and you are at the same level as the quote factory. Now, the other thing in all this about whether Mark has the easier goes, again, let's assume that the test does go well in September at Mazano, he may then stay. And you're like, look, okay, wow, we found something, we're moving in a better direction, that's very possible.

But the last thing is the concession rules. Dorna has admitted that they want to help Yamaha and Honda get back to the front, and they're willing to give them concessions. Now, Ducati's at the forefront because they were giving concessions which Honda and Yamaha never objected to. Believe it or not, the rules are set by the MSMA, which is the Motorcycle Motorsports Manufacturers Association, something like that. So they're in control of concessions.

So the five manufacturers can say, yes, Honda, even though they want to race with Rens, you get the concession, which is you get the six wall cards instead of three, you can test with factory riders in between races, and you get nine engines and you don't have to seal them and have an engine specification. So you get those concessions. The thing of it is, so the five manufacturers have to vote whether they would allow that to happen. You know where Honda's vote's going, you know where Yamaha's vote's gonna go, right? The other manufacturers that are there, you're like, well, KTM, Aprilia, are they gonna care?

KTM probably doesn't because I think they would like to beat Honda at their game when Honda's at the top of their game. And Aprilia, I don't think they're kind of least of use. I don't think they're gonna care one way or the other. The people who may care are Ducati. And Ducati did boy, did use, so Ducati has a right to veto these concession rules.

They really do. I mean, each of the five manufacturers has the right to veto that concession. So it's like, is Ducati gonna veto it? And well, to be honest with you, Ducati vetoed an earlier decision about a rules change that everybody wanted and they vetoed it cold, but that's maybe potentially changed. And that's the next thing we'll talk about is Ducati's veto power.

But going to the concessions, Church, your take here on whether Honda and Yamaha get concessions. Yamaha should. Yeah, well, my take is that the concession rules as they exist at the moment do require a tweak. Now, at the time that they were brought in, of course, you had one or two factories utterly dominant. But the concession rules are a different factor as it's true.

And everybody else kind of like way, way behind without a hope or a prayer of getting a podium even. Now that's clearly, we're kind of in a situation now where we're becoming the victim of the concessions rules as they have existed for the last number of years because basically nobody has concessions. And just the sheer fact of Rins, who's the Cota specialist winning that race of the concessions that they badly need. So I think probably there is a change needed that will say, well, just soften the level at which the concessions start to come back into play. Because if, and I don't know them in detail and I haven't got the rule book in front of me, obviously, but let's say if that one win that Honda have had this year with Rins, which was rather unexpected and there's been no sign of a repeat obviously by any Honda rider.

If that one win was to negate them from getting concessions this year, well, you'd say, well, it was a fluke and it shouldn't really count against him in terms of getting some help on a bike that is quite obviously to anybody that's looking in need of some additional development time to help Honda get back and to ward off the risk that Honda say, solve this for a game of soldiers, we'll go and spend our money in a different way because that's not what the championship needs. So I think given that everybody's at such a close level now, even though Yamaha and Honda have slipped back, the concession rules do need tweaking that makes it easier for the concessions to start to come back in. Maybe they graduate them somehow, I don't know, but I think that does need to happen. Now, Ducati, you would say probably they would look to veto that, but Ducati have to be careful because a few of the things they've done in the not too distant past, if you think about, and just this is a slightly off kind of a tangential thing, but when Matt Oxley was it broke the sort of the thing around the whole tire pressure and people that were playing a little bit faster and loose with the interpretation of that rule, Ducati took umbrage at that and banned him from coming to their sort of press events and stuff like that. And that kind of starts to leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.

And I don't know what you think, Joe, I'll be interested in your opinion on this, but in a period now of almost uttered Ducati domination in both GP and in world super bikes, because they've done a great job, but the more that they win and the more that they start to take a position that stops other people from being able to get a chance to catch up, I think it devalues a little bit their success. And I think that's a shame for their brand if that is what happens. So I think it would be very much in their interest from a sort of public relations standpoint to support one or two of the teams that are now struggling. As you quite rightly said, they themselves have done for many, many years with that Desmos to teach it. Took them a long time to get that bike working.

I know they've reaped the benefit of their efforts, but for them to hold another team back or manufacturer back, I think would not play well from them from a marketing perspective. So I hope that's not the position that they would take, but I suspect and fear that initially they would. And Dawner's problem or the MSMA or whoever on this one is that the Vito can't be overridden on safety grounds, which thing we're gonna talk about in a minute, I think was then pushed through on safety grounds. That's the kind of get out of jail free or joker card that sometimes comes into play, but it wouldn't be the case on this technical thing. So this one's obviously gonna be very political and we'll no doubt sort of run around for a little while until it gets concluded.

But personally, I hope they soften up the concession rules and I hope, not just Ducati, I mean, KTM, I suppose might be another one that would rarely go inside there if the Japanese factory is currently having a bit of a leg up, but I don't get that impression with KTM. I think they like a fight and if they lose, they lose fairly and if they win, they win fairly. You know, as I think perhaps there's a slightly more, I don't wanna use the word arrogance, I think it's the right word, but Ducati are very much more sort of combative in the way that they go about the sort of off track action when it comes to this sort of stuff. So yeah, I think it would be a shame if they took that position. Yeah, so that's an interesting take.

And for me, I can see this sort of two-sidedly and this is not a good comparable because it's a Formula One comparison. So it's a cars versus a bike. But I was, am, sorry, still a big fan of Formula One. However, I haven't watched Formula One in almost three seasons. I maybe watch one or two races because I find, I really got turned off in it, in the dominance that Mercedes had winning eight world titles in a row for manufacturers, Hamilton winning seven world titles and whatnot.

I got tired of it, mainly because the other teams were hamstrung by the rules that they could not catch up. So that part to me is, okay, this is really a problem. Yes, they need to change the concessions so that we don't get into this one more total domination that we are starting to see. However, I also can see the flip side of this because I was watching religiously Formula One during the Schumacher era when he was at Ferrari and they won everything. The difference being that everyone was free to spend to whatever budget they wanted, to test as much as they wanted, to build as many different components and parts to a car that they wanted, yet they could not be faster than the Ferraris.

There's a caveat in that one because if you remember, the only car that was fast, that was on Bridgestone tires was the Ferrari. Everyone else had kind of gone to the Michelin in the tire war. And if you realize the problem with that was is that you had somebody making a tire bespoke to that chassis, which in that case in Formula One gave them an advantage that was absolutely spectacular to the point where they did everything they could to slow down that car and whatnot. So I see it from both sides. I want there to be different brands at the front.

I do not want it to be a Ducati, Ducati, Ducati thing. However, the racing between the Ducati satellites against the factory is compelling. It's good TV. It's good to watch because they're, you have that, again, this is bad comparison. Formula One's all about the car.

I think we all agree that 80% of what makes a Formula One car at the front is the car itself. How good of a car did you build? And you could put a driver with not as much skill and still win or be on the podium with that car. However, in MotoGP, it's flipped, right? It's 80% the rider and 20% the bike.

Now, maybe now with all the gizmos on the bikes, maybe that's a little bit skewed more to maybe 25, 75, maybe as much as like, maybe only 70% of the rider, 30% of the bike. There's some level there, but still there's a big difference where the rider makes up something. And the other thing about it is too, is that while you're watching that racing, you're watching MotoGP, man, it's incredible. They're slinged over so far. They're dragging elbows, they're dragging knees, they're rolling over, they're touching, they're banging into each other.

And it's just them on a bike. Formula One's just a car and you never see the lead car because once the lights turn green, they're gone. So I can see it both ways. The fan in me wants more different manufacturers at the front consistently, but the engineer in me says, well, you guys worked for it and these are the rules and we built the bikes to these rules. And if you can't build a bike good enough to that rule set, it's incumbent upon you Honda, you Yamaha to build a better motorcycle.

So I'm not sure which way it really is going to be, but that's how I see it. You can see it from both sides very clearly. Yeah, I mean, it's very nuanced when you get down into the detail of it. But I think there is a genuine problem when people start to talk about the premier motorcycle racing championship in the world and people start to call it the Ducati Cup. I mean, we've done it once or twice, but that is not a good slogan for the MotoGP championship.

So Dawna or the powers that be, I mean, it's not really Dawna, is it? It's more the manufacturers association and the sporting regulation side of it rather than the commercial side. But obviously the commercial side has a vested interest. They will not want to see the championship being tarnished by the thought that it's, you can't win if you're not on a Ducati. I mean, good for the sport really, but KTM have come out as good as they have, which we didn't really expect based on testing.

So luckily for us, the likes of KTM and maybe, you know, Prilya sort of flattered to deceive, don't they, so far this year. Otherwise it would be an utter rout by the Ducatis, of which there are many, which, you know, you could say, well, okay, you go back 10 years, you had loads of Hondas out there, but you had lots of customer Hondas and the trouble now is that a customer Ducatis are pretty much as good as the works bike and certainly good enough to beat a Honda or a Yamaha. So even if it is a development step back, so there is a problem and it does need to be solved and the obvious way to do it. And it's always been an amazement to me that Formula One has never adopted this kind of concessions type methodology. I mean, that would be one thing that they definitely could borrow from MotoGP.

That would be very much to the betterment of Formula One. I think, you know, the cost cap is probably something that ought to be existing in MotoGP now, given, you know, lurching from one sort of economic crisis to another over sort of a 10 year cycle that these things tend to run on. So I think cost cap combined with some more kind of nuanced concessions would be very much the thing that I would hope to see happen. And I think that would help to keep most of the manufacturers that are in the sport at the moment, you know, in the sport. We still don't know why Suzuki left and we won't get into that now, but I don't think, you know, because they had arguably the best bike, certainly the second best bike on the grid at the end of last season.

So it's a mystery why they took that decision. But anyway, I mean, that's past history and no sign of them coming back. So yeah, they need to shore up the championship and make sure people don't drop away. Yeah. Because that would be a real disaster.

I mean, we don't, our reference of history, Rich, starts from the moment we started watching the sport. So before that, what, you had MV Augusta won races all the time. And they dominated for years, right? So it comes and it goes. So there are these highs where someone dominates for a long time, they have the right riders, the right bike and it works itself out in some fashion, whether through rules changes or just their own attrition of complacency because we won so much, right?

Which may be part of Honda's problem. Hey, we really haven't done a research and done any work on the bike because, well, that guy's still winning. What's wrong with the bike? I don't know, he's winning. I don't, you know.

Yeah, they've all set themselves a high bar over time. But, you know, as you said, Jim, these things always change. They ebb and flow, you know, a few years from now, Ducati might be really struggling to beat, you know, BMW, it could be, you know, in 10 years from now, who the hell knows? But in terms of the here and now, Honda needs some help, which is the question you're asking about the concessions. Agreed.

So let's get to what Ducati did veto. So there was an ask. So how can I put this? Ducati didn't use its veto to stop a change to the race weekend. Now, at least temporarily.

The riders wanted the first practice of the weekend to be untimed, and then the second practice would decide who would be going directly to Q2. As it stands right now, the first practice session of the Friday, you gotta be in the top 10 to be able to go to Q2 directly. And they wanted that change. Now, Ducati quickly went, nope, mm-mm, sorry, veto, and said, nope, we're not doing that. It came back as a safety issue, I think, and that's where this reversal has come from.

The riders basically were pretty much bent on getting this changed and like, look, this is a safety thing. We can't just drop out here right away and just turn these things on to the level that they, you know, we can't just turn it up to a 12 as soon as we show up. We gotta kind of start at about a nine and then we'll work our way into this 12 area here. So Ducati did seem to have relented. I have not heard anything whether this is truly going to take effect in Silverstone.

Stay tuned, we don't know. But all indications are is that Ducati will renege their, will, was it repeal their veto, and yes, and agree to having this as that. So that was what Ducati did there for that. I thought that was weird anyway, that they started that first session. Like why, I don't, you know, this didn't make any sense.

Well, I suppose because they dropped FP4 and stuff. I suppose they had to, you know, combine or- You got the sprint race there. Qualifying practices into, you know, a shorter, more condensed period of time. But I mean, even Bagnari, you know, the guy who's leading the championship for the Worx Ducati squad came out publicly and said, he would rather that first Friday session was more of a test session so they can get up to speed without the pressure of it counting towards QP1, QP2. So it was a bit onerous for Ducati then to, as you say, Jim, immediately veto that.

I mean, I don't know on what grounds they wanted to veto it. I suppose just because they know that they got a lot of fast bikes out there, a lot of fast riders, and are likely to dominate the, you know, the qualifying practice or the pre-qualifying sort of time through those practice sessions. So maybe it was not in their interest to go with that rule, but when their own riders want to do it, why fight it? But as you said, it was kind of pushed through, despite the, I think it was gonna be pushed through on safety grounds. So Ducati was sort of faced with a fate of complete really, which was climb down and sort of revoke your objection, or it's gonna happen anyway, and you're just left with egg on your face.

So I think that's probably what happened. Yeah, there's what, you know, not to go back to concession rules and things like that or whatever. But the one thing that I don't want to have happen out of all of this is where we start to create contrived rules to cripple Ducati, but nobody else. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, I want rules that help Honda become better, that help Yamaha to become better, so they can be at the front.

Then again, once you're close, okay, then your concession is now removed from that, just like Prilia had to do. You know, Prilia got to the front because they had a concession, right? And then now they don't have a concession, but if they were to be in the same sort of boat that Yamaha and Honda are in, they would obviously get concessions back again. So I just don't want to get concessions. Crucially, what the concessions don't do is penalize the people that are doing well.

It just helps the people that are not doing well for a period of time until they are doing well as well, and then they lose the concession. So it's not a hobbling system, and that's what I've always liked about it. What it currently doesn't take account for is let's say a rider gets a couple of wins in wet races, which is kind of like a random thing, but the very fact that you win would have an effect on your concessions, which might be nothing to do with the bike. That might be a purely environmental or weather-related thing, hypothetically, but that could easily happen, and you would not get concessions or you would lose them. So I think it's right that they look at that and perhaps just sort of nuance it a little bit more across, well, just nuance it compared to what it is at the minute, because clearly, a couple of good results for Yamaha and Honda, it's almost not in their interest to win a race at the minute.

And that's what you don't want to do. And that's not what we want. We don't want riders being told not to win a race because it's going to affect them getting concessions. So it has to be looked at, I think. Let's talk about where riders may be going here.

So silly season in full swing right now, right? But we talked about Marquez, we talked about where Pedro Acosta could be, right? So the question then is, Renz wants out of his LCR contract. It seems as though he has figured his way out of it, because it's almost a guaranteed lock that he will join Fabio Quattraro on the Yamaha, replacing Morbidelli. So the question is, where does Morbidelli go?

I think the answer to that's pretty obvious. He goes to VR46, but Marini's there, and so is Bizecki, right? Now, Marini's a half-rider to Rossi, so that's pretty hard to tell you how, I mean, sorry, you ain't gonna ride. I don't put that past Rossi to do it though. But Bizecki's also the better, I won't say the better, he's farther along in the championship than what Marini is.

And he's on a good run of form. So it's really kind of hard to say, where's Morbidelli going to go? My thought is he goes to World Superbike. That's what I think Morbidelli goes. Well, all the talk has been about him going to replace Toprak, but I think from what we've read and heard in the last week or two, that doesn't sound as if it's terribly likely to happen.

So I think the sensible money is what we, I think, have speculated on once or twice a little while back, which is that indeed Morbidelli goes to VR46, because he's a VR46 rider, the original one, I think. And Bizecki goes up to the Pramac team, and probably the guy that loses his seat when the music stops is Yarns Arco, probably. Now, whether he takes on a development role in the background for Ducati, having been around the board Superbike paddock and some people, and Silverstone recently would be mentioned earlier on, I haven't heard Zarko's name connected with anything going on in World Superbike. So he might be the guy that gets left stood up when the music or chairs sort of go, when the music stops. So that would be the obvious thing.

Because I mean, Zarko has been around for quite a long time and hasn't ever won a race, been kind of close or had the odd weekend where it looked like he might, but he would be the obvious casualty if you were gonna be cutthroat about it. And this is a cutthroat kind of sport, cutthroat time in silly seasons. So I think that's kind of the likely scenario is that Bizecki goes up to Pramac. The only thing in my mind that prevents that from happening is that Zarko is Ducati's chosen test rider. How much does Ducati value what Zarko gives them in feedback as far as new parts or new ideas on a race weekend versus what could Zarko do if he was pounding around the jello?

Or around San Marino? Would he be, is the feedback equal because he's trying to, I'm sorry, not that I have a lot of train of thought, I'm trying to think of how to explain it. If you're testing the bike and you're by yourself, it's very hard to go fast, right? Some, consistency is the key because that's the early part of the development. But the question is whether that piece is actually faster or not on the bike.

And usually that's gotta be done by one of the guys that are on the factory bikes at a race weekend because they are pushing to the limit where that limit is not being approached in a private test or in, yeah, private test, we'll just call it that. So that's the only part that's questionable to me, although I do think Zarko at some point is going to be shown the door as he is the second oldest Moto GP rider behind, really, okay, Spargrove, I think. Probably, Olesz Spargrove. Olesz was born in 80, it was born in 89. And I think Zarko was born in 90 or 91, I think so.

Well, you would see Zarko kind of replacing Piro in terms of the wildcard rides, of which Ducati tend to have certainly three. They're only allowed three bikes by the rules. What they're allowed to do. Samarino. I mean, I'll take your point, Jim.

If you're testing parts, it has to be in the heat of battle against the best. So Zarko would be the guy to come in and sort of replace the Piro role that he's had for many, many seasons. So it's just kind of like an upchanging of the guard, isn't it, really? And okay, hard on Piro, I suppose. He goes out to see then, or out to pasture.

But I mean, he's been riding the wildcard. Who cares, right? I mean, he still could have a contract to go test parts. I mean, there's an endurance test that you gotta do with a bike too, right? And actually, Jim, I mean, somebody like Luca Marini, you see, he's very much on that sort of Zarko plane, I think, in terms of very fast, very consistent.

Okay, he doesn't often look like he's gonna win races, although he's looked like it a lot more than Zarko has in the last couple of seasons, that's for sure. And he would be a great guy to sort of come in and play that kind of test, weekend test role. So I could see that kind of changing of the guard and I'm with Gucatti in order to accommodate more with Daddy coming across. Which is to make way for Rens, which is your initial point. It's very interesting there.

So Mir is the other one. So Mir is looking to go to Cressini to replace DG Antonio. Now, that would reunite Mir with his crew chief that he won his 2020 championship with. I don't know about this one. I mean, Mir wants out, he wants out real bad.

DG Antonio has not impressed. However, you have other people in the Moto2 paddock who have impressed. One, Tony Arbolino. Where is that boy gonna go? Because I don't see him in Moto2 next year, regardless of what happens.

I don't see him in Moto2. So the only logical place that I could see him, and I do believe his name has been tied to Cressini as well, replacing DG Antonio. Yeah. And I'd be very surprised if that deal wasn't done some time ago, to be perfectly honest. I think that too.

I mean, Carlo Panat, who is Arbolino's manager, is very close to Cressini. I'd be amazed if that isn't already in place, that deal. So, I mean, I'm sort of in this weird position with Joanne Mia, really, because I really like him. I think he's probably a really nice guy. I'm sure, in fact, I'm convinced he is a really nice guy.

But he kind of stealthily took himself to the title on the Suzuki, didn't he? Sort of Kenny Roberts Jr. style. Yes, very much. And hasn't really done anything very much since then, as he was outshone by Rins most of the time at Suzuki.

Rins been quite heavily injured a lot of the time, and then had that one season when he couldn't stop crashing, it's true. But that was because Suzuki were just chasing performance that they didn't have. So, and then he's just crashed his brains out whilst he's been at Repsol this year. So Mia is not in a strong position to get a ride anywhere, I don't think, if he wants out of that contract. So I mean, he might be best off staying where he is and just hoping to God that they produce something that's a little bit easier to ride.

But I don't see where else he's gonna go. Old Superbike? I don't know, I mean, look, if he really wants out that bad, and if Honda's in the position that they're in, do you take Leckowonner or something and put him on the bike, right? And we'll get to Leckowonner here in a second, not to spoil things. But I could see that being a flip flop swap that they may consider.

I mean, they might, go ahead. The one place I could see Mia landing in the non-high siding fashion, which is not what we tend to talk about with Mia, you would have to figure, although I hadn't really picked up on what you were saying about Aprilia and potential financial trouble, but when we were pretty not in financial trouble with all their parent company, I mean, it's just like- It wasn't Aprilia that's in financial trouble, it's R&F, who are in financial trouble. Oh, okay, all right, okay. If I said Aprilia, I didn't mean R&F, I meant their satellite team, R&F has a financial problem, supposedly. Right, okay.

Well, that might put a different complex in what I'm about to say, but one person who you would have to say is looking very vulnerable right now is Raoul Fernandez. Ooh, yes. Because he hasn't shown anything like the sort of form he should have shown either when he was in Tech 3. Now, okay, people said that that was a gnarly bike, that KTM that they were on last year in the Gas Gas team. When he was in that team with Remy Gardner, neither rider had a particularly happy year on that KTM, it's true.

And everybody was expecting after a few rounds, because these guys don't have an awfully long time to prove themselves, do they? That he would really sort of gel with the Aprilia and would be doing the biz, but no sign of it so far. And so, I mean, Rins probably would like to- Sorry, not Rins, Mia would probably like to see himself landing on that R&F bike, I would think, because that would be a good place for him to go. Well, he might be able to bring sponsorship, and he might be, Mia might be able to bring dollars. So, that's a good point, that's a good possibility.

Oh, who knows? Continuing on, Cal Crutchlow will race as a wild card at Motegi for Yamaha on the RS4 GP team. If anybody's seen a picture of this, it's on the race, there are articles on the race, look at the picture of the bike, it looks cool. It's got like a deep Navy color with some white red on it, it looks really cool. Lekawanna will race, we're talking about Lekawanna, Lekawanna will race at Silverstone, replacing the injured Rins at LCR.

So again, Lekawanna's getting another shot, I think this is like the second time he's raced on the Honda. So, we'll just see what happens there. And then we'll do here, the last thing about riders is Nakagami. Now, I think we all think that this was, or have felt that this is Nakagami's last year in MotoGP, sort of his farewell to arms tour, if you will. But that was always predicated on the pack, on the pack, on the idea that there was someone who was gonna replace him, i.e.

Agora. Now, Agora is not doing that well this year. Legacy of a very bad crash that he had practicing and the wrist problem that he has. And it's taken him in a while, half a season or more. I mean, he missed like two rounds, he couldn't ride properly.

Now he's starting to look like the Eiger of old. I give you Asim, which was a fantastic race. Although, I has always gone well at a Gura, or I has always gone well at a Gura. I has always gone well at Asim. Wow, that's an alliteration that I really screwed up people, sorry.

But he's also stated that he feels he's not ready to go to MotoGP. Okay, that's fair. So, if he's not moving, does Nakagami get a stay of execution and he stays? Perhaps maybe at the factory team because Mir's off at Aprilia or the R&F? I don't know.

Or does he have a different teammate alongside him? We know, because we know Rens is 99% gone already, right? So, a lot of talk that that other seat may be Jake Dixon's. I don't know if that'd make you happy, Rich, but he's on the wrong brand then at this point, right? Well, yeah.

To be there is good, I guess, regardless of the brand you get, right? We've had this discussion. There was a lot of speculation around this discussion, Silverstone last week. Oh, I bet. Admittedly, this was before the whole KTM taken on the LCR as a third, or sorry, as a second satellite to the works team.

That's before that news really started to, well, gather momentum in the public domain anyway. So, I mean, at one point, Dixon was being linked to the other Yamaha ride because of course Jake Dixon and Fabio Quattrarra are Bezza mates. Yeah, they are, yes. And I think Quattrarra was probably pushing quite hard, not to mention Dawn are pushing incredibly hard to get a Brit back into the MotoGP class since we lost Carl Crutchlow, what, a couple of seasons ago, despite the sporadic appearances that he's making in terms of wild cards and stuff. But that's when I was a test rider, obviously.

So there's a lot of pressure commercially for a Brit. And it has to be Dixon. I mean, who else is there? Now obviously Aiden, the better massively by the fact that he won his first race pre-summer break at Assen. So the whole Dixon into MotoGP thing has gathered a lot of pace.

And yeah, I mean, I'll take your point, Jim. Does he really want to end up in MotoGP on that Honda as it is at the moment? Better to be a MotoGP than not to be a MotoGP, I think. Yeah, yes, I would agree. And no doubt Jake Dixon will absolutely, you know, bite the arm off the person that puts that piece of paper in front of him to sign.

So however, that will fall to pieces, of course, if that LCR team suddenly starts running K-Chems because there's two other riders that will take precedence over everybody else. So yeah, this is hard to know. There's bits of the jigsaw that, you know, don't quite fit at the minute. But here's where we have to really consider something. Dixon and Acosta on Husker Varnas ran by LCR.

Because if KTM is true, and that, well, we really, yeah, we kind of don't want Marquez. If they don't, right, who better than to put Jake Dixon there? Or you could restructure it anywhere you want, right? You could, because Jake's riding on a gas gas, he could restructure it anywhere he wants. He could go to tech three and remain with gas gas, right?

So you could do that, or you could, then you could pull on the Husky with Acosta next time. I'm telling you, if KTM actually gets this second satellite team, they have multiple scenarios that they can do and shuffle people in different places. That is really pretty cool when you think about it. I mean, they're, from where they came to now, and where I think they want to go, is kind of a really cool blueprint for how to really do it. Their presence is correct in the lower formulas, it's in the junior formula, they're getting these kids to be on KTMs.

I use quotations because there's so many different names you could use for them, right? It also then allows them to evaluate that talent as they come through, and they have a place to put them in the Moto 3 class, they have a place to graduate them to in the Moto 2 class. And then now you're branching out to where you can have as many as, well, I think there's eight Ducatis on the grid, right? There could potentially be six KTMs on the grid. That's 14 bikes on the grid there, and then you're left with what, two Hondas potentially?

Two Yamahas to get you to 16, 18 bikes, and the last two are the, or last four, sorry, are the Aprilias to get you to. And in a sort of funny sort of a way, I don't know if this is paradox or not, not paradox, that's the wrong word, but sort of coming at it from 180 degrees, this is where Honda have really landed themselves in the proverbial SHIT in not having this kind of development path through. And it strikes me that their policy of many, many years, certainly in terms of the works, let's call it the Repsalting, that's what it's been for donkey's ages, their policy of buying in big talent, known winners, okay, you might say, well, they brought Mark Mike as a, but I mean, he was already known to be a standard talent in the way that Pedro Acosta is for KTM. You know, that recruitment policy of riders has not really served them very well recently, given where they are with the bike, I actually think it would serve them very well if they lost Marquez, let's say to the Husqvarna team that we're dreaming about. And if Mia has a get out clause in his contract and he exercises it, or they just are quite happy to let him go, because it will save them money in crash damage or whatever.

It would serve them well as, you know, and I'm talking Repsal Honda here, it wouldn't be a million miles out of sort of left field for me for them to say, let's put Iagura in there and let's put Jake Dixon in there as, you know, two Moto two proven fast guys without all the baggage of previous Moto GP experience. Okay, Jake Dixon had a few ride outs on the Yamaha what last year and just start from scratch, you know, without all the preconceptions and all the sort of, well, my Suzuki used to do this or my Yamaha used to do that, you know, none of that, just put them in there and start from scratch, because that's what they need, particularly if they lose LCR. You could sort of conceive that possibility, or I could. I think you've hit the nail on the head, Rich. The key statement that you have said, there's no, well, my Suzuki did this, my Ducati did this, my Yamaha did this, my KTM clone did this.

There's no preconception of what a Moto GP bike should be. They have none. And that could potentially be where they need to be to get back to being at the front again. Don't know, right? I mean, if you think about it, that's kind of what they did with the world super bike team to a lesser extent, okay, they didn't put true, nobody ever rode a super bike there, but you have to admit that their choice of talent that Honda put on there was definitely, dare I say this, and this is not in any way to be critical of anybody's skill at a world level, because I'm nowhere near it.

So, but I think we agree there's sort of elite talent and there's great talent. Honda didn't get an elite talent for their world super bike team. They did a great talent for their world super bike team. And that is starting to bear some fruit as they've moved through, right? So.

Yeah. I'll tell you what, Jim, the last thing to say on this whole kind of silly season is I can't wait for, I mean, it's unfortunate I'm on the top of the seats, but I'll be watching it. There will be some big announcements, I'm sure, coming out over that weekend. Prime amongst them, I would have thought, well, you would assume the Acosta conundrum, because the 30th of June was the deadline for them to tell him what he's doing. So they must have a plan.

I would think they have to have a plan. It's a question of, is it plan A, B, C, D, all the way down to Z, isn't it, really, in terms of which plan it is? Because, I mean, the worst case scenario, I suppose, would be that they have to look to Gas Gas and one of those riders has to go. Unfortunately, if anybody's gonna go at Gas Gas, I think he would probably wind up being pulled, unfortunately. Well, in a harsh world, you would think probably yes.

Yeah. Perhaps with a caveat that they say to him or to- We'll make you a test rider. Augusto Fernandez. Yeah. Test jitters for a year, and then we will have another satellite team for you, and you'll be first up.

Get yourself back together. We're signing. It could be. I mean, because I think Augusto Fernandez has had a very progressive season, where he has progressed, progressed, progressed, progressed, progressed. I think he's getting better and better and better.

I don't wanna stop that progression if I'm KTM. That's harsh. No, but let's be honest, they've invested a lot of time and money in the guys well over the years, so to have to give it up, and they've been in this position before. I mean, we mentioned, I think on the last show, Jorge Martin, I mean, he was KTM talent all the way through until the point where they could fit him in anywhere, and after he went to Ducati, and okay, you might say, well, he hasn't done much for Ducati, and that's true up until this year. Yeah, he finally got it.

No, I don't think he's gonna win the championship, but he's gonna push Banyar pretty hard for it by the looks of it, because he's stopped crashing all of a sudden, and he's bloody fast, so that's what you want, and it takes time for these guys to get to that stage, so KTM will be looking at that and thinking, we don't want that to happen again if we can possibly avoid it, hence their desire and their desperation to get another two bikes on the grid somehow. Any which way. All right, Goodwood Festival speed happened. Have you ever been to Goodwood, Rich? I don't, I've wanted to ask you, is it really that cool?

It is a great, great event. Now, I went back in the late 90s, that's how long ago, when it was nothing like the event that it is now in terms of crowd numbers, I mean, it was still pretty busy when I went, and I went the year, you all know this, Jim, was an F1 devotee of old, when Nick Heidfeld in the McLaren broke the lap, not lap record, the hill climb record by, you know, he absolutely slaughtered him, that generation of silver McLaren West sponsored. Oh wow, that's in the, see the last of the West sponsorship was 99. Yeah, so I think it was 97 or 98 that I went. It's in that time, that is in that timeframe, yes.

Yeah, you know, the beautiful era of the screaming V10s and stuff. Just, oh yeah, heaven. Yes, it was. And I don't think I've been back since then, and I would have gone this year, because given the MotoGP presence, but again, just wanting another money, time, everything else, just couldn't juggle it. Plus the weather wasn't great as it turned out, but there was, yeah, it was nice to see the MotoGP crowd there, although again, I think as you were coming to, perhaps it wasn't quite as well publicized by- They missed the mark.

It was a B. Yeah. Oh yeah. Again, you know, if you're worried about people being in the stands, I think Stuart Pringle said it in your interview with him at Silverstone, that crowd was light. And you have to believe that MotoGP has had one huge miss in their, I call it this, their drive to survive concept that they tried to create.

That was a bad miss. I mean, that was just so, so, so bad. And it could have been so, so good, especially because you had the problem of drive to survive is people say it's good. I can't watch it, but that's me. And I'm not going to get into those reasons now.

It's not a Formula One podcast. We talk about it too much, but you have a knock-on effect that comes from that. Plus we had the faster movies. And I'm sorry, but I know this is me. I'm probably, you did too.

You had some envisionment in your mind that when they moved from one racetrack to the next racetrack, Ian McGregor was going to come on and he was going to talk to you about what happened in between and what was going on in the pits and where we were in the championship and what was going to happen. And it wasn't there. It was just a picture with words that I got to read. So again, their idea of how to interact with fans and whatnot is horrid right now. But they do have the guy who was from the NBA.

It's going to take a while to get a plan together. Sorry folks. And then make it move forward progressively to get where they want to be. And it's just going to take some time. But you have- As I mentioned, Jim, there are a number of journalists at that thing that's also last week.

So I won't say who said this, although people might well, read between the lines in terms of who I said was there. But it was very much mentioned that those of the journos that went to Goodwood and kind of approached some of the MotoGP teams to say, let's make something out of this. Let's interview the riders. And the teams would be like, no, it's a weekend off. And Dawn of themselves didn't really appear to have had any great involvement in what was going on there at all.

And as you say, it was an open goal for massive publicity, particularly with Silverstone coming up just a few weeks later. And it was all a little bit like, nah, or meh, as the youngsters say nowadays. So yeah, like you say, massive kind of open goal and nobody there to kick the ball into the back of the net really. So that was representative of kind of some of the issues that we speak about often here. And I just got asked, once it's in my mind, Jim, I just want to ask you, did you pick up on the interview with Stuart Pringle about the fact that the dual F1 MotoGP race weekend at Silverstone had been discussed in some detail?

That had also been discussed at COTA by Bobby Epstein's group that they wanted to have Formula One and MotoGP at the same time. And I agree with what Stuart said, and I'm gonna try not to spoil it if you guys haven't heard that interview yet. He's right with what Stuart said, he's right in my mind because it's not going to work. I mean, the two are warring factions, right? And there's, I don't know.

Yeah. I think it would work, Jim, as a sort of a one-off kind of PR event. You know, just give away the 20,000. You had half a million people in at Silverstone over the Formula One weekend. I mean, that was a lot of people.

If you captured 15% of those people that then said, oh, I'll go to the MotoGP race now. Yeah, I know. The proper one. Right. But to me, the thing of it is that, I don't think it would work if it's just like an exhibition, three or four bikes out there.

It's not going to work, okay? No, it would need to be a race. It's got to be a race that counts for something in a championship, okay? To me, this is me, put a sprint race on during the Formula One weekend and let everybody go. Because number one, the first and foremost thing that is going to capture Formula One fans is going to be the noise because that's what they miss because we don't have V10s or V8s anymore.

We have muted, turboed hybrids and they sound like a vacuum cleaner going by. Sorry, it's what they sound like. The second thing that's going to, if the people are there and it's promoted well, people are going to be amazed at one, how fast the bikes are and two, they're going to be amazed at how far the guys lean off and how much they can tell what's happening just by the position of a rider on the bike because you don't see that in the race car because they're covered up. Now you can watch an onboard camera and you can see Hamilton's hands or Lando's hands or you can look at George Russell's hands and you can compare what their hands are doing but it's completely different to watch what's happening with somebody on a motorcycle. And Formula One is not going to give up that crowd and have any chance of them being stolen by some guys on two wheels.

That's exactly what Stuart said. He thought that would almost be detrimental to do that. So yeah, I'll pose a couple of, hopefully toughish questions to him and he pushed back pretty hard on a couple of things which is great. Listen to the interview folks, it's good. It's really good.

Where were we? Oh yes, so of course not just the fact that MotoGP decided to basically stab themselves in the foot, Soner decided to chop them off at the knees because Casey is Casey Stoner, right? So what does Casey said? He wants the Clone Wars and MotoGP to stop and quite honestly, he's right. I never thought of it that way until I read it and I realized he's right.

Because what happened, Ducati came out with all these cool gizmos, gadgets and whatnot and everybody copied it. Hey, we want our bike to go faster. Well, let's put wings on it. Hey, we got to, Ducati's got a mass dampener system in the back of the, well, we need one of them too. Hey, they got a ride height system.

We need one of those too. And everybody just started copying everybody else which is kind of like Formula One. And yeah, but ever was it thus? I'm not saying that there's, again, I'm not talking, I mean, I don't have a problem with anybody copying anything, right? I completely get that.

But the thing is, is that it's becoming Formula One-ish, right? Somebody comes up with something, right? And then because they have basically in my mind, stagnated, oh, and that's not the right word. I don't know how to say this Rich, and you being English, you might have the right words. But some people have stopped trying to make their motorcycle better because they see the cool trickery that Ducati has.

So they're not working at making their self better. Do you understand where I'm at? It's like, oh, Ducati put this work in, do you have a ride height system, right? And so then everybody else just like copies it. And so they're not trying to innovate and make their bike better.

They're thinking the solution lies with something that's on the Ducati already. Oh, we just got to put it on our bike and then we're gonna be just as fast. And we found out that that's not the case because it's an integrated package that works with that bike, i.e. the Ducati. So I think that's how I look at it.

Yeah, it's a tricky one. Casey Stone is a bit contrary. I mean, he always has been in his viewpoint. It makes him fun. Funny enough, just, I won't go on about this too long because we're already way over running as it is.

But just talking of the race, I just started listening to an interview that Toby Moody's just put out as a podcast today or yesterday with Wayne Gardner. Wayne Gardner starts off by saying that when he arrived at Honda, expecting to be on the best bike, and it was a bit of a, well, he didn't say it was a dog, but he was implying that it was not what he was hoping and expecting for. And he couldn't understand why the RGV Suzuki was so good. And so they started taking some photos and spotting, you know, that the engine was like 25 mil higher in the chassis and that they had this really sort of high bank swinging arm angle and stuff like that. So Honda basically reverse engineered what Suzuki would do.

And suddenly they start to get a sweet handling chassis again, you know, or something that Gardner could use to win. So what was it? Imitation's the sort of greatest form of poetry or whatever the phrase is, but you know, so I suppose it's always been like that. I suppose the problem that we're facing, and this has been the problem in Formula One for a long time is that as you get kind of closer and closer to the apex product, in terms of a weapon of the machine to go faster around the track, everything must converge to the same point within a given set of rules. So I think what we really are desperate for now is the new set of technical regulations that hopefully maybe outlaw a few things or open up a few things.

I mean, I, for example, would like to see, if I could have anything at the moment, I think I would say you've got cost cap and a much freer set of technical regulations within that cost cap. Okay, you have to use synthetic fuels and maybe we're still on a single brand of tires. I don't see that is likely to change, but if you wanna run a three cylinder, you wanna triple, do it. If you wanna run a V5, do it. If you can do it within the budget cap, be my guest sort of thing.

And then you will see some variation again, because everything's kind of gone V4. I know people say, hang on a minute, Yammer, but the V4 is kind of, I think now can perceive to be the optimal configuration within this set of rules. And then you dress it in an aero package that does A, B and C and so on and so forth. And so that's what starts to stifle the competition. And I suppose to take your point, Jim, is you work towards a set of rules, which although they're three years away or four years away, that's not that long, I suppose, in- Not in the development cycle.

For a race team in an R and D cycle. Maybe people think, what's the point? We might as well just wait and start with a clean sheet of paper a year or two ahead of the new regs coming out and just wait, just ride it out now, literally. So I guess that's kind of what you're saying. So Stoner told us that he wants the wings gone, no ride height adjustments, no traction control.

And his thing is, well, you can't go back. Well, F1 did, they eliminated, they eliminated access suspension and ride height control in their cars. They did take away traction control in 2008. They have, the Cerebellis has the same ECU, so they all have the same limit there. But the one thing that I found that was really interesting in here is that Stoner said, you gotta be in a 10 year stable rules package that allows other teams to innovate and catch up.

That is a very key point. And that kind of goes back to concessions. Like you have to have the teams that are struggling give away there. Now, if with your cost cap, let's pick numbers. Let's just say you get 200 million, pick it quid, euro to run a race team.

Now, I don't know if that's enough. I don't know if it's not enough. I have no idea. That's a number folks. 200 million, well, okay, if you were in the area of concessions, maybe you get 250 to 300 million that you get to spend.

You get to spend more money because you wanna do something differently. But they also, I think need to change the technical regulations from the standpoint of, as you said, can you have a three cylinder? Can you have a five cylinder? Could you have six cylinder? Change it up to where you can be competitive because that was one of the most magical things about the 990 era was that you had a V5, you had V4 and you had inline four.

And I mean, seriously, nobody really ever thought Honda was gonna build V5, but they did, which is really the only people who could have really done that was Honda. I mean, they had a V6 on the bench. Yes, they did. At one point. Yeah.

And then you had the, you know, the pretty RS cube. Cube was a really interesting idea too, which that was them looking very much outside the box, almost burnt con all the words to death, but it happens, right? And the other interesting thing about that set of rules, Jim, I always thought was great, was the different weight limits that applied, sliding scale, deciding that's why the V6 never worked for Honda because they couldn't justify the weight, but they could justify it in five cylinders. And equally with Aprilia, they ran the triple, but they never got down to the weight that they were allowed to get down to. They just could not get the last five or six kilos, I think it was off that bike.

Now, maybe that will still be the case now, I don't know. But yeah, I would love to see a more open set of innovative rules for people to work around because this is the complaint you always in Formula One that is way too restrictive in terms of what you're allowed to do and all the cars, if you, they're all white. You couldn't tell them apart. You'd be hard pressed to tell them apart. You could not tell them apart.

Really hard pressed. So the other thing I think I would do is I would, I would ban pneumatic valves. You have to mechanically open and close it, which obviously gives Ducati an advantage. Okay, I understand that, but you wouldn't have these high, super high revving engines. You'd have to be able to develop torque in a different way, especially if you take away traction control, except for like a safety measure or whatever there.

But anyway, that's what Stoner says. And I think we've pounded down that out. One last thing with Stoner, he got to ride as a Suzuki two stroke 500 at Goodwood, which he thought was fantastic because he always wanted to, everything he did was to go ride 500s and he gets there when they changed to four strokes or whatever. Oh, and the last piece of news, this one brings a tear to my eye, but the question is, could two strokes return to Moto GP? Well, Pat Simmons, who is an F1 boffin, and he is of the fame of a lot of different engineering things that have came out of Formula One, is seriously looking at using two strokes in the next F1 engine.

The use of biofuels is what's going to potentially, and some other technologies, but essentially the move to biofuels and a fully biofuel based fuel is going to be really interesting for it. If as well, will you add direct injection to a two stroke? And then you have what they call pressure charging on top of that. They're very green motors, very lightweight. So now you could mean that you could bring two strokes back, maybe have a three cylinder two stroke, maybe a four, twin crank, counter rotating, whatever, figure out what you want, but go against a thousand CC bike as a four stroke, could happen because of all that.

So, but the four stroke bike may be hydrogen powered, which is really cool, because then you're looking at advancing a certain segment of technology, i.e. the biofuel, the hydrogen fuel. And then you couple that in with lightweight of two stroke, and the idea that you can do whatever you want in there. I mean, that's really kind of an open area that I really think would be cool. And let's face it, to hear the sound of a two stroke again, that'd be phenomenal, right?

And let's be honest, I mean, if you want to attract manufacturers back into the sport, then the way to do it is to have a very open set of regs, you know, that are very much, okay, you have to gear them around kind of the, the conventional wisdom of the age, which is about sustainability and, you know, I don't like to talk about zero carbon, because it's just a dream that people are chasing, it's completely untamable. It's fraudulent, it can't happen, but. Lower, lower carbon output, fair enough, that's a different thing. The problem is the word zero. Anyway, that's a political discussion for a different forum, but you know, so yeah, why not have two stroke regs in the next cycle, to take the stonest point, open it up, let people innovate.

Do something different. That would make the sport really interesting, and it would bring more people into the paddock again. I'm sure absolutely convinced, you know, you might get Suzuki back, for example, Karasaki might want to come back in at that point. You never know. The likes of BMW for sure would, and there's a whole raft of Chinese manufacturers that are probably queuing up to come in, you know, if they could justify the spend, in terms of what that's going to translate to the road.

So yeah, we live in hope, Jim. That's one of the things that's definitely gonna help MotoGP is the movement to the biofuel, and eventually to like a fully synthetic fuel, whether you want to call that renewable or not, that's again, debate for a different forum. Yeah. But that is a, if that can possibly happen, that's movement in the direction that I'd love to see. Because I just think, you know, I mean, yes, I'm a romantic, yes, nostalgia is a disease.

I understand all of these things, but man, there was some great racing in the 500 day, and it, you know, a lot of it was just by right of wrist. And if you think about everything that we have today, it still is the wrist, but there's a lot of safety measures in there. All right, that's the news. Done with all that. That only took how long?

Anyway, so let's try to kind of, not to berate things, but let's just try to roll through some of the listener feedback we've had all summer long, which has been fantastic over this. I really appreciate everybody who has written in and contributed and said some things in there as well. So kind of quickly go through, Jake Rower came, wrote in, he told us that he went to Moto America, he went to the Ridge, which is out in Washington state, West coast of the United States. He said they had a nice crowd, it was good vibes. He even liked the sound from an Energica electric bike, cause they run in a, an Energica, okay.

See, Rich is my, I need Rich cause Rich is good with English. And they had one of those and that was in the Hooligan class. And he also loved hearing from Mark Miller. So I love the fact that you guys are telling us, hey, we've gone to a race from this is what we saw. And there was people in a crowd and all this, which means that we're doing something, right?

If we have people that are there. So we had that part of it. The second one was from Don Barnes. He had a couple emails during the time and there's a whole bunch there, Don. I really appreciate a lot of what you sent in cause it is, it was quite the lengthy set of, set of email that was in there.

But one of the things I'll touch on here, because I think it needs to be touched on a little bit is the fact that I've made this statement that look, when bikes are crashing, even Moto three bikes and Moto two bikes are getting very close to the walls in the track. And his conclusion was, well, is it really that they're going faster or is it there's some speed that regardless they're gonna get there? Well, there is, right? Okay, if you're an engineer like me, you know the math, you get your one hat, you get your momentum equations and you have all this stuff. You can figure out that, yeah, these bikes are having enough momentum and enough energy that they can get themselves to the wall.

And I guess where I did not make my point properly and I'll try to articulate it here is that, look, my thing is I understand that the riders accept a certain amount of risk racing on a motorcycle and racing at a track. The people who aren't assuming risk are the quarter marshals or who don't wanna assume risk, I guess, is the way that one looks at it. And the people in the stands are assuming that their risk is significantly less than the risk of what is happening to people near the track or riders on the track. And if these bikes get to the point where they start to catapult walls and go into stands, then racing is going to get stopped. It's gonna stop at that track and it's gonna probably stop at another track and at another track.

And I think we all love this sport and I'm not clamoring to slow the bikes down. This is not where this is. What I'm asking is that people need to take a really hard look at where we allow spectators to stand, the catch fences that are there in those areas, and maybe we need to kind of beef things up a little bit so that if these bikes do get there and they do bounce over and they do bounce into the catch fence, let's be sure that that fence can contain that energy and keep it out of the stands so that people who came to enjoy the event are going to go home having enjoyed the event. That's my take on it. One, I guess, nuance to this, I think is, particularly with MotoGP bikes and with the Aero, I think, and again, I'm happy to be shunted down on this one, but I suspect part of the kind of equation in all of this, Jim, is that bikes are arriving at corners quite a lot faster and slowing down in a much shorter period of time because of course now they have downforce.

Obviously the brakes get better every year. So if you're gonna crash going into a corner, it's quite likely that you're gonna crash at a faster speed than you would have done a few years ago. Perhaps the overall lap time is not markedly different, although it will be faster year on year as a general rule. But it might just be that the energy that gets released in a bike that crashes at a corner now is more, and again, Jim, you're the mathematician, and you can tell me, but in terms of the exponential way that physics works in terms of once things start to go wrong, once a bike hits the deck and starts to tumble and stuff, there's a hell of a lot of energy there. So if it's arriving three kilometers a mile an hour faster, that energy has to get dissipated or absorbed or whatever somewhere.

So the crashes are likely to get bigger. That's just my take on it. But one thing, and I mean, as you said, Jim, the emails that we got in from Don were massive. And yeah, absolutely superb. And Don had spent a lot of time doing some analysis of the laptops and stuff.

So either by separate email or maybe Don, if you're listening or when you listen to this, perhaps you can sort of give us a yes or a no. But what I thought would be quite good to do, given the level of detail that you've gone into and the amount of time you'd spent sort of compiling those lap times and stuff, perhaps we'll stick it on the MotoGP website on the blog site and we'll just put it up there for people to read and they can spend a bit of time because it's far too much for us to go into now. So if that's okay, Don, and perhaps if I remember, I'll drop you an email in the next day or two to ask if I can, but perhaps we'll just stick it up on the blog as an article after I edit it a tiny little bit, but we'll see what people think. That's great. It's fantastic.

Let's see, Lee also wrote in with a huge email as well. It was great to see this kind of feedback from you guys and talk about these kinds of things. But he was talking about in Germany, he had Martin who had all these stoppies going into turn one and Lee was talking about all my time playing Xbox. There's like a bump that goes in there, but I don't know if that's really there or not, but why are we seeing these massive stoppies? And look, well, one is because Martin is a demon on the brakes.

I think he is probably the latest of the late breakers and the hardest of the breakers. And it also has to do with the fact that the ride height device doesn't release itself until you brake. So as he brakes really hard, the bike then lifts up and then it just kind of, that little bit of momentum going that way, it helps him ride it on the front end into the turn. But we saw that with like Marquez and the Bridgestone area and things like that. So that was all in there from Lee, that was one of them.

He's also kind of a little bit, I don't think this is the right word, not annoyed, but the idea that everybody wants to have a rivalry. There have to be rivals in sport to make it a sport and whatnot, Rossi Biagi, Rossi Marquez, things like that. But he was talking just about how like, Jack gave Zarco a lift back to the pits and how Bezekian and Peco were hugging on the podium. And nods, high fives, that these guys all seem to be kind of pals, if you will, inside of the paddock. And he said it was nice to see a little, not the hardened edge of it, but the softer side of the sport, which he liked because it was a great way that they could capture these moments.

And I agree, there is a friendly side to it, there are those clicks, but I think there still has to, I think there still has to be a villain somewhere that somebody has to be in. I think that's where, I think there's one everywhere, right? Look at Formula One, who's the villain? Max Verstappen, who was the villain? When you look at the great rivalries in any sport, it tends to be a sort of, what's the word, an antagonistic kind of relation.

I mean, Borg, McEnroe, Tyson Holyfield, you could go on and on and on, couldn't you? There tends to be a bit of edge. The other thing I would just add to what Lee was saying, and I touched on this when I was talking to Stuart Pringle about Jake Dixon, you also need, and currently somebody like Jack Miller fulfills this role very, very well, but you need a kind of an out there character, that sort of cheeky or very marketable. So I reference Barry Sheen as being perhaps a bit of a comparison for Jake Dixon. The Kimi Raikkonen type of person, the one who's a bit out on the fringes, and just creates a bit of interest by the way they behave.

Not looking for bad behavior exactly, although I like a bit of bad behavior. And I think Bart, the problem with MotoGP riders, whilst I get the point that it's nice that they get on well with each other, but they're all a bit boring, aren't they? I mean, a lot of the time, and it's all a little bit kind of, it's not entirely their fault. I mean, they are so kind of washed with PR people around them and protected by press officers and stuff, which is obviously that has to happen to some extent, but to think, just let them speak their mind a little bit more, you know? And they'll get themselves into trouble.

I mean, we've criticized a few riders for saying things that are a bit daft, but it's a talking point, you know? And it gives them character. So I think a bit of rivalry, and then a few decent characters in the sport. And trust me, if Jake Dixon makes it to MotoGP, I mean, he's gonna be very, very marketable from Dawna's standpoint, because he is that kind of a character. And we do need that.

We really do. I mean, I like Miller because he's that tough Aussie, and he speaks his mind. You know, and everyone remembers the sort of the cat, you know, Miller's Taxis, that has kind of become part of the common vernacular of modern MotoGP. You know, if somebody needs a lift, Jack's gonna be the taxi. He's always doing it, and it's become sort of a standing joke, but it's very much in Jack's favor, because it's a thing for him.

And you know, somebody else mentioned recently, you know, the Acostas, the Arbolinos, they're all pretty savvy, these guys. So they, you know, they will introduce a new dose of personality into the sport, which has been a little bit lacking in the last few years, I would argue, although people might well disagree with that. I think Acosta, Arbolino, and MotoGP will be a fascinating rivalry. They will be friendly to each other, but make no mistake, there will be jabs in the press at each other. And it's gonna be great.

It's gonna be great fun. It's gonna be real drama, as opposed to the main drama of Drive to Survive. Yeah, yeah, which is, yeah, as you say, it's so kind of pantomime sort of, you know, scripted. It's, yeah, it's become a bit of a parody almost, really. Right, so Lee also went into about the wings and the speed and things that we've talked about already, but his one thing that was said, and I give him great credit for this one, is that if we wanna get, slow these things down, and we want the race to be closer, limit the amount of fuel, right?

Which at one point we did, right? We had, at one point, you could have all the electronics you wanted, but you were only allowed 20 liters to make the distance, where Ducati was getting 22, because they had the different electronics on it. Well, we went back to having 22 liters for everybody, because we have a standard ECU that's gonna be on there. Again, this is the law of unintended consequences, right? I mean, I think it'd be really hard to cut the fuel down from the 22 liters they have to cut it down.

The biofuels are what's gonna really cause us to have a change here. When it becomes a pure biofuel, from what I know or understand of it so far, and again, this is a black art, the new biofuels lack the octane. No, sorry, I believe I've got this wrong. They lack the potential energy that you have. Start again, sorry, bad engineer.

Engineer knows what he wants to say, engineer doesn't know how to say it. If you take a certain amount of fuel today, petroleum based, it has a certain amount of energy per that volume. Biofuels will have less energy for the same volume, which is going to be means less energy, which means less distance. So they may even have to add more fuel to the bikes to be able to go the distance. It might be 25 liters that we have to have to get there when it's pure biofuel.

But what I think they could do is maybe take a small page out of what Formula One has done and say, look, you can only run at a rate of 100 kilos per hour, whatever it is for the time of the race. It's a flow rate that they're allowed. So you'll flow rate. So you're only allowed to, if a MotoGP bike and making a number of needs, a liter of, I guess, let's just say a liter, a liter of fuel to make a lap around Silverstone. Well, that's all it can run for that lap.

You can't have, you can't richen it up and run it for 1.2 liters of fuel for a lap around Silverstone because you're controlled by that fuel flow. So I think fuel flow might be one of the things that you could look at to settle the bikes back down or whatever. And he was also asking about like a lace riding around with his wing off and right brake guard turned up and all of that. And how much of these wings really matter? I don't know.

They matter to some extent, but we asked that same question in Formula One at times, right? We've seen cars break all kinds of winglets and pieces off and you're like, hey, it's still fast, right? I don't really know, Lee. I can't really figure out how to do it, but I am concerned like you are about whether there should be a black flag or something for a lace because of the fact that he did have this broken wing that could potentially fly off. I think we've all seen what happens when broken wings fly off and hit open wheel race cars.

Those are, there's some very bad things that happened to that and I wouldn't want that to happen to motorcycles either. So I do think that you're right that- Yeah, and he- Go ahead, Rich, I'm sorry. He ran the pretty well, the whole of the Ascent Race with that one half of the wing flapping away, didn't he? As you say, without an obvious detriment to his speed. And yeah, I mean, if that thing had flown off and hit a following rider, say in the visor, that would have been quite nasty.

So I'm very surprised he didn't get the meatball flag. In fact, somebody mentions a meatball flag in one of these emails, don't they? Which is basically the black flag with the orange circle in it, which says you've got a technical issue with your bike. You need to come into the pits to get it sorted out or retire one or the other. Yeah, I mean, it comes down to, it's kind of like, he equates it to Fabio with the open zipper of his leathers.

Nothing happened, but what if? Yeah. Yeah, so I agree with you too. Can I just pick up one thing, Lee? Sorry, Jim, that Lee wrote back, because I don't want to pass over this one.

Because I've thought this often, and that is what is up with Moto E? Yeah. You know, these bikes that go around, they're so say the future of everything. And yet you're hard pressed to find the coverage a lot of the time, and particularly this year with Ducati coming in as the replacement to, I think that was on the GK as well, wasn't it? Yeah, a bit curious really, how the sport have introduced this series.

And yet you're hard pressed to find a lot of the practice sessions. I guess the races are on, but I'm gonna go back. The races are on, yeah. I'm being a little bit contrary myself, but I don't necessarily follow up. Although the races are quite entertaining, it's true, but the coverage is not great.

No. Which is slightly at odds with the whole intention of bringing the bloody things into the calendar. I don't think that they have a real intention of actually making it a real series. It is a stop gap that says we're doing something for the environment between now and biofuels and 100% biofuel when it's 20 or 100% fake scape, again, carbon neutral by 2026. 2024, we put a little bit of biofuel into things, right?

It's a stop gap. It's a stop gap. It's always been a stop gap. But that's just where we are. We have to look, we have to appear, right?

I mean, if you're talking about carbon footprint, Good Grief Formula One, you look at their schedule and where they jet to. And they don't group the races together and whatnot. So, I mean, it's... No, well, it's certainly, I find it... Well, this is something else.

A slightly dispiriting experience being lectured to by the likes of Lewis Hamilton, demanding that I lower my carbon footprint when he spends most of his life jetting around in a private jet. That's true. It's like the usual champagne socialist telling everybody else how to live whilst ignoring their own advice. Anyway, sorry, I've slipped into a political field again. Yeah, it's okay, we do that.

Oh, then he like... So, Jim, do you think motor he will disappear then when the biofuels come in? No. What's your take in terms of what will happen with them? I think they're going to still be there.

I believe that there is a place for electric motorcycles and electric cars and electric trucks, but for cities, for mobility in cities. I think that's where their place is, right? Would it therefore make more sense? This is my idea, anybody at the government body that's listening, you can have this one, to have like a hooligan class, give Moto a Moped. Yeah, that's kind of what Moto America's got.

They've got a hooligan class with the one bike that's electric. They should kind of go down that path. Oh, sorry, that's already a thing, is it? Okay, I've never seen that. It's new this year.

Cool. They, I've, again, this is, I need to talk to Scott Bolton to get more detail on all this. I don't know whether the hooligan class is at Pittsburgh, but if it is, I'm very interested to watch because they look sort of like naked bikes and they're sideways and it's kind of, they're old school dirt track style riding and whatnot, tire smoking kind of thing. So it's super cool. But they're e-bikes, are they?

No, they are gas powered except for one. One in the class, say that electric, what is it, energy? Energica. Energica bike that is in that class, it is electric. I will never be able to say that properly, folks, I'm sorry.

So I'm looking forward to seeing those too. I think they may do something, they may move towards that. I think they may shorten the races distances so they're not as long. It's gonna be there because I think people, because they're gonna have to kind of sort of compel the people that are there. Now, I know you can't do this, but what would be cool is if MotoGP figured out how to have like a sub series that allowed you to race electric bikes in a city.

And I know it's not, I don't see a way that it's actually possible. Like a car could hit a wall and the driver's gonna be okay. Guy on a motorcycle cannot hit a wall, he's not going to be okay. All right, so I understand it, but I think if you could do something like that or you move it to someplace like go-kart tracks or something, I'm not sure, it's not gonna go away. I just don't know if, you know, MotoGP has more problems than whether or not they have an electric bike running around the track, unfortunately.

So I don't know what they're gonna do with it, but I think it's gonna be lesser and lesser. I mean, it's not a world championship for electric bikes, which I think is stupid in some respect, but I think- Well, don't they call it the World Cup? It's a World Cup. Some kind of, yeah, whatever the hell difference that makes. I don't know what, again, contractually, I'm not riding in a world championship, so you can't pay me as much, I think is what that is.

But I think it would be interesting if they had sort of its own separate series of World Cup races that were like electric, e-bike America Cup, European electric bike cup, Asia e-bike cup, right? And then at the end, sort of at the end of the year when everybody's at Valencia, or wherever the last race is in MotoGP, the champion of each of those regions comes and they race their e-bikes there, which I think would be kind of cool. Now there's a bit of interest in it, right? It's its own thing, it's got a stand on something. So I think something like that may happen, but yet it's still gonna be like sort of under the governorship of MotoGP, but not really.

I think it might be like that. So, yeah, interesting. That's where I think it might hit. Oh, lastly, Lee had a great thing about hypocrisy, which I thought was really good. Hey, when Rossi was at the end of his career, everybody was talking about Rossi was too old, skills fading, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But as soon as Marquez has got a bad bike, it's Honda's fault, and not Marquez's fault. That just goes with the territory, Lee, I'm sorry. That's how they make clickbait, and that hypocrisy is gonna continue, because that's what drives people to click on websites and generate revenue and buy subscriptions to the race and whatever else, right? I mean, that's sort of the deal. I do see where you're at there, right?

I do understand. The only thing about it with Rossi was the fact that, and this is a small distinction, I believe Rossi just wasn't fast enough to be at the front. The speed required to race fast at the front had moved in a way in which Rossi wasn't capable of getting to there. I don't think it was a lack of skill or effort, because Rossi was faster at Valencia than he'd ever been when he retired. It's just, there's, motorcycling is a young man's game, and there's risk versus reward.

And I don't care what anybody says, Rossi wasn't willing to risk as much as what Fabio wanted to risk, or as much as what Marquez wanted to risk, or as much as what any of the younger guys wanted to risk. I mean, that's just why people said that. I think we've talked about that enough. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, so maybe.

Yeah, you just run out of steam at a certain point, don't you? And you just can't. You just can't compete on equal terms anymore. And you cannot. Oh, so the last thing that I had here was that, this was by Jeremy Burnage, and he was talking about technology as far as what these crashes that have happened were Marquez and Olvera crash in Porto Mayo, and you could add in the Marquez-Zarco crash that happens at the Saxon Ring.

But his idea is that, look, there's situational awareness is a really difficult thing for a MotoGP rider. I think it's a difficult thing for really any motorcycle rider, to be honest with you, because here in America, there are states that require you by law to wear a helmet, and there are other states that do not require you to wear a helmet by law, by individual state. There's people who say you should be able to ride without a helmet. There's people who say you should have to wear a helmet. Me, I would never get on a bike without a helmet.

That's me. But I do understand the point that some people say that you lose sort of some peripheral vision by wearing a helmet. Now, okay, if you wore an open face helmet, maybe not so much, but what protection are we talking about in there? That's not what this is. But just to give you some idea of where Jeremy's coming from, he's talking about the idea of like, hey, why don't you take the technology that exists in the cameras that are backwards facing on these bikes and somehow introduces like a heads-up display that's inside of the rider's helmet?

Well, that sounds really pretty cool. To me, I would not want it to be a HUD, so to speak. I would like it to be sort of like in my peripheral vision, just fill in that gap with a projection of the image of the rider trying to pass me. So I could know if I could go to the apex or I had to leave room for the guy that's there. It's kind of like here in America and a lot of the new lorries that are out on the highway, they don't really have mirrors on the sides of the truck.

They have cameras that then become an LCD screen in the cab that the driver looks at to represent a mirror, but it shows a different picture. And I think you could probably do that and put that into the helmets. Whether or not the riders would like it or not, it would have to be up to individual taste, but it could be used as a safety thing because obviously then you could project yellow flags and things into the helmet. And there's a lot of things that could be done there, I think, with it. It just would have to be a standardized system that everyone would have access to.

The question then becomes who pays for the development and is it the unfair advantage that some people have, some people don't have. But again, you could implement it underneath the grounds of safety. And if you had different screens that a rider could toggle through, well, I would prefer to have one in the center that I look up and see it just as a rear view mirror. Like I said, I would like to have it as peripheral, fill in a void because maybe I really can't see to 180 degrees, my eyes won't let me go there. You could never see your ears if it wasn't for a mirror, right?

So what if you encapsulated that to make it so that it felt like maybe you had 270 degrees of vision as opposed to say just 180? So it was really a cool idea. I thought it was really cool just for that part of it and whatnot. So implementation is the key, digital mirroring and stuff and all that. And it's more there, but hey, it's a cool idea.

And why not? And the more micro technology gets, I suppose the easier it is to integrate it into something like a crash helmet. Although there's all sorts of regulations around how crash helmets operate from a performance perspective, from a safety perspective in the event of a crash, for example. So the more stuff you're cramming in there, I suppose the more difficult that becomes. But I'm sure I can recall years ago, and this would have been done, I suppose with small scale mirrors, I kind of like a rear view mirror kind of just above the eye line in a helmet.

And I'm sure it was trial for a little while, but people were having difficulties with motion sickness when they looked at it and stuff. And obviously, if you're not looking where you're going and you're looking at something else, I suppose that's where a HUD would be a benefit, but it's very close in the visor, unlike a HUD on a car windscreen, like I've got on my car, which is brilliant, but it's not right in your face. So yeah, it's tricky, but it's a good idea. I mean, for those of you who have seen the old on any Sunday movie, classic Bruce Brown, yeah, Bruce, because Dana's his son, Bruce Brown movie about motorcycle racing in the late 60s, first part of the 70s. If you look closely at Malcolm Smith, he has a visor view visor, which was motocross helmet, open face that Malcolm Smith had.

It had the classic square visor that snapped onto the three buttons that were on the helmet, but it had two little mirrors that were at the end of the visor that were maybe an inch square by maybe a half inch tall, and you could glance in and you could see things that were behind you. So if that worked in the 70s or late 60s or 70s, whenever that movie was made, then why couldn't it work as a heads up display inside of, but that's where I came up with my idea of like a peripherally was from that. So. And like some cars now, you don't have a wing mirror, you have like a little- Right, big trucks here in America have one that way too. Digital image, don't you?

Yeah, on the inside, yeah. So the technology is there. It is. One last one, Jim, because we mustn't move on. The one person we haven't mentioned yet.

Yes, Gary. Is Gary, Gary Schaave. So he had a very reasonable question about is, with returning to the woes of HRC, is Alberto Pooch and his style of management the issue there? I think you replied to Gary, or a couple of people did. Your take, Jim, on that one was?

You know, I do think that Pooch's style is very different to the style that say Lovio Suppo had. You kind of got the impression from Suppo that he was a very hard-nosed Italian. And if he wanted something, he sort of stand up to, is not the right word, but pushed back against the factories to get what the riders wanted. I think he maybe had the riders at heart, maybe a little bit more than say, Pooch does. Did Pooch really bring Marquez to Honda?

No, he didn't. He was responsible for Asia Talent Cup. And yes, they found Aguro there. They found some Cat Troncher there, but they're sort of mired in Moto 2 land. And again, there isn't room at the end, right, in Moto GP.

But Pooch seems to be more of a pushover laid back kind of a guy. And I'm not so sure how well that works. I think he likes to think about things from a committee standpoint and get everybody's opinion on what they want. Now, was there a coup to actually remove Suppo and put Pooch in there? Maybe, was it led by Marquez?

Don't know. Somebody needs to write a book on all that. But I think Gary makes a valid point. I think we tend to do this with sports teams a lot more than we do with like motor sports teams. My example is hockey, because I follow hockey in the winter because it's the only sport that's fast enough to keep my attention.

But one of the things that happens, if you have a team that is losing, one of the first things that happens is the coach is fired and he's replaced with a different coach. Why does Honda's situation in motor sports any different than what happens to a hockey team that isn't winning? Not a lot, right? You can try to get different riders. Well, that hasn't worked.

If you've got to get different players, that hasn't worked. Then what do you got to look at? It's your style of play. Well, who dictates the style of play? Well, the coach does.

But the coach has to work with whatever players that happen to be presented to him. It was just like, Pooch would have to work with whatever Honda engineers are giving him, but you've got to go back to, in a hockey term, you got to go back to your general manager as the coach and say, look, I need a fast winger. I need a guy who can play defense. I need a better goalie. And you've got to go back to your general manager and say, look, the riders need to have this.

They need more traction, better connection between throttle and tire. They need less chatter in the front end. Now, are you taking the advice of only your star player, i.e. Marquez, saying that this isn't working? Or do you got to listen to everybody else who's also riding on a Honda?

And I think that is one of the core strengths of Ducati, Ducati wins. Who's over in that pit? Gigi Delinia, who's the other guy I can never remember, Rich? You know his name. In which team?

In Ducati. He's... Davide Tardazzi? No, not Tardazzi. That one I know.

The other one. Paolo Ciabatti. Ciabatti, that's it. Ciabatti's over there congratulating everybody. You know that Ducati is listening to what every rider says about that bike.

They listen to what Ben Yaya says. They listen to what Bascinini says. They listen to what Martins says. They listen to what Zarco says. They'll listen to what Alex Marquez says.

And they'll listen to what Fabio Gd'Antonio, Luca Marini and Vizecchi are all saying about that motorcycle. And I wouldn't be surprised if Digi Delinia being the kind of engineering guy that he is, doesn't have some form that has a list of things on that form that says, what did you like about the bike today? Oh, the hand really nice. What was good about the handle? You know, sort of a 10 bullet line list or whatever.

I always heard that Ross Braun did that in Formula One. He had a sheet that he would give to all the drivers at the end of every test, every race. And they had to fill out what worked, what didn't work. He actually did that with the crew too, about pit stops and strategy and all that. You know, what worked, what didn't work kind of thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if Delinia doesn't have something like that. But it shows that they're taking a larger sum of data and looking at like parsing that out to where they understand that we'll look of the six riders, right? No, can't be six, be three, yeah, six. Four, eight riders that are on Ducati bikes. Five of them are complaining about lack of precision with the throttle, with its feel to the rear tire.

Oh, well, maybe we need to work on that. Now, does that mean it's the traction control? Well, three of them think it's the traction control, but one of them thinks it's the spark timing, whatever, that's causing the problem. So, I think they take that all in as a whole, where I don't think Honda is holistically speaking there. Now, is that Puget's fault?

I don't know, but I get the idea that when Stoner was there with Supo, Supo would be like, no, this is what's right and this is what's wrong with the bike and you need to fix this part of that bike, right? No, that's just my take. This has come up before when, I mean, not just us, I mean, the pushback wasn't directed at us, but we have sort of reflected some criticisms around, say, Alain Jarvis, who would be the, you know, the counterpart figure from Yamaha's point of view to say Alberto Pooch. And I know a couple of journalists have said, you can't blame them, they're not engineers, they're team managers, they manage the race team, the test team, whatever, but they're not engineering the bike, they're not doing the R&D back at base. I mean, your point about Ducati and the way that Ducati works, Jim, I think a really crucial element here, and this is not a judgment in any way, shape or form, it's a pure observation, which is provable while watching the TV, they're all European.

In fact, most of them are Italian, so they're all talking the same language within a culture that's common to all of them. And I don't think we can underestimate how effective that is, allied to good communication. I mean, Ross Braun was always said to be the absolute master communicator, understanding people, getting the best out of people. And you do kind of, I always get this impression that because the sort of latent advantage from an engineering standpoint has dissipated away for the Japanese factories now, so they can afford to be a bit poor on occasion because the bikes were so much better than the competition at that time. That's gone now.

And you kind of look at, I mean, bless him, he's a funny looking bloke, but Ken Kawahuchi, who came across from Suzuki, and he stands in the pits, and he with his little clipboard, with this sort of funny little kind of downturned mouth, his sort of grumpy looking face, watching yet another Honda barrel rolling itself into pieces, and it's just completely emotionless. And you just wonder how that whole dynamic between the Europeans and the Japanese kind of works in practical reality sense, in terms of that way that whole communication stream works. And then you sort of factor in, and it's not a criticism, as I've said many times, but the way the Japanese culture works in terms of pride and not wanting to admit that something's wrong or hasn't worked and all this sort of stuff. And you can kind of see where the rock sort of sets in. But Gary's point, which I think was a good one, was counter to that, just Pooch focused too much on pushing the riders.

And he makes the point that if you look across to the Yamaha garage, okay, they might not be going as fast on a given lap as maybe the Hondas do, and they're not crashing, but their riders are not all in hospital for long periods of time. So, yin and yang, innit, I suppose, at the end of the day, but yeah. But that's- Good point, Gary, I mean, as always. I don't doubt that that could be a part of it too, but I also, at least in the case of Marquez, he's not wired to ride within himself, right? It's just not, I think Quattroraro has been down enough to know that he can't push beyond a certain point.

Now, the interesting thing is how come Morbidele can't be as fast as Quattroraro? Again, then again, why isn't Mir as fast as Marc Marquez? It all swings around though. I apologize for this, Rich, but who was it who was the team manager for Suzuki when they won the world championship? Can't think of his name.

Definitely Privio. Privio. Privio was known as a man who was a communicator, who was the single point of contact between the two entities. They won a world championship, and the bikes were looking mighty good in 21. And what happened when he left to go to Formula One?

The team fell apart because it was directionless because there wasn't the communication. And I think that's what you're seeing, and it's a very valid point. It's proven by Suzuki. I think it's proven by Ducati. Again, you have all Italians talking in Italian to each other, and you have this sense of family.

And it's a cultural difference that's there. I mean, in all honesty, it's that way from Formula One, because if you think of it, Honda, every time that they've been world champions, they just supplied the motor, but they always were integrated into the teams. They put 10, 15 Japanese engineers that spoke good English. They lived in England. They worked with the chassis to be sure that everything was functionally correct so that they would be fast.

You look at the teams that aren't fast in Formula One, i.e. Toyota, they were gonna do it their way. Well, we're gonna be in Germany. Okay. All the special bits and bobs are in England and you're in Germany, but okay, okay, okay.

Ferrari's in Italy. So I see your point, but they always designed a car by committee. There was never that focus of what was going on. And again, I think, go ahead. Wood for the trees, Jim, or forest for the trees, as you might say in the States, isn't it?

Oh yeah, it's this exact same concept. Honda has essentially lost their way. They lost their way because the person who was winning crashed a bike and hurting himself so bad, he hasn't been able to ride for two years. Again, we could all sit here and go ifs and buts or candy and nuts, but if Marquez decides, gee, third place is good enough today as opposed to, no, I'm gonna go catch everybody and win from having Rudin off the track, we're in a completely different situation with Honda. But over the years- I still think we would have wound up in the same place, though, Jim, I think it would have just unwound slightly slower.

We might be here. I will not disagree with you on that because the Ducatis, the KTMs have advanced more than the Hondas because Honda would be like, well, we don't need to be any better. We've talked about this earlier, so we're not gonna repeat it. But you also have that fact, and I think kind of lost where I was here with this one, but again, you have a different story if Marquez isn't crashed, right? Well, think about it.

Look, when Honda has always had someone who hasn't really been a prima donna, if you will, and demanded certain things out of that bike, when they get lost in their development, what do they do? They just go find horsepower, say, oh, we're just gonna make a faster bike. That isn't gonna work anymore. It's been proven by Ducati, based on how their chassis is, that it is now the sum parts of it. It just can't be blindingly fast in a straight line.

Ducati was that way for years. Couldn't go around corners. Fundamentally, Gigi Delinia has looked at ways in the rule book to be able to make that motorcycle go around corners better. Yet somehow Honda has decided not to think about that. And I think you hit the nail on the head earlier, Jim, actually, when you said, and we don't know that this is the case, but strongly suspect that it is, that when Gigi Delinia is looking at his priority list, it's a pretty short list, because you can only tackle a few things at any one point in time.

It's a little bit like, and I'm going well for tangent now, and I'm gonna get absolutely lambasted for this if I go too far with this, but it's like, you know, the UN climate change committee is 120 priorities for tackling climate change. If you've got 120 priorities, you have no priorities, because you cannot tackle a list that big. You have to have, like the fingers on one hand or less, is what priorities are. And you start with the most crucial one, and then you move on to the next one, assuming you've solved the first one, or you haven't created a slightly different priority problem that becomes number one or number two on the list, you know? That's the way priorities work.

You can't have hundreds of priorities, because then you've just got chaos, and you're in the whole, can't see the woods for the trees again. And you do get the sense that Honda in particular, and Yamaha, I think to a lesser extent, are kind of in that position anyway, because they've fallen behind in terms of the key areas of bike development that are making the Europeans fast. And then if you throw into the mix, let's say a poor communicator or toxic kind of personality, that's that kind of crucial, the thing that David de Brivio did so well for Suzuki in terms of the intermediary between the race team and the riders and the technical leadership back in, wherever in Japan in that particular case, you know, I see where Gary's coming from with the observation around Alberto Pidge, who has a quite a significant reputation for the way he goes about doing things, which has been very effective in the past, but you know, equally can be pretty corrosive as well. And Lin Jarvis, you know, kind of sits probably somewhere in the middle of, you know, Brivio and Pooch in terms of the way he goes about things, you know, we don't really know, but yeah, you can see how all of these things mount up to being an almost insurmountable problem, and they need a sort of a new talisman to come in, both in terms of riders probably, and in terms of team personnel, particularly leadership, because you know, you can't underestimate the word leadership, you know, it's so crucial. I think that was one of the things about Tenkata that was wicked back in the day, right?

Like Tenkata had a strong vision of what they wanted in a bike that they could make a super bike, right? They had a 600 Super Sport Honda that, when they went to Japan one year, that bike never came back, because Honda didn't know how come that bike was that fast. Right? So these guys had a way to do it, right? Eventually that relationship got soured, and Tenkata went to, I don't remember what.

Yamaha. Yamaha, okay. Yeah, they run Yamaha. Okay, so Tenkata's running Yamaha. I knew they switched, I just couldn't remember who.

But I mean, that's the kind of thing you're talking about. I would, you know, I think that HRC needs to have a team that is a well-run team, a la LCR, Luchinelli, right? That has that team home feel, but has the five Japanese engineers that are there to cover the five things that they need to be a part of. You know, a guy with chassis design, a guy with the engine, whatever, right? Electronics.

Whatever, an electronics guy or whatever. But even that, you're basically all down to the same ECU electronics package, basically. And even at that, they started hiring the people who, it was Magneti Morelli, who finally figured that came to be fine. And even then, they started hiring Italians who knew the system, or some people from away from it. So as much as what Yamaha and Honda maybe at one point got resources taken from them, and you know, people cherry pick these people out, they need to start finding the talent and bringing them back in again, but they have to listen to what they have to say, that this isn't right, or this isn't, this is right, this is wrong, or whatever.

It's a tough place to be, and you gotta believe that the whole environment is getting even more toxic. And I also think this, if Mr. Honda was there, and he would be, he listened, I mean, he listened, Freddie had his ear back in the day, and they did what they needed to do to get it done based on what Freddie wanted. And I think that that has been lost somewhere. And I just call it culture, call it the world's changed, and Honda hasn't, I don't know.

But it seems like their R&D isn't what it once was. Well, I think the other problem, Jim, is that back in Freddie's day, you probably had a team of 20 people, now you've got a team of several hundred probably, and it's a whole different beast. Yeah, it's difficult. I also think it's, again, if you think about it, KTM is obviously headquartered in Austria. Ducati's obviously in Italy and Bologna, right?

It's real easy for them to be there, they're central, they are where their factory is, not halfway around the world. And good grief, what is the time difference between Europe and Japan? Is it 12 hours, Rich? Gotta be something like that. Yeah, I think it's six, because I know it's six for us, but I know it's like, from central US, it's 12 hour time difference to Tokyo.

Because I remember we used to have to deal with that when I used to work at other places, but yeah. So it's, no matter how you look at it, it's gonna be difficult to get that out of there, and it's just what it is. But I think Honda needs to clean house at some point. If they truly wanna get back at it, they need to clean house, and if that means Marquez goes, and that means Mir goes fine, then that means Puge needs to go too. Hey, go run the Asia Talent Comp, we're gonna find some what can take on the whole position of being the technical lead, and he is that liaison between people, or whoever, pick your person who's going to be there.

They also need to get Kalex out of the mix. I'm sorry, they need to get back, they need to get back into doing it all themselves, and make it happen. And if that means really basically just going back to scratch, and I think it is, you're gonna have to relook at everything from a different standpoint. And I think, again, not having Marquez there will help them, I hate to see it happen. It's an ugly divorce, but if you've got, as you said, people who don't have a preconceived notion of what a MotoGP bike should feel like, then all they're gonna say is, I don't feel the traction, or I can't feel the front, or whatever it all is, it'll eventually work.

It's just gonna take time to dig themselves out. Gotta go back to basics. Anyway, I mean, so I'm trying to quickly route through this list, so Gary, Jacob, Don, who else did we have, Lee, and Jeremy, he have Odo Loli Chocolate fame. Hey, when are we gonna get the MotoPod branded chocolate bars, Jim? I don't know.

I'm gonna have to throw that out there. I know, so Jeremy's in Pennsylvania, so he might be at pit race after asking, where's my chocolate? There you go. Thanks, guys. I mean, we haven't done justice to all of the wordage that came in, but I mean, I kind of copy pasted onto a Word document the majority of what came in that had been paraphrasing our way through, and it kind of went through seven pages, and I had pretty narrow margins on my Word document and quite a small font.

So there was a lot of stuff there, but all great stuff. So thank you to everybody for that. Jim, just before we go off, because I guess we're running way over two hours already. Let me just, in 120 seconds or so, if I can, just quickly route through a couple of World Superbike and BSP things, and then we'll be out of here, I guess. So World Superbike, a couple of things I just wanted to touch on.

Big debate going on at the moment in terms of who goes where within the BMW camp. So looks like Scott Redding might well be out of the works BMW squad, because Vandermark, I think has a contract for next year, and they've already signed top rack to go in from Yamaha next year. So the big debate, we're waiting to hear where Scott Redding goes. So that's a piece of news that will come. Ducati conundrum in World Superbike continues in terms of the, well, firstly, the works ride alongside Bautista.

So you've got Rinaldi, Bassani, even Andrea Iannoni, as we were talking about in the mix, possibly a Zarco, depending on what happens in MotoGP. Couple of other Ducatis that might be on the grid next year. So looks like Andrea Iannoni will be in World Superbike next year, it's just not clear which Ducati satellite team he will be in. So that one we will find out fairly shortly, I would imagine. Great three races at Imola last weekend.

I mean, what a track that is. It's a shame MotoGP can't go there for safety grounds reasons, but three brilliant, brilliant races at Imola. A rare slip up this year from Bautista, who crashed on the first lap of race three. So, I mean, he's still comfortably ahead in the points by 70 points from Toprak, but what was it? Four years ago, three or four years ago, when Bautista had a huge lead on the Ducati and then just couldn't stop crashing and ultimately conceded the championship to Johnny Ray.

I don't think that's going to happen this year, but that was a rare mistake from him. We're going to be, or they are going to be at the Czech Republic round in most this coming weekend. So we'll have a few things to say about that briefly next time we get together and apologies to everybody. Hopefully some people have heard the part one of the Donnington rider interviews that I did put out two weeks ago. I think it was, there is a second part to that, which is going to be Chas Davis and a chat with Greg Haynes again.

I'm going to try and edit that one up next week, Jim. I think I said, didn't know when I'm on the holes and see if we can get that one out after this show has gone out on air. And then very briefly, BSB, I've got a shout out to Toby Bridewell, my local rider lives 20 miles up the road from here. He has won five of the last six races in BSB. So again, honor Ducati Panigale V4, the weapon of choice in world super bike at the minute and well, and domestic championships as well.

So the shakeup in the point system in BSB, which we touched on a little while back means that the championship is still quite close. So Bridewell's 258 points, his teammate Glen Irwin is behind on 223 and a half. So all to play for there. And Thruxton will be the next BSB round in two weeks from now. I'll be there.

So again, hopefully we'll catch up and might see a few people. And Jim, you've already mentioned you're going to be- In pit race, which is- The upcoming race, although there's a round at the ridge. No, no, no. Their next Moto America's next race is in Brainerd, Minnesota. And then from Brainerd, they will come to pit race in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that it will be, I believe that is 16, 17, 18 of Augusts, a week behind your Thruxton race.

Yeah. Okay. So we'll catch up on some of that in due course. So I think that's probably about the top and tail of it. Yep.

I think it is. That's it for the show guys. It's a long one. Sorry about that. But there was so much news to talk about and run down through it.

Just took a while to get through all that. And a lot of listener feedback. We promised that we would have that show. So we should, I'm hoping to get ahold of Scott Bolden soon and have a Moto America catch up with him. And I will be, as said, at the Moto America race in Pittsburgh, which you're going to be off to holiday here, which enjoy it, sir.

Relax. Thank you. Drink a few cold beverages. Yeah. And as I said, I'll be at Thruxton BSB as soon as I get back.

So catch up with, hopefully catch up with a few riders and friends there as well. So with that folks, we are going to sign off. I'll ask you all to ride safe. Ciao everybody. See you next time.