The Michael Gougis Interview

Motopod, proudly supported by Road Skin, a UK label specializing in protective outerwear for motorcyclists. Modern biker clothing that you can wear all day long and engineered to save your skin. For the road, for life, visit roadskin.co.uk. Hello and welcome to Motopod, the Internet radio show all about motorcycle road racing. I'm Jim McDowell and this is episode number 791, a special interview episode.

I had the great pleasure to interview Michael Goudjus, who is editor at large for Road Racing World. He is a professor. He is a motorcycle racer, a champion motorcycle racer with his SV650 Suzuki. And he's also recently written a book called Legend. Mark Marquez, 2019 MotoGP World Championship.

He was over in Jerez for the 4th Street Bike Test and we were able to hook up and have a conversation. We talked about many things. We tried to talk about the book, but that didn't seem to work out too well. As two guys who love motorcycles, you know what we did. We talked about everything, super bikes, MotoGP.

We delved into Formula One comparisons of MotoGP about shapeshifting and aerodynamics and tires and on and on and on and on. It's a far ranging interview that we were able to accomplish. Definitely someone else that I would like to have back on the show and he's offered. And so I'm sure we'll have another off season talk and talk more about other things that have gone on in the sport and in motorcycling in general. But as much as we tried, we tried to keep to the book and about what's in the book.

So hopefully you'll enjoy it. Now, I need to apologize slightly for the audio from Mike's end. He was at the Jerez Superbike Test. So occasionally you get a bike sound that happens in the background. Occasionally there was his Mike picked up some other journalists who were in the media center where he was during that.

I tried to cut out as much of the background noise as I could where I could. So with that, we'll just go straight to the interview. Hey, Motor Powders. It's Jim with a special guest interview. With me is a man who is a professor, a motorcycle racer, a champion motorcycle racer and a full-time journalist.

He's written a book about Marc Marquez that we want to talk about. Please welcome to the show, Michael Gougez. Michael, thank you for being on MotorPod. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

No worries. I'm going to start with a really wild thing. I'm going to start with a question right off the bat first. Since you're at or were at the Superbikes races this past weekend, we have seen in my mind this real resurgence of world superbike racing. And when I think back and I look at it, I think about, you know, I remember 502 strokes and that was like the coolest thing on the planet in GP.

And they said, hey, we're going to do this thing called Superbike racing. It was going to be a world championship and it's four strokes. Cool. Here's a two stroke. Here's a four stroke.

And they sort of existed, you know, equally on each side. But then here comes MotoGP 2002. Hey, we're going to run a four stroke. And then it was like, it seemed like World Superbike suffered and became this anomaly that nobody really cared about. But now it has this great resurgence.

It's in the forefront. Could you explain why? Is it just the riders who have happened to be here now? Or is it rules? Is it format?

Well, if I were to guess, it would be in part because what we're seeing is higher performance motorcycles in World Superbike, higher spec, more technology, and the bikes are just cooler. Let's face it. We are we are fans of motorcycle racing in part because we love the technology. OK. So we go to the track to watch them race stuff that we can't get our hands on.

And when you look at the Panigale V4R and the BMW, the M1000RR up close, it's unobtainable. You know, it's stuff that we could never have. So World Superbike has risen and fallen in popularity over the years. But I think if you look back at it, a lot of the times when it was at its most popular, they had the greatest amount of factory involvement and the greatest amount of technology. I mean, you know, those I mean, these bikes are really freaking amazing, Jim, when they do tests, postseason tests where the Superbikes and the MotoGP bikes are on the track at the same time, the lap time differences are remarkably close.

Now, we're seeing right now the early days of aerodynamic development in World Superbikes. They're nowhere near as aerodynamically sophisticated and advanced as the MotoGP machines are right now. But they're getting there. They're not far off in terms of horsepower when it comes to MotoGP. And the really it's just like one notch down in sophistication.

So that's where I think you're seeing some of the excitement and some of the interest in it is just they're amazing machines. I'm over I'm still out here in Haaretz. I'm covering the first 2025 season test, which is taking place today. And I've got a chance to look at some of the bikes up close. Testing days are nice because there's fewer press people and fewer executives around.

You can get up much closer to the machines and you look at them and you're like. You know, these things are so amazing that it wasn't that long ago that one of these would have been on the front row of a MotoGP race. You know, they're that good. They're really that good. I tell you, the riders are no slouches either.

You know, you look at what they can do and you watch it up close. Just like it's amazing. If I could go on for just a second longer. Sure. I was watching Toprak here this weekend.

I was watching him going to turn one here at Haaretz from right at the edge of the track where the photographers can stand and to watch what he does to slow that BMW down. It looks like it defies the laws of physics. His whole body is up out of the seat and his torso is fully off center of the bike. So he's got his weight shifted all the way to the inside. His leg is dangling so far out that his his boot is on the ground.

The rear wheel is up and the front wheel is actually turned. Now, he does this in all these things he's trying to do to prevent the bike from pivoting around the front axle and to try to prevent it from swinging the wrong direction. But it's just I'm looking at it going, if you ever saw me on a motorcycle in that configuration, please call the ambulance because it's not going to end well for me. You look at people like that and it really is a generational talent. And that's part of the reason I think that this particular element of the sport is so incredibly interesting.

Yeah, I saw on Instagram, Bumota had posted the new 998. That looked like a very serious piece of kit of unattainable. I mean, it just has everything that the googly eyed engineer here wants to see on a motorcycle. I'm just like, it's just insane. I mean, those are the things that you things that I always wanted when I was racing club.

You know, hey, I wanted a set of Olin's. I wanted to you know, I felt great when I got a Penske rear shock and we've you know, that just transformed Honda that we had, you know, just those things is all there. But you opened the door here. So I'll ask this question. Sure.

The world's super bikes are becoming much more aero dependent, much like our motor GP counterparts. Yes. Now there are people who believe on one side that, hey, that's fine. It is a motor GP is a run, which you brung unlimited weapon type of class. So do whatever you want to do to be the fastest person around that circuit.

There's another group of people that sit on the other side and go, no, that isn't a motorcycle. That's a low level aircraft. And so the truth is somewhere in between. So do you think that the arrow has hurt or helped each sport, each each class? You know, your observation is absolutely correct.

I confess to occasionally watching Formula One cars. And I heard a comment a few years back from one of the announcers who said something that really stuck with me because the drivers were complaining about a change in the wind direction that had made the cars more difficult. I think they were in Brazil and the announcer said, you know, you fly these things as much as you drive them now. And I love that phrase. Yes.

Racing is supposed to drive progress. Okay. Racing is supposed to drive technological innovation, but I think we need to be careful about which way we drive it. It is fascinating and long overdue, really, for us to see the sort of aerodynamic development that we've seen in motorcycles, basically up until seven, six or seven years ago, it was all just about the streamline. That was, I mean, all you were trying to do was reduce drag.

The I see two main problems with unlimited aerodynamic development on motorcycles. Number one, generally speaking, it's pointless on the street. Okay. I mean, Aero works best at speeds. It starts to work at speeds that aren't really legal anywhere in the United States on the street.

So a lot of what we see, I think, you know, in terms of seeing wings on street bikes now, it's for show, you know, it's very much, hey, look at me. I've got, you know, look at this. Look at the size of my wings. You know, it's sort of like that when the impact on anything, on anything you should be doing on the street is minimal at best. Okay.

Your other problem is that the more that you are dependent on Aero, particularly the on the front end of the motorcycle, the harder it is to ride close to another rider and to safely break, especially break behind another rider. A lot of those crashes we've seen in the past three years and it's MotoGP. These are the best riders on the planet. Why in the world are they running into each other from behind? Like Australia?

Yeah, I was going to say, just like you saw, what was it, Pezetki hit Gagnolez, you know, that's not the first time we've seen exactly that crash at turn one at Phillip Island. Okay. You know, what is happening is that when you get into the draft of another bike, when you're on the brakes, you start to lose some of your, some of your downforce on the front end and that leads to less traction at the front end. So you're either going to have to let off the brakes slightly in order to avoid the wheel from under rotating or locking more than it already is, or the wheel just locks up and you crash, you know. So and it's not like it's, it's not like you can see where the soft air is from the, from the bike in front of you.

You're almost trying to feel where it is and modulate the brakes. And when you think about that, it's remarkable that it really doesn't happen more often, you know, that to me is one of the larger dangers of unrestricted, unregulated aerodynamic development. You put riders in a position where it's much more difficult to remain completely in control of your machine at exactly the time and the place on the track where you need to be most in control, you know. I mean, I've heard that there's other downsides. I've heard riders talk about how they can't, it's harder to pass now because you can't follow a rider out of a corner.

The wings give you downforce as you're coming out on the front end. So if you're right behind another rider, once again, they're taking clean air off of your wing and you get more wheelie than they do. So you can't accelerate as quickly as they can. That makes it harder to get the speed that you need to pass at the end of the next straightaway. So that's, you know, that's kind of the way I look at it.

One other thing, since we're on this topic, the hydraulics, the lowering devices, way more complicated than you're ever going to see on the street. You can do that electronically, you know, and if they allow it, the rules allowed it, all the engineers in the MotoGP paddock would tell you we would much rather just do it electronically, but we can't. So we have these incredibly complicated hydraulic systems. It's a hydraulic computer, basically. That's exactly what it is.

Yeah, it's essentially, I always I use this analysis. It's Alan Turing's first computer pushing hydraulic valves around, which is basically what it is. I mean, that was kind of 1995-ish Formula One cars for that way. Yeah, fully active suspension. It was the same idea.

It's just been borrowed and put onto a MotoGP bike. But yeah, that whole thing. I'm personally glad that they decided to ban the ride height devices to shape shape. I love that they got rid of the hole shot device as well. I was surprised that they didn't, you know, there's a very strong argument that can be made from a rider safety standpoint that when you let go of the clutch, the bike's going to kind of want to come over.

And if you have the hole shot device, you're less likely to have that wheelie off the line. But I see the point. We've seen numerous times where the hole shot device has not disengaged, especially if there's a relatively medium speed corner that doesn't require a vast amount of braking at the first turn. So I think it was a good move by the organizers. And now they're going to go limit the aerodynamics as well.

You've got. I'll call them two basic wings that you're allowed to place on the front of the motorcycle to sort of just keep the front end down, which I think is appropriate. I don't think they need more than that. I mean, these rear seat wings and bat wings on the back of the gate of the gas gas and everything else that they have is a bit. Strange.

It's expensive. The money is the part that I really think is the big problem. I mean, OK, speeds money. How fast do you want to go? I understand.

I get that. I mean, you know, you're good. We would sometimes go to to try to go to make a national as a club guy and you go there, you got your 600, you got maybe three sets of wheels. You've got a few bits and bobs, extra pieces of fairing bodywork. And what you've got is what you got.

You say, well, I'm going to go make this super sport race. And there's, you know, well, for me, there was like, do Hummel and then Bostrom and all these guys are riding around mid Ohio and you walk past their truck. And there's four sets of Olin's. There's four sets of suspension. There's five rear shocks on the wall.

There's, you know, 14 different sets of wheels. And you know that the motor that these guys got got every production part where every crank, every rod was the maximum allowable length by tolerance all in that motor to get that last bit of CC in it. And like, yeah, I'm going to make that feel those guys. You know, look, I just based on the bike alone, I'm not going to get there, let alone the fact that my riding ability doesn't even keep me into the same one. I mean, I fully remember going into one at mid Ohio, having gone faster through that turn than I ever thought I could even go by.

And right. Y'all do Hummel runs around the outside on the concrete berm as if it was like normal to be five times faster than what Jim's going. So I get where you are. I get all of that. I get every bit of that in a way that is people.

Let me throw something in here real quick. This is funny from this morning. We're talking about there's money and then there's money. So Bimoda Kawasaki introduced the new KB 998 this morning. They had the area in front of the garage roped off, you know, like a VIP area and a nightclub, and they had custom made carpets and they had a guy come out just before they rolled the bike out.

And vacuumed the carpets when you have a job, when you have a team whose job it is to vacuum the presentation carpets. Now your factory. So the again, you know, the real problem with Aero is that, you know, you're just spending so much money, you know, you can see the logical end of this tunnel in the Formula One world. Well, you've got teams running, you know, tunnel wind tunnel test, you know, if if they would let them, they would do it 24 seven, you know, and you're spending it in the world of motorcycle and you're spending all of that money on stuff that you just don't need on a street bike. That becomes a harder and harder sell to the board of directors.

You know, so I think that that's a that's a one of your one of your larger problems. I'll tell you one more thing about the hydraulics is that when you think about it, what that really meant was movable aerodynamic devices, correct? Because you're you're moving the attitude of the machine and no other motorsport allows that. So I'm really happy to see a lot of that going away. Personally, it's just my opinion.

I think they should have gone further with the front wings trimming them. You know how they had the Honda CBR 1000 has that little rack of small ducks on the side of the fairing, the new ones, something like that. Keeping it that minimal would have been ideal for me. But that's just me, you know. But you're an engineer.

You know how hard it is to write a rulebook to prevent clever guys like you from taking advantage of every loophole in that, you know, in that rulebook. So yeah, there's a there's a few things that exist in the we're a rulebook now that didn't when we were club racing. And I'm just going to leave it at that. I don't really want to get into it. You have to remember, I'm the guy you knew you'd asked about my racing background.

When I was racing at Willow Springs, I started out on small lightweight twins bikes because I had a budget and I knew I couldn't afford to race leader bikes. I had heard of a guy who built SV 650s with reduced strokes because the SV 650 came from an SV 400 Japanese model. You throw the 400 crank into the 650 cases, spin up a couple of rods at Corrillo and you have a bike that displaces 504 CCs. My wife, who went to law school, read the rulebook in Willow Springs carefully for me determined that for the classes, I wanted to race 504 CCs done this way would be legal. And it was beautiful because there was my main competitor was not happy to see me show up with that.

And he couldn't believe it. But it was so funny when we went to the we went to the office and I brought I brought Sandy with me and she had a copy of the rulebook. I was like, all right, what do you guys want to know? You can talk to my lawyer. But that's but that's part of the fun of racing, right?

What do they say? The race begins when the rulebook is published. Yeah, we always had a saying. My dad and I had a saying that it wasn't so much the black and white of the rulebook, but it was the gray in between. There you go.

I love it. Absolutely love it. Yeah. So I mean, that's where we were. It'll be really interesting to see what we see on MotoGP bikes in 2025 and 2026.

I think KTM has just started to scratch the surface of what you can do. The air back behind the rider's legs is really dirty. So there's only so much you can do there. But seeing those battling things attached to the swing arm gives you an idea of just how hard they're looking for gains everywhere. And I think unless we do some sort of unless either Dorna or the teams get together and go, hey, you know what?

We just need to stop going down this path. And we're we're all going to vote to do it unilaterally, which I think is very unlikely. I think we're going to see something really, really interesting and unique stuff in the next two seasons on the grid there. All right. So we could do this on and on and on.

And I think we should do this on and on as an offseason. We get there's a whole bunch I'd like to talk about, like Liberty Media. And what do you think that that's going to do and all this other things? It's all there. But the main purpose of this interview is to talk about your book.

So I want to kind of go to your background a little bit. Right. We forgot the important part while we're here. We're talking about your book. And so I definitely have to have you back on again, Mike.

There's no question about that. But tell us here, what is one of your earliest memories of motorcycle road racing? Like, was there a family connection? Did your dad take you to the track? Was it just something your buddies?

You and your buddies just went to Willow one time. You just got the buzz. Now, my my parents hated motorcycles. I wasn't allowed to have one until I moved out. Part of the reason I moved out, you know, so you get a motorcycle.

But my very first comprehension awareness is the word I'm looking for. Of motorcycle road racing came from an article in Sports Illustrated. And I don't even remember how old I was. I was definitely in single digits. And they did an article on the Daytona 200.

And this was back when guys like Kenny Roberts were running the Yamaha Bumblebee, the yellow, black and white. And what the OWS 74, 76, something like that. A something like that. I honestly don't remember. But I just remember looking at those things and thinking, those are the coolest machines I have ever seen.

And one of these days, I'm going to do that. You know, I have. I saw a guy, he raced Isle of Man, the Northwest 200, that sort of thing. For Honda. And I saw an interview with him a few years back.

And he expressed how I feel as an adult about that moment when you realize that you saw one of these things. It's like, oh, my God. He said, when I was a kid, I always wanted to be a spaceman and have my own rocket. He said, I'm never going to be an astronaut. I'm never going to have a rocket.

And then he padded the bike and he said, but I have this. And this is pretty freaking close. And, you know, that's how I feel about these things when I see them. And when I and I remembered, you know, just reading that article, it's just like, oh, my God, how do how do I do this? And it took probably another 30 years before I was actually able to get on the race on a racetrack, you know, but, you know, going down the back straight at Willow Springs, you know, that first weekend, I was just like, I can't believe I'm doing this.

This is the coolest thing on the planet. You know, so yeah. So you sort of came into this in the heyday, what I call the heyday of motorcycle road racing, the five hundred two strokes that were just wicked. Yes. Who was your favorite rider of that two stroke?

Oh, I loved I loved watching Kevin Ride. Yeah, Kevin Schwartz, because you're the Zuki guy. I expected that. Well, it was it was it was the level of excitement he brought to absolutely everything. It was like I used to say about that up here, Francisco Kelly, Kelly.

You would go into a corner and you were never quite sure if he was coming out. Kevin was sideways going in. Kevin was sideways coming out. And one of the first races I ever saw in life was the the Grand Prix at Laguna Seca. And I was sitting up on the hill and I was watching the 500s go into turn 11 and they pivot and they get on the gas and I had never seen anything accelerate like that.

It was just jaw dropping, you know. So I loved watching Kevin Ride, like I said, but just for the sheer excitement factor of it, you know, I'm really I consider myself very lucky to still get to speak to Kevin every now and then. He did the introduction for the book. And he's he's he's one of the real legends of this sport. I loved Wayne, Wayne Rainey and Mick Dewan's determination.

They I Wayne said once in an early article, I remember reading, he said, you know, I I show up at the track and I look around the paddock and I think I wonder which one of these guys is going to come second. You know, I love that attitude. I was, you know. I love the way that Dewan could just manhandle a machine around the track that and make it do things it didn't want to do. And, you know, we were talking earlier about technology and super bikes, how it's unobtainium.

You know, you looked at what they did and you knew you absolutely knew that they were doing something that you could not do. And that level of fascination with these, especially these riders, has never left me, has absolutely never left me. You know, I talk to them, I watch what they do, and I am just in awe of who they are and their ability. So that was that was a fun part of watching. Because a lot of those 500 CC Grand Prix races, not all that exciting.

You know, a couple of guys up front, first and second are separated by three seconds, five seconds, something like that, you know. But the the machines were just such beasts, you know, just watching them ride them and trying to, you know, but watching them come through the corkscrew was, I mean, just watching them do that was enough. And then years later, when I finally got to do a track day at Laguna and go through there at my own, I'm like, holy crap, how do you how did you ever do this on a 500? That was amazing, just amazing. So, yeah, those are those are a few of my favorite riders.

Yeah. I I put Ferney Spencer at the top of my list because he won a 250 and a 500 title in the same year on bikes that were so drastically different in riding style. What it took to race a 250 back then, being all corner speed, handling that mentality, that difference that that makes doing that against the fire breathing, snarly 500 that you have to literally grab by the throat of the triple clamp and fling it around to make it do what you want to do. But having done. Road as on a 250, then stopped and got on a 500 or do it the other way.

Take your pick in some races was absolutely amazing to me that he actually was able to do it. So I will always hold him as to him. He will always be the goat for my have utmost respect for all of these guys who've gotten to that level because I look at what they do and I know what I could do with a bike. And I know I can't do that, but I know what they're trying to do. I know what it takes mentally.

I know what it takes. I get what they're trying to do and what they're thinking. And I'm like, I can't process that part of it. And then they do it that much faster. I think that's one of the really cool things about being the club racer, like you and I, we can't do what they do, but we have some insight in what they are trying to do.

We're not sitting on the sidelines. They go, why don't they just do this? Because we know how hard it is to do that. You know, I always said that one of the best things about practice at a club race was when the pros show up and you got to see them do what they did from three feet away. Yeah.

Wow. So, yeah. Let me throw some. Let me. Sure.

Sorry. Good. Let me throw something at you at Freddie. Freddie was just a little bit before my time. You talked about the difference between the 500 and the 250, which is truly you're absolutely right.

Truly two different skill sets. Freddie also came into Grand Prix racing on something that was halfway in between those two. The three hundred five hundred. Exactly. You know, that bike, you rode much more like a 250 because it was significantly lighter than the four cylinder bikes and entirely different power characteristics.

So I wonder if a season of, you know, of running that thing around. And he was wicked fast on that. Oh, you know, I wonder if a season of winning that thing around taught him a thing or two about, you know, jumping on a 250. You know, it's entirely possible. It's entirely possible that there, I mean, sort of the unknown story of it all is Honda never had a 250.

They built one for him, which is wild that he's still to this day because I've interviewed him for the show. And he says that 250 is still the favorite motorcycle he ever rode. He says it was the best handling bike he ever had. And if you think about it, you're going, wait a second, Honda actually built a motorcycle that handled huh? When did that happen?

I must have missed that, you know, compared to the compared to the 500s of that era. Oh, yeah. A wheel a wheelbarrow probably. But I don't like it. I probably yes, I agree.

Right. And the 250s were light and they had half the horsepower. I mean, as long as you kept them in the power band, you know, you got to remember that was the class where guys were dragging elbow way before it was fashionable, you know. Um, that's the part that sometimes is a bit. I don't want to call it annoying, but it's the the younger generations don't understand some things and they're like, oh, my gosh.

And I have friends who I work with who are way younger than I am. And that's fine. And they know that I'm a bike guy, whatever. And they're like, hey, did you see Marquez? He had his elbow down on the ground.

Like, yeah, like Luke Catalora and everybody was doing that back in the 250s back in the day. Wanger Rieger and all those guys is like, yeah, right. Nothing new. It's just it's not. It's just that I always try to remind myself that history begins with what you can remember.

Yes. That's where your mark is in the line. So my my mark is way farther back than their mark. So they've never been introduced to the sport. They've never seen the sport until like I took them to Kota with me.

And then it was just eyeballs that became so big. You could put saucer plates in there because it's like, oh, my God, these guys are amazing. It's like, yeah, that's why we're here. Exactly. Go ahead.

I'm sorry. Didn't mean to say no. I love it. It's I mean, you're absolutely right. We're here to watch things that normal people can't do.

You know, if you if you're not amazed at what professional riders do on a top level Moto GP or world super bike machine, then you don't understand the sport. Yeah, yeah. That's my attitude. I agree. I wholeheartedly agree.

Let's try to go back to try to get to the book. You have the book thing. Well, we might get here. Maybe not. So the book is about Mark Marquez.

It's about his 2019 championship season. Mark is an amazing rider. He does things with a motorcycle that I don't think anybody can do. And not I mean, top rack is probably the closest thing to bending a motorcycle into weird shapes that Marquez can do. That's similar.

That it is not the same by any stretch of the imagination, but it is similar. But I guess the question I'm trying to ask here is what fascinated you enough to devote the time and the energy to write this book about Mark Marquez? So I had mentioned that one of the things that fascinates me about top level riders is that they're they're different than you and I, you know? And one of the things that really struck me about this particular season and this particular rider was the mentality. All racers.

OK. And I don't care if you're a club racer, you've done three times. Three times and you quit or you made a living out of it. We are different than the majority of people. You know, when I would have a bad day at the track, Sandy used to tell me, hey, you're faster than everybody who sat at home on the couch today.

And I really appreciated that. Even in that universe, Mark's mentality and always has been throughout his career has been something unique. It's not just his otherworldly talent. OK, but it's the mentality that goes along with that talent that makes him so absolutely fascinating to me. So if you look at the 2019 season, OK, he starts the season injured at seven different times during the 2019 season.

He is in second place on the last lap. He can finish second in every one of those races. OK, just sit behind the leader and finish second. And he still wins a championship. I did the numbers like by three races or something like that.

OK, Mark cannot bring himself to settle for second. You know, he passed. What was the race? I think it was quarter Roro at at Massano, where he passed quarter Roro twice on the last lap twice. No reason to do it.

None whatsoever. OK. So that level of determination that unwillingness or inability to settle for second place. Absolutely fascinating to me. And I mentioned I was a general purpose reporter became before I became a motorsports reporter.

One of the great things about being a reporter is you get to by definition, you get to interview and talk to people who are out of the ordinary. And you see this with entrepreneurs. You see this with entertainers. You see people who simply can't settle for anything less than something better than the best that they think they can do in the context of motorcycle road racing, where the consequences for getting it wrong are so great. Looking at somebody who.

You know, at Burr around where the title where he can seal the title just by sitting behind quarter Roro and still throws it in there, you know, on the last lap, you know, it's how are you not fascinated by that? How do you not want to sit down with that guy and go, what are you thinking? What do you know? How how do you how do you not want to know how you do that? I find it fascinating.

I also find it inspiring. I also find it, you know, as a way of just looking at my life on a day to day basis and asking myself, are you doing the absolute best that you can do, you know, and can you do better? So that's what I found. So absolutely astounding by it. Numerically speaking, I think it was record for greatest number of podiums in the season, greatest number of points in the season and biggest gap from first to second in a MotoGP season.

So, I mean, there's all of that, which you could say objectively marks it as one of the greatest seasons ever in the history of motorsport. But when you look further at it and look at the man who made it happen and how he made it happen, that to me is what's so amazing about it. He is of a different ilk. He is. He's he the closest comparable is Michael Schumacher in my mind, though another man who was completely driven to be the best.

Did he? Yeah. Or Ayrton Senna. Yeah. This is not a not a formal podcast, but we're going to go here for a second, because I want your.

Perspective on it, so so to me, if you think about it, Schumacher, this is me looking at what he did was amazing, because what Schumacher did is Schumacher took a team that was absolutely horrid and put people around him and motivated a whole team to do something that has essentially been unparalleled in motorsport at that time. Motorsport at that time, you could claim later on. But Hamilton and Mercedes did was of a similar thing, but it's not what Schumacher did. And I look at Schumacher and think, yeah, Schumacher was good in a car. He was a good race car driver, but he was not the talent, naturally gifted talent that Ayrton Senna was, which I think is completely two different ends of a spectrum.

Yes, because I can look at in motorcycling. I can look at Rainy versus Schwans. And the two of those guys are incredible motorcycle racers. I'm not sliding either one here. But but Schwans was probably the more gifted, natural talent of what he could do on a motorcycle where Rainy was a great talent.

But he understood that on that day, if Schwans had him, he was going to let Schwans go because he was going to take second place. Yes. Now, he was going to dog him the whole way there. He was going to make Kevin work for it. But he wasn't going to sacrifice that second place points.

It doesn't mean that one is better than the other. It's just you have to wait the situation. Well, you are not to again. You're right. It's not a Formula One podcast.

So I don't want to go too far down that path. But you're right in both disciplines, whether it's motorcycles or cars or anything, that your natural talent is only part of the equation, you know, and. Schumacher, Senna, Hamilton, people like Marquez could take a team and galvanize it around them and encourage them and raise their game as well. There's so much more to this than just being able to ride bike. You know, there's so much more to it than just what happens behind the wheel of a car.

And again, you know, you look at what Mark does on the track, just from pure from a pure violation of the laws of physics. And it's jaw dropping. But you look at, you know, all of the other things that he has done that he did to get a team to build him and create a bike that he could win with and then have it perfect or nearly perfect every time out. That's one of the things that Kevin said when we were talking about this book. He said, you know, there were 19 races that year.

He said, I think they got it wrong once. I think they picked the wrong rear tire once. Everybody on that Repsol team was just operating at their absolute maximum because they were around this guy, you know, and that is something that is unique in motor, you know, unique. I shouldn't say unique in motor sports, but it's something that's rare. It's something that you don't often see.

Hey, Jorge Lorenzo is no slouch. OK. Yeah, you know, you know, you don't win five world championships by accident. He couldn't ride the bike. You know, he could not ride the Honda during the season.

When Mark is, you know, occasionally just walking away with wins, he's always at the front and Jorge is just crashing his brains out until he finally goes, you know what? I've crashed enough in my career. I'm done. That's another part of what you see that is just so fascinating. You know, the whole how a rider can galvanize a whole team.

We saw it with Toprak this year in World Superbikes. The BMW was nowhere last year, was nowhere last year. They made some management changes. They got in Toprak to be fair. You know, the Ducati got hit with some and let's call it what it is.

Success penalties. OK. But that BMW, the team's performance is night and day from what it was last year. And I think the big part of that, the big key to that change was bringing Toprak on board. You know, all of a sudden, the crew doesn't show up wondering where they're going to finish.

You wake up on Friday morning thinking we can win this. And that is an entirely different way of looking at the world. So let me ask this. Marquez is on a year old Ducati. He's in it.

He is in a satellite team. Right. He's manipulated that bike well enough to earn the factory ride next year. Oh, one thing that I've noticed. And I saw it several times during the year when Mark would be, say, a second or third, he's on the podium or like he was when he was second in Austria in the sprint race.

Did you notice how DG Delinia looks at Mark? The smile that DG Delinia has on his face, the smile that does not exist when Peco Benyaya wins a race on one of Gigi's motorcycles. I think Gigi knows what's coming. I think everybody knows what's coming because I honestly believe I believe right now, I'll tell you this right now, if Mark had a factory Ducati this year, at the island, nobody would have known which way he went. I think if he had a factory Ducati this year, he probably would be world champion.

Do you think he'll be world champion next year? I if he stays healthy, I mean, honestly. So here's here's. The form here, here's the equation in my mind, OK? You're not going to see any major machine changes next year.

You're going to see an evolution, the GP 25, if the pattern holds, is going to be slightly better than the GP 24. We'll take them a minute, take them a few races to get the thing settled and get all the data that they need. It might take them a little bit longer to get all the data that they need to make it run. OK, because you've only got six bikes on the grid next year, not eight. And you've only got three factory bikes, not four.

You know, it's always funny when you and I were racing, right? We always wanted to have a machine that was better than everybody else on the grid. If we found something that made us a little quicker, you know, we would we would we would do anything to keep that information out. When I was at. Ascent earlier this year, and we were doing our media interviews with Petco.

They were talking to Ducati, was talking about their plans for 2025. And somebody asked Petco, you're only going to have six bikes on the grid next year, only three factory bikes. What do you think? And as a racer, I'm thinking this is great. This is one less guy who's going to have a bike that's equal to mine.

And Petco actually said, I think it's going to be less than ideal. I'd rather have more people on my same bike developing the data that I need to win. So let's never discount the value of gathering data in MotoGP in 2024. OK. But I think that.

The GP 2025 is going to wind up as a better motorcycle. I think that Mark is going to have full factory support. And I think just looking at it from the outside. What we have seen is that not only do all the satellite Ducati riders have access to the factory data, but the factory has all the data that the satellite riders are generating. And I think you want to know why Gigi is smiling, because he can see what Mark can do on the bike.

He can see it on his computer screen. And he knows just how special that man is and how talented he is. You add that to the mental fortitude of flying yourself to a hospital halfway around the world and having the doctors put you under and break your arm and reset it because. You want to win that bad? Why wouldn't you be grinning if I was Gigi?

I'd be grinning like an idiot. You know, why not? That's what's coming. And that's why he's smiling. You know, it'd be nice to see Peco win this year.

Is what he's thinking. But, you know, they've got the title either way. You know, they do. How he wins, you know. But I think why Gigi is smiling is because what you have on the books for next year could potentially be one of those seasons that, you know, will live in the record books.

You know, one of those seasons where it's not just a single Ducati's win most of the races, but a single rider might be dominant again in the way that Duhun was or, you know, at his absolute prime or Rossi was when he had his absolute prime. And I think that's why Gigi's smiling. You know, he's like he's like a kid who knows that he's getting exactly what he asked for for his birthday. Just waiting to unwrap the present. Yeah, I've speculated and said it on the show that when it came out that Marquez was going to be on the factory bike and they were going to keep Peco, I speculated that like, OK, yeah, that was done because Gigi wanted that.

Gigi was looking very much at what Mark was doing on a year old motorcycle and a very, very as far as we know, a very early spec of that two thousand twenty three motorcycle. And he was doing things that nobody else is able to do. And it's like Gigi's looking at that going, I need that to show you how great of a motorcycle. I can build. I mean, he's going to go Gigi.

Gigi Delaney is going to go down in the history of Moto GP. It is the equivalency of what we think of Adrian Newey and forming the. Yes, the greatest architect of a motorcycle design slash innovation slash make it go fast. Right. That no everybody's ever done.

And it's really hard to see how that with the with the new rule changes that are coming up. It's really hard to see how anybody is going to build a bike in twenty twenty seven that's faster than the ones that we have. I mean, that's the whole idea, right? Smaller displacement, less arrow. I bet against Honda having a better motor out of the gate.

Yeah. Better engine, a better engine out of the gate than what Ducati's got. But OK. But it's not going to be as quick as these. I don't think it will.

But yeah, I think the whole package. But we'll see. Right. But my point is that I think Gigi is going to be go down in history as the architect of the fastest motorcycles. Road racing motorcycles in history.

So we were talking a minute ago about the mentality of the top level road racer, the all the things that they do other than the impossible. Just you know, just other than the impossible that they pull off on it, you know, every time they get on the bike. When you think about what Mark did along with Gigi by pulling off this move to the factory squad in twenty twenty five, it was. A stroke of competitive genius on so many levels. OK, he took.

Two people that were perhaps some of his greatest competitors and basically took those pieces off the board, OK, he is not going to have to fight Jorge Martin on equal equipment next year. Oh, Jorge is going to the Aprilia. And believe me, if we really can just get their day to day act together, that bike is amazing. It is it is every bit the equal of the Ducati when they can get it running. OK, again, you look at what Vignoles and and Alessia Spargrove have done on that thing on their day.

It looked like they were riding Moto GP bikes and everybody else is riding a Moto two machine. OK, but. I don't think. That Aprilia is going to be there at the beginning of the year with the day to day racing operation that Ducati has. So he's taken March with this move.

Marquez has taken Gigi. Sorry, Marquez has taken Martin off the table. He's taken in a in a Bastineini who is. Incredibly talented. OK.

He's not quite he's not quite fully cooked yet. OK, he's still got some rough spots, really. But at the at the end of a race, if you all of a sudden you got five laps to go and suddenly his name appears on your pit board, every rider in that field is scared. OK, he's been removed from the board. The the Prima Prima Prima team has been removed from the board.

You know, when you look at all of those elements, that when Mark managed to get Ducati to hire him for the factory team, he has rearranged the entire playing field for 2025 to his benefit. You know, that's what I talk about when we talk about what makes these people fascinating, you know. Isn't thinking about suspension settings. He's thinking a year down the road and rearranging the factory rider lineup to his benefit. I kind of hope Peco wins this year.

OK, because I think by midway through next season, he's going to be showing up at the garage for race weekend and people are going to ask to see his ID. So who are you again? I like to think that Marquez is playing chess and everybody else playing checkers. Exactly. You know, there's so many moves that he made that dominated the scene from behind.

And yeah, I know. I know if you watched Marquez walk out of the trailers early part of the season, he had a I don't want to call it like a like a pouty face, but he had he wasn't the grin, the smile, the everything that he was very sharply focused. And it wasn't he wasn't focused. I don't think he was focused about racing a motorcycle. I think he was focused about what he wanted to do, where he saw himself a year on.

Right. And then once that clicked, hey, I've got that bike. Then the smile came back to the face. The ease at which he rode became, well, OK, I'm I'm good here. But he still was just to me.

He's still amazing. But he he he had to get to that mental headspace to make himself comfortable. Yes, I guess. Looking at if you remember at the beginning of the year, I was at Qatar for the preseason test. OK.

And he would tell anybody who would listen. One of the fascinating things about being actually at the event is you get to watch the athlete do multiple interviews. And they're all saying they say the same thing over and over and over. He said, I am no longer as young as I used to be. I am no longer as sharp as I used to be.

Every athlete has he has his day. I've had my day. Now it's about managing the downward slope. And if you go back to the interviews at Qatar, that is what he was saying. I was shooting out on the backside of the track and I'm watching him go, you know, trying to wrestle his new Ducati around.

He's only been on it two or three times. And he still doesn't look comfortable. His right arm still doesn't look comfortable. One of the pictures in the book is a picture of him on the Honda in testing at twenty twenty two. And it's from the shot at the same spot at Valencia as I shot him in twenty nineteen.

And you can see the difference in body posture. OK, the man's injured and he's never quite healed that way. So my point is at the beginning of the year, even he wasn't sure of what he where his his physical capabilities were going to be. He wasn't sure what his future was was going to hold. OK, all he wanted to do was be at the front of the field again.

But Andy, but he really wasn't sure that he could pull it off. I mean, really, for the first time, I think he had doubts. He had doubts. Even up to the last on the Honda, he still believed that he had the talent to do it, but it was the bike that was holding him back. I mean, remember it had the Saxon ring in twenty twenty three when he threw himself off the bike like eighty four times or something like that over the weekend, you know, broke two bones, was caught flipping off the Honda on camera.

I think at the beginning of this year, like every athlete and again, if I could use a parallel to the entertainment field like entertainers. You're thinking to yourself, is this where the downward slope begins? Is this the beginning of the end? And it took a few races until he could actually get the bike to do it. Not even what he wanted it to do, but when he could get the bike to do what it wanted to do and when he he and it started to gel and he started to get podiums, it wasn't just the smile, it was the swagger in his walk that came back.

And it was then that he's looking at Gigi going, you want me on your factory bike next year? You know, you could almost hear him asking, Gigi, do you really want to compete against me next year? Because I have offers and I know that we never know what offers he had on the table for twenty twenty five. But I would be willing to bet my immortal soul that Aprilia and KTM had offers on the table, offers in front of him. You know, people in Tibet, you know what?

I'd be willing to bet they probably would have paid him well more than Ducati did and is and well more than Ducati is going to next year. You know, but it's not about money. This is a man who walked away from one of the most lucrative contracts a sport has ever seen, you know, just because he wanted to win. And man at Circuit of the Americas, you know, when we were there and we saw him finish, you know, on the podium in the sprint race and we saw him walking around preparing for the Grand Prix. You knew this was a guy who who this is a guy who believed he could win again.

This is a guy who believed in the talent and he had the package. Will we ever see the old Mark? I don't know if we'll ever see the mark that we saw in 2019, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book. OK, I don't know that that guy will ever be back. OK, but the Mark Marquez of 2024 is still pretty freaking amazing.

You know, and I really think I think that even this guy is a generational talent, which should tell you something about what I think we saw in 2019. You know, he said something. And again, this was one of those things where, like I said, the athletes say the same thing over and over and over to different media outlets. He said something to one of the media outlets. I think it was an Italian, so I don't and I don't speak Italian.

So I have to rely on the translation. But after he won at Aragon, he said something like in 2019 wins didn't matter. He said they just came. They just they meant nothing, you know. And I want you to think about that statement for just a second.

OK, I mean, a guy winning Moto GP races and thinking, yeah, whatever. On to the next one. That tells you. What the Mark Marquez of 2019 was like and why I found it so amazing, fascinating. I think that's a great place to put this interview at the end here.

The great way to sum up Mark in the book, remember, guys, the book is, if I got this right, is legend. Mark Marquez's 2019 Moto GP World Championship is available on Amazon. We'll put a link in the show notes to all this. Big thank you to Michael Goudjus for taking the time out of testing at HREF to sit with us. Really appreciated, Mike.

Always a pleasure. Thank you for having me here. Remember to subscribe to Road Racing World and Motorcycle Technology, the magazine where I'm at editor at large. And any time you want me back on, I am happy to sit here and talk about motorcycles till when do the cows come home? We're going to find out.

I guarantee you that because we will do that. I guarantee you, I guarantee you, Mike, with the off season, we will we will find a time we will sit down and we will talk until the cows come home. Thank you. Thanks again, Jim.