Michael Gougis, The Long Chat

Welcome to MotoPod, the internet radio show all about motorcycle road racing. This is episode number 793 for Friday, December 27th, 2024. I'm Jim McDowell here with a special long interview chat with Michael Goudjus again. Michael and I sat down a little while ago and talked for quite some time over numerous things that we wanted to cover. The season that was, things to come in the new season in 2025, we talked about KTM, we talked about the problems that KTM is having.

We talked about even crazy stuff like World Superbike and adding pit stops to MotoGP instead of changing the bike rule. We just went on and on and on into so many different areas. I don't think I can name everything here. It's a great chat. Hopefully you guys will really love it.

But I would also like to take this time to say thank you to Michael because he was gracious enough to gift us with an autographed copy of his book, Legend Mark Marquez 2019 MotoGP World Championship. And to win this book from MotoPod, all you have to do is send an email to motopod at Tell me in there how many wins Mark Marquez had in the 2019 season. Everybody with a right answer will be entered into a random drawing. One winner will be picked and we'll shout you out on the show who actually won the book from Michael and then we'll get in contact and we'll get it sent to you. So without further ado, I give you the chat Michael and I had.

Hey Motor Podders, it's Jim back with friend of the show, Michael Goudjis. Michael, I assume you're back from Europe now after the Haaretz test. Yeah, it's good to be and it's good to be back here. You know, was over there and it's funny because Europe is different. Being there, it's especially Spain and the south of Spain.

Obviously it's sort of the national sport and more than that though, you get to see tests, you get to see prototypes, you get to see there are teams doing things there all the time that are outside of, you know, just bring in the best that you've got at the moment and going racing with it. So it's really interesting perspective. I got on that particular swing. It was the last round of World Superbikes, the World Superbike testing, the race in Valencia, which obviously was rained out by the horrific storms. So went to Barcelona for the MotoGP race, stayed for the Harley demo, which was a chuckle.

And then we stayed for testing at Barcelona. The Harley thing was most fun because, excuse me, I think that they had arranged for four GP riders to show up on the Monday and do demonstration laps with the on some King of the Bagger spec Harley Davidson. Okay. I was wondering what Harley does, but I think it was baggers. Yeah, MotoGP and Harley are going to collaborate on some stuff, but they didn't give us any details about what they're going to be doing in the future.

So as the visual or the entertainment part of that announcement, they had some baggers over there at the track and they let four former GP riders run around on them. Now imagine you're Marco Malandri. You're about three foot six. I mean, he's a really tiny guy. They're all super tiny.

I know, but this guy, I mean, Danny Pedrosa would be pushing him in the chest going. Okay. So, and he's raced and he's world champion on a 250 GP bike. Okay. 250 bikes, way nothing.

Okay. He probably needed a step ladder to get on this bagger thing. You've got to be thinking, Oh God. Okay. And Marco doesn't ride a bike on the street.

Okay. He just, he doesn't really ride that often. He's basically these promotional sorts of things that he does. So they were probably all of them, except for Simon Kreyfar, who actually raced a Harley Davidson engine bike. But it was in a full on race chassis back in New Zealand.

I think he said it was back in the early 1990s, late. When Harley had their factory super bike. Right. You was similar. No, it was similar to that.

Okay. One of the crazy things is that you're an engineer. You look at stuff and go, Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I did this. Yeah. There's a whole history of people who have looked at a Harley Davidson lump and thought, I'm going to make a race bike out of that and have done so.

And some of them are really amazing bikes. Anyway, I think the rest of them were just like, Oh God, what have I gotten myself into? Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Two hours later, they were buzzing.

They had the best time of their lives. Randy Mamala, who is, how shall we put this delicately overproductive when it comes to words? He's an interviewer's dream, man. He just will not shut up. I love him.

But he was just buzzing. He was like, I expected this. And this thing was so much fun. Torque, it handled, it was easy to ride. And so that was a lot of fun.

If you didn't see the post on roadracingworld.com, there's a picture of him wheeling one of these things down the front straight at Barcelona. And it was like, that is one of the best shots I've ever taken. Because he's been on the thing for four laps and all of a sudden he's on a 620 pound bike at a 45 degree angle. He just looks completely happy. It was interesting being there.

The Barcelona test, first postseason test, excuse me, was really interesting. It's a big deal most of the time because now you're into the off season and the engineers are working flat out. But you can't test what they're making. You can't, unless you're one of the teams that has concessions, you can't try it out until they're basically done. You can make some smaller changes between the first test of 2025 and the beginning of the season.

But you've got to get it right in Barcelona or at the end of the year test, or you're heading down the wrong path and then the company has spent a lot of time and money going down that path. And don't forget, you've got an engine freeze in 2026. Basically the engine that you come up with in 2025 is the one you're stuck with for two years. And if you don't get that right, you're in trouble and you're in trouble for a long time. It's fascinating to look at the engineering around the rule book because the rule book, you know, it's a suggestion.

Very much a suggestion. Rule books are never airtight. So the rule book says that you have whatever, I think it's eight engines now for MotoGP that's got to last you the whole season and you can't touch inside of the motor, okay, once it's sealed. So Ducati and others looked at the rule book and said, okay, what exactly do they mean when they say inside of the motor? So now they have external flywheels and you can now change the flywheel, you know, stuff like that.

This test was a little different in that it was a very hastily arranged thing. Obviously you had to move the location. The other thing was that it was really cold. It was really chilly, chillier than Valencia. This is really slick too.

It's very slick. Barcelona is a very slick track. It's cold. Nobody wanted to crash. And a lot of people were changing teams, a lot of new riders, a lot of people on new bikes.

So there's very much a kind of a get to know you kind of feel to a lot of it. Aprilia had some interesting new stuff. Yamaha is still just throwing stuff to see what sticks to the wall, you know, but I thought it was interesting that especially Marquez, Ducati has a pretty good idea of where they're going with their 2025 bike. Michele Pirro is really doing the job for them as their test rider. So when Mark jumped garages and moved over to the factory side, they had a 2024 bike for him.

He took it out, rode it around a little bit, but then spent most of his day on the 2025 to give feedback as to where they needed to go from there. So that's interesting because I read how Benyaia said that his comments were very much in line with what Mark thought of the bike, which is different than what him and Bastianini were, which I found surprising because you and I both know Mark's style is completely different to the way anybody else rides. So for Benyaia to say, hey, what he wants is what I want, I thought that was huge. Well, it is. But let me give you a little bit of background on that.

So and again, like I said, being in Europe, you get access to certain things that you just don't get anywhere else. I think it was the end of the test day, either the end of the test day or the end of Sunday. I forget which it was anyway. Ducati brought Gigi Dillinia up into the media center and put him at a table and they were like, you got five minutes, go. And we were like, holy crap, right?

Talking, he's a very busy man. He doesn't have a lot of time to just hang out and talk, right? So that was a rare opportunity. And so the 2025 Ducati is going to they're going to try to make it even better under braking because what Gigi said was right now in MotoGP, where you pass is on the brakes. That's where that's happening.

So we have to give our riders more of an opportunity to do that. I mean, you know, we we interview Pedro and Pedro Acosta and somebody asked, what do you want to see on the KTM? And he's like, well, I want more braking. I want more power. I want more handling.

And he's like, and Gigi was the same thing. We want to make the bike faster in a straight line. We want to accelerate better. We want to corner better. So but our primary focus is on the brakes.

Bagnaia is very, very good on the brakes. You know, he's really, really difficult to pass on the brakes unless he's not feeling it. And he's a smart guy generally. You know, he knows when he's not feeling it. You know, he had a very difficult time this year just staying on that line.

But he and Mark both understand they really understand how to ride a MotoGP bike to win races. And the bike has to have certain characteristics. And that's what they're developing. That's what they're developing it towards. And both Bagnaia and Marquez, Mark Marquez, are looking at this is the way that we need to go.

What was really interesting about it, Jim, was that after the test day, we all we get to talk to all the riders. And Bagnaia was like, you know, I like the 25. It definitely is an improvement, but it's still not quite as good on the brakes as the 24 was. Now, you have to put that in perspective. The only person who's ridden the 2025 really is Piro.

Bagnaia was and Bagnaia had dialed in that 24 to be exactly the way that he wanted it most of the time. You know, I mean, the things he could do on it was, you know, he'd dance right on the edge. So the 2025 is not there yet. But he said that the 2025 Desmos Adichie is better at this point in its development cycle than any Desmos Adichie that he'd ridden. And that to me, if I was on any of the other teams, I'd have been like, oh, crap.

Agreed. That's not a good sign. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also, throw this out that you read that, you know, Marquez kind of went out.

He did his thing, got acclimated to the 25. I thought the testing color scheme was brilliant with the all red. I thought it looked good. I thought it looked good. I mean, I wasn't there to see it personally, but it looked good.

It was very difficult to photograph. Really? Yeah. It just the photos come out as a big red blob in part because it was very bright, very sunny and tone on tone really doesn't work very well there. Part of the challenge of photographing the tests, by the way, is that everybody has a prototypes in flat black.

No, please don't do that because the pictures look horrible in photos. But it was it was definitely an interesting color scheme and definitely eye catching. You know, I thought it was funny that he had no sponsor decals on the bike. But like I said, at that level, sponsor contracts are very complicated things. I think they would be extremely.

Yeah. So anyway, back to Mark here slightly. He said, hey, if I had a 24 bike, I don't want the world title. You believe it? Maybe.

I would definitely say that he was a lot. He would have been a lot closer. OK. I think. I think he would have had a difficult time beating Martin.

OK. OK. Jorge did a lot of work on himself this year. OK, he was definitely a different rider than I saw at the end of last year. Stop me if I told you this story before, but I was shooting at the Valencia tests at the end of last year.

On Sunday, Jorge had crashed out of the race. He'd lost the championship, you know, the very last chance. And he honestly felt like it had been taken from him because of that Michel entire fiasco in Qatar. And then I was shooting and he crashed on during the test on Tuesday. And I got a picture of him walking away and he just looked like the most dejected human being on the planet.

He looked all alone and just he wasn't he wasn't in the mindset to fight for a championship. He realized that worked with a therapist, got himself back on track over the winter. And I was at the Saxon Ring and he crashed out of the lead of that race with two to go. Couldn't believe it right in front of me. Best photo, best best crash sequence I've ever shot.

And and we talked to him after the race and he was like, these things happen. We have to go back and figure out why it happened. He said, but when you're pushing as hard as we are, these things happen. We're going to go back to the next round and we're going to. And I was like, at that moment, I was like, OK, here's a guy who can take a setback in stride and not let him slow him down.

OK, so it was going to be a challenge for Mark to beat that guy. Right. Having said that. The Alex Marquez jumped from the 23 Ducati. To the GP 24, which he's going to be racing next year.

And Gigi had said last year, there's going to be a big gap between the 23 and the 24 bike. Right. And Alex got on the 24 and came back the end of the day. And he said, essentially, he said, now I know why we couldn't beat these things. He said the 24 was built and they had evolved and developed it to work with the new Michelin rear tire.

And Alex was echoing what I'd heard riders say much of the season was like, the Ducati's are amazing at using getting everything out of that tire and we can't. So in that context, could Mark have won it if he was on a GP 24? There's a really there's a reasonable, the reasonable argument to be made that, yeah, because he would have had a better machine. Did you look at the crash? Did you see the stats from the crash report?

Who? Yeah, who had crashed all year? I did not. I saw it briefly. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it.

The three people, Pedro Acosta crashed most because he's a rookie. And even Pedro told us at the end of the test, all three rookies for this for next year, had jumped from Moto 2 to Moto GP, all of them crashed within the first hour of riding the bikes. OK, it's got to be a. I'm sorry, it has to be an incredible change from from a what I would call a standard motorcycle with a three cylinder Triumph. OK, so so super bike esque street bike basically to a full on.

Here's all these bells, whistles, controls, logic, buttons that you got to push in sequences that you have to push correctly to maximize all this aerodynamic shape shifting thing. It's got to be absolutely mind boggling. Plus, I think the everyone seems to say, well, it's not how fast it goes that bothers me. It's how quick it stops that bothers me because the the carbon brakes are just phenomenal. But you got to keep hitting them and it doesn't work unless you go fast.

And there's all that that's in this. You've got to be mind blowing. It's not just it's not just the brakes are better. But remember, you're not allowed to do aero in Moto 2. Correct.

And aero is one of the ways that you keep the rear wheel down on a Moto GP bike under braking. So between that and the hydraulic ride, ride height adjuster. Now, it's not just that you can hammer the brakes harder, but the bike stays stable. It doesn't try to rotate over the front axle as much. So, yeah, you're learning that a Moto GP bike has twice the horsepower of a Moto 2 machine.

It weighs more. But the big difference is the tires. The big difference is the tires. And that's what I was getting back to. Alex jumped from the 23 to the 24 and said that the tires in the 24 was was built around those tires.

If you look at the crash report, Pedro crashed the most. But three riders who are on the GP 23 were right up there in the top five. And I thought that was really interesting. Fabio, Digi Antonio, Alex Marquez and Mark Marquez were all in like the top. I believe it's the top five of the crashers.

And I think it's largely because they were riding a motorcycle that was not built to adapt to those tires. So it made it would have made a big difference. It would have been a big deal. And had Mark been on the 24 from the beginning of the year, I wouldn't have bet against him. But Martin, I really think it would have been difficult to beat him this year.

So you mentioned tires. Here's a question I have about the tires with Michelin. I'm trying to remember, I think Michelin's tenure stops after 26 and then it's up for retender. I think so. I believe that to be be correct.

So I have this wild and crazy thought that when we go into 27 with the new rags, we're going to see Pirelli across all three classes. Wouldn't bet against it. I would not bet against it at all. I think it's I think it's just I almost want to go ride it on a rock because I think that's strongly about it. Every time we ask Giorgio, you know, when he's at the test or at the track or something, it was like, so, hey, you know, you guys have got pretty much everything else on the planet locked out.

What do you think about this? And he just grins and he won't answer. It would make sense. Yeah, I think it does, because it. That would be what I was thinking.

I think that would be one of the very few times that every class is on the same brand of tire because it's always been somewhere. There's been some mix that I can think of across it. And the reason I'm so we've gone into this whole realm of aerodynamics and craziness and we're pushing the bikes into the ground with the wings. There's been all this talk about that Michelin front all year. Right.

There's all there's a new Michelin front coming. There's a new Michelin front coming and it never appears. Right. And Michelin says, hey, look, we've got to put this on a track. We got to have a test that we have riders in order bikes or something or, you know, that are running around slagging laps on this thing.

We need the top guys pushing it at the top speed as hard as possible to decide if this tire is a is a better step. And we, you know, and all this. And I look over, I kind of take a glance over at World Superbikes and Superbikes are not as sophisticated aerodynamically. But we are definitely we've got wings. We're starting to sprout that and all the bikes.

I mean, the BMW has it. I think the Yamaha's got a wing of some kind. And I know they're all the cottage got a little bit of a wing there. But they have they have some the aero loads are nowhere near what you see in MotoGP. Right.

I I I was. Yeah. But what I'm getting at what I was trying to get at, you don't hear the guys in World Superbike really complaining about the Pirelli. Like you hear sort of the I don't want to call it a complaint, but more like a knock on Michelin. Like, hey, we don't have a front that we can race with, but you don't you don't hear that there.

So I'm thinking maybe Pirelli has some different kind of magic in that squishy tire that that makes you feel better on the brakes, even with an aerodynamic with a minimum aerodynamic load. That maybe they're ready to compensate for that. You know, maybe they because. Well, OK. Just so let me offer my insights.

Here you are. Please. The the difference between a superbike and a MotoGP bike. It's not really evident when you look at the machines. They look very similar, but Andrea Iannone and Daniella Petrucci both rode MotoGP bikes.

And who else? Aldaro Bautista. OK, all, you know, World Superbike race winners. They've all ridden MotoGP bikes in the past couple of years. And all of them say just nothing prepares you for this.

They that the load on the tires, the way that the machines behave is really different. Iannone said after his wild card at wherever it was, I think, Sepang, he said I was and this is a guy I remember who races World Superbikes and can win in World Superbikes. He said I was done after five laps. He said it was just hanging on. So they are definitely different types of machines.

I don't know that the construction or the compounds or the way that Pirelli makes a tire is any different. What I can say is that Pirelli has done a very good job over a long period of time in a number of classes, creating a tire that works for all machines. And so they might be willing to I mean, they might they might just be better at adapting their tires to a different set of circumstances than Michelin is. I remember talking to a Pirelli engineer years ago about their World Superbike stuff. They introduced a front tire that only did not only only work for one machine, but it only worked for one rider on that machine.

It was Max Biagi. And they told me, yeah, they said we can't we can't have a tire in the rotation at only one. And so they moved it from the rotation. You don't hear the riders complaining about the Pirellis in part I think because Pirelli understands what their role is. And they're not they've got a lot of experience in trying to create an even playing field for a lot of different bikes.

The other thing is just one minute longer. You got to remember, why does why does a motorcycle tire manufacturer get into this game? They're doing it to promote their product. And to do that, you've got to be faster than the whoever, whoever was doing this before you right? Like any new employee, right?

You got to do better, better job than the last person. So what's funny, what's interesting about it is that it's kind of a trade off. It's a negotiated trade off. The performance of the tires is a negotiated trade off between the series and the tire manufacturer. They the series will say, OK, we will allow you to be the spec tire supplier and you will pay us.

But we have a caveat. We will let you build tires that are a little bit quicker. But don't go crazy and make something that's really high performance. Right now, the riders might be complaining about that Michelin front. OK, but the lap times are better.

Yes, Michelin is getting what they want out of it. Record setting tire performance. OK, the the tires aren't blowing up. You know, they're not failing on and, you know, for every boring race in Moto GP, there's one that's absolutely nail biting. So Michelin's like that whole thing about if it's not broke, don't fix it.

Right. Yeah. You know, it's really easy to screw it up. I had somebody I can't say their name, but somebody who's high up in international racing management tell me that we could we could. Have a spec tire on the bikes that would slow them down.

The problem is that you would have to, as the series, pay the motorcycle manufacturer, the tire manufacturer instead of them paying you because nobody would sign on to pay for the privilege of building tires that are slower than the ones that you've got. And honestly, now now I'm just thinking off the top of my head. But if you did that, you would probably wind up branding the tires, you know, the name of the series or whatever, because nobody would want their name on this tire. Right. Yeah.

Exactly. Do we expect tires is a real challenge. Yeah. You know, I sung Pirelli's praises on the show for what they've done in Moto3 and Moto2. I mean, for coming in cold like they did.

And I mean, they knocked Moto3 tires out of the park. Like those guys were just wicked fast everywhere. Didn't matter. They were just and they had longevity in it. And what I thought was really cool about Moto3 with the tires was that there was two options that could work.

You saw Alonzo do some races with the softest tire, and sometimes you had that medium tire. Then everybody else would be sort of on a soft and he could make that work. So you could pick either way and had pretty good chance of at least being on the podium. And then I didn't think Moto2 got off to sort of an odd start, but those guys got sort of victimized by the testing conditions and what happened in the rain that happened at Qatar. And maybe nobody really ever got it together.

But I thought, wow, that should have been the easier spec tire to build because I think of a Moto2 bike as like a world superbike. And I think they brought some of those SC0s and SC1s or whatever they have and brought those over. And it was sort of like once it happened, it sort of everybody got to it, got on with that one, too. And records were set there, too, for Pirelli. Literally brought World Superbike tires to Moto2.

OK, they really did. OK. I thought they would. But that's where they started last year. They literally pulled World Superbike tires off the shelf.

They thought about bringing World Super Sport tires, but the profile of the front tire didn't quite work as well as the World Superbike tires. The thing that Pirelli brought to the game in those smaller classes this season was tire management. The Dunlops, they were not as sticky, but they were absolutely consistent. Every Moto2 rider I talked to said that Dunlop, and this is my interpretation of it, they understood the concept of the control tire. It was not to create the tire that would make brand new lap records, to smash lap records by a second.

They brought a tire that everybody could ride and that everybody could ride to its capacity from the green light to the checkered flag. Pirellis, you could not do that. You had to manage them in both of those classes. And those races where you saw David Alonso in Moto3, you saw him drop back in the middle of the race. Totally managing that tire.

Yeah, I think he was saving the tire. I think he really was. So it adds some variety. I love it, yeah. Yeah, it makes the race more interesting.

I know people think I'm nuts. I would not be mad if they introduced pit stops in World Superbike and MotoGP and made them run two different compounds. That would be fun. We would definitely see some variety. I'm a pit stop guy, but we talked about that.

Yeah, yeah, I get that. I don't... You know, okay, I get a different little spin on that. Yeah, sure. I'm all for a pit stop, but I would be for a pit stop for when it rains.

Instead of swapping a whole bike, I would rather see the crew change tires. I know the cost. I get all that, but I think that's a way different concept than jumping on a different bike. So now it's a different strategy game because now it's about how good is my crew? It's about what time do I pull that trigger?

It's about is it really going to rain or am I just going to stick this one out? Because like, whoa, now this time gap of me having to stop and be stationary is a way bigger gamble or a construct that you have to think about in the context of, well, there's four laps left and it's now just sprinkling. Because then it's like then I think you get a better form of flag to flag racing because now you could, in theory, build that into a Moto3 race, into a Moto2 race and say, look, guys, you have to be prepared for this. Yeah. And so, well, hey, now that's way...

It's just a strategy game that's completely different now about your technique, about what you're going to do. The guys who are great on that because it's just like, well, OK, there's also that element of what happens. Oh, gosh, the guy loses the axle nut and it rolls away. Oh, crap. Now I got to get another one.

They are now truly a part of the race, which gives them something to work for because there would be total pride in, say, PreMac having a faster tire change than, say, the factory Ducati guys. There would be so much into that. I think that would be fantastic. It adds a whole new dimension to the racing. I hear people say, well, it's too expensive or it's too dangerous to do.

And I just shake my head. I'm like, you've got to be kidding. Hey, do it at Daytona. And look, Daytona. World super, world endurance.

Yeah, right. Those budgets are nowhere near what MotoGP is. Look, dude, the Red Bull hospitality, I saw them taking that apart on Tuesday at Barcelona. There were, and I'm not going to exaggerate, nine semi tractor trailers or tractor semi trailers lined up, OK, to pull away the pieces of the hospitality that they build. You're telling me a team that's got that kind of budget can't afford to put quick change on the bike.

I don't buy it at all. I don't either. I don't either. I think it'd be and clearly, you know, in a 24 hour, you know, Le Mans or the Bordeaux, those guys will do 22 tire changes and they've got to do them all perfectly. No, I don't buy that argument at all.

I think you're absolutely right. And I think it would definitely add an element of suspense to it. Yep. Cool. I think it'd be fantastic.

I mean, because there's I think it just brings a different element of potential mixing it up. Right. There's a variable that you can't control. Like, well, Acosta makes a decision, let's say, to come in that one lap earlier or maybe he decides to tough it out on a set of slicks. Right.

So he comes in, but the KTM crew is a well-oiled machine, so they make a faster pit stop than anybody else. So he's now got an advantage. Whoa, because this is stop time, stationary time was, I don't know, say, 10 seconds versus a 12 second stop by whoever else. It's just those are cool things to think of. It might have been a pass in the pits.

Now, yes, that's the thing. Yeah. Now he's got track position. Now the person who was holding him up, now they're behind him. Can they get back past around?

Yeah. You've got, you know, it takes sometimes it takes those guys a couple of laps to get the tires up to temperature. Now you've got the question of, OK, somebody pitted a lap before you. Their tires have one more lap now, more heat in them. You know, are you going to be able to?

Yeah, it's. Yeah, even in the even in the dry, if you had if you had hypothetically, you have been Yaya out front, but he's out front by a lot. But he's getting to the end of life of that tire. Right. Marquez, he's got a pretty good gap on Martin.

If I stop, I put on a super soft rear for the final five. Can I go catch everybody that's ahead? Because that's a technical that's a strategic decision that you could make in the moment. Yeah, they go. Because now where's the attention going to be?

Well, hey, guys, Ben was running a one minute 30 marks first lap on a really soft is at a one twenty eight. He's two seconds a lot faster, but he's but he's 18 seconds behind. Now that's drama. Right. You absolutely cooked in drama to this.

It's just insane. Do you? Yeah. Do you run the race without a pit stop on a medium tire or do you put on a qualifier bolt to the front and then bank on a pit stop? And there's there's obviously one of the things about racing in twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five is that I have an answer to that question.

All I have to do is ask the computer and it'll tell me what the quickest overall race time is likely to be based on the tire modeling and everything. But again, an old Formula One geek. I'm there with you. They excellent. Brabham at a period in the 1980s introduced refueling wasn't outlawed.

I want to get this right. Refueling wasn't outlawed, but nobody did it. So they introduced refueling mid race refueling because they knew they weren't going to win. So they would they built a car with tanks that wouldn't go the race distance, knowing that that car was fast enough that they'd get up front and get exposure for the sponsors. If you are track house or VR forty six or your tech three and you know that your odds of winning are pretty slim.

How tempting would it be to go to the go to the grid on half tanks with a set of qualifiers? You know what? We're not going to win this, but for three laps, we're going to look like rock stars. Yeah. And again, part of the fun of racing, right?

Part of the fun of racing. It's everybody has different motivations. Everybody has different different reasons and different goals for what they're trying to do that day. Okay. If you are promac this year, okay, 2025, you know you're not going to win races.

Okay. What are you there to do? Oh, you're you're there because Yamaha is writing you a check with a bunch of zeros on it. You know, and you're there to do the best you can to give Yamaha feedback. You know, there's a reason they pick the two riders that they did.

Those guys might not be and they're both race winners, obviously, not the fastest ones in the field. Set up guys. You know, solid guys who can give you get off the bike and tell you this is what it's doing. And this is where if I had more of this, I could go faster. That's incredibly valuable.

That's incredibly valuable. So what the tires with Pirelli having jumped in? We were talking different Dunlap Pirelli. What was what was what was out of her problem? I mean, the guy ripped off four wins on a set of Dunlaps at the end of the year looked absolutely unbeatable thought for sure you come into this year.

He's odds on favorite and it just fell apart. I mean, walk away with this. Yeah, he just didn't seem to I think he just didn't gel with the Pirelli. But I I don't I don't know that. That might be.

But the so the people there were riders who simply did not get along with the tire changes. And we've seen that before. Do you remember when when Tony Elias went back to Moto GP and they had gone to the spec bridge down that he just could not ride? He was a Moto two champion and he was finishing last. So there were people in the Moto two field this year who struggled to adapt to the Pirelli, but they tended to be slow everywhere.

He wasn't. Yeah, that's the thing. He won races, which is right. Saxon ring. I can't think of the other ones, but I think he won three and like that Saxon ring afterwards.

You know, he said I waited till half distance saved my tire. Saw the you know saw the halfway flag and then he just was gone. Right. Couldn't see him. This is, I don't know him.

I don't know his personal circumstance but this is my observation from the outside of watching this stuff and writing about this for a long time. For mean signed a contract to go to Moto GP in 2025 before 2024 started. What does that have to do? What does that do to your motivation and your focus? It goes down.

Yeah, your job. Look, your job is an upcoming rider is to eventually if you're, you know, the stars line up and everything. Your job is to get a ride on Moto GP. Your job is to sign a Moto GP right and holy crap dude, he got not just a contract, but you got a contract to ride a factory bike on the dominant team. Okay, 2024 in Moto to every time he threw a bike on a through a Lego on the bike.

He was running the risk of throwing that dream away. All it took was one crash, you know in a serious injury. And all of a sudden he's compromised. I gotta tell you man, I don't know how motivated I would have been tiptoeing around the track. I barely have my knee down.

Okay, I don't care where I finish. Just don't crash. You know, I'm I get that. I get it. I get it.

I get that. But I look at it. There would still be some part of me that would be like, I would want to be Moto to world champion. For some reason I would have I would I would I would want that to write to to one to reinforce the idea that I was good enough to be a Moto GP rider because you know you sort of got plucked out there. And hey, this guy just sort of came on and gets it like you justify to everybody else that hey, I am this good by winning that championship.

But I also see man, I could have a rainy esque crash. And now that dream is never going to happen. And it's like, ooh, I there's a tightrope there that I don't think I want to try to travel down. I don't I again, like I said, I don't know him. But I know a racer's mentality and I know professional racers mentality.

And it's you know, if it was limited this way. If it were all like I have to win every race or I'm not showing up a Moto GP grid would be six riders. You know, there are people you know, it's a job. Thomas Stevens, I remember interviewing him really well, you know, he talked about even winning, you know, the AMA Superbike Championship. He said there's nothing fun about this.

It's just work. It's just hard work and a really dangerous job. Right. So, yeah, I mean, part of you wants to think that a racer always wants to win every race, you know, the famous Wayne Rainey quote I'd show up on Friday, look around and think which one of these guys is going to finish second. Right.

But at the same time, you know, it's a little it's, it's a little different, the reality of it and definitely different in those in those lower ranks, you know, the end and just to just to prove that I'm right. No. Oh yeah. Did Pedro Acosta signed a contract to go race Moto GP in 2024. And it wasn't long after he sealed the Moto two championship that all of a sudden for me and started beating him.

I wonder how much Pedro was like, thinking like, Oh, I got to get on a Moto two bike again. Why, why can't I just go start, you know, start my the next chapter in my career. Yeah. I don't know. But for me has definitely been on and off, up and down, and it will be really interesting to see how well he actually goes.

Also, you're cutting did a really sporting thing this year by giving Jorge Martin, exactly the same equipment as, you know, they gave Peko. They absolutely held, you know, they comply with the letter of their contract with prom act, and man more power to them. That was really, really amazing. Right. It was that was one of the things that was great to see Ducati did not do.

You caught it did not metal in this because it was very, very easy to be like, well, sorry, you're not getting that upgrade just a little bit, just little things, you know, look, delaying the delivery of the latest tire analysis data. You couldn't you couldn't delayed that, you know, yeah, we have the information from this morning session, but we can't get it to you for this afternoon session, you'll get it tomorrow morning. I've been. Yeah, just the little things like that. Right.

Here's my question about elder gear. He's got a ride. He's got to ride a 2024 bike next year. And then in 2026, he gets the full factory version. If he does not do the job in 2024 will do Connie, say, here's a factory bike.

Good luck with that. You know, maybe and you could you could I don't know if they would do it, but you can make the argument that well he's not going fast enough to generate useful data for the rest of the riders. So until he does, we're not going to share their data with him. Now, Gigi says, we know he's got improvements to make. We know where he can make those improvements and we think he is a future Gigi actually said that.

That's how I phrase come from Gigi. I think Gigi is one of those people. He is. Well, we've said it before. We talked about this before.

He is the Adrian Newey of motorcycles. Right. This is a guy who understands not only the scientific approach of data and the analysis of that data, he also has a very what I call he's very good at what I call the eyeball test. Right. He looks at how that rider is on that machine and how it and how where is the throttle being applied visually?

How does the bike move in the rear suspension visually as they exit a corner? How does it work as it goes into a corner? I think he's so good at both of those sides that for him to say what he says is almost biblical. Right. To me, I think, you know, it's like as a rider, you're like, wow, you know, I have been I have just been endorsed by the best.

Sure. On the other hand, think about this guy. He has also said, I know the guy needs to improve. There's a fair amount of pressure that goes along with a statement like that, you know, to say, you know, yes, this is the guy. That's the flip side, the other side of the sword with what you you had said, you know, he thinks I am the future.

If I can fix these things, all of a sudden, now you've got a lot of pressure on you to fix those things. I'll give you a third side to this two sided coin of this argument. I love it. Is is OK. If Ducati honors the contract, if DG, if Gigi works with him on the things that he is lacking and outer out of her has that ability to look inside himself, look at what Gigi says.

Look, you need to do X or Y or Z to this to get the ultimate out of this motorcycle. And he does. He will not have that pressure because if you've got the proper people around you, right, if you've got Gigi in the in the room and he says, look, this is how this goes. This is how it's designed. This is how it's supposed to feel.

And you adapt yourself to that and you push the barrier down. There's pressure, undoubtedly pressure. But there's also that pressure can be reduced by a great team. Yes. Around you doing and helping you understand what you're trying, what you what you need to change about your riding position or your style or your use of the brakes, the brake pressure, all that.

If they give him that data, they help him understand that data. He's going to be fast. And I think that's that's what you're hoping. The beginning of the year, you'll see all of that's there. OK.

And if it's if it's showing results, you keep going. But it's just human nature. You get to the mid part of the season and still nothing is happening. It's like, yeah, that's going to be scary. Oh, you know, and how much how much more in the way of resources are we really going to put into, you know, into this situation?

And so that's that's where I think the pressure is going to come from. I think Ducati right now suffers from an embarrassment of riches in terms of riders, so they might cut him a little more slack, give him some more time. They might have learned a lesson from Fabio Digiantonio, who had a horrible first year. OK. In Moto GP on the Grissini.

Right. And then the second year he switched crew chief. So that was like starting over and it was only like halfway through the season. You got to see really got to see his talent. I really do wonder if we'll ever truly see how good that guy actually is.

Just because of, you know, all it takes is one missed rung up the ladder, you know, and you get, you know, not a career ending setback, but it's definitely a blip in the arc that it's hard to recover from. You know, I don't think we're ever going to see Fabio on a factory team with a factory bike, you know, and that's good. So maybe maybe they've learned that lesson and they'll give Fermin, you know, some time to mature. They gave man they gave Peko some time to mature. And boy, did that pay off in spades and did that pay off, you know?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely down that one. So I think we got to talk about the elephant that's in the room, which is everything about KTM. Oh, I mean, that is like that is like, that's the big elephant in the room, right? Because it's like, there's so much in this that's absolutely a crazy story that I don't think Hollywood could have written this.

You couldn't you know, you just don't see. It's hard to imagine that many mistakes being made at that level that rapidly. So here's the really ironic thing about it. Okay, the I'm not sure if I'm using irony correctly. Ironic, coincidental, whatever.

The pandemic is one year old. Okay. And I'm talking to an Aprilia rep. And he's pointing out that sales are through the roof. And that's what happened during 2021 2022.

Those were great years if you were a motorcycle manufacturer. We needed diversion from the horror show that was going on around us and we spent our money on motorcycles. I remember that Aprilia representative telling me the trick is going to see what happens when things go back to normal. Will we continue to will we continue because we got a lot of new riders during that period to will we continue to see new riders joining the sport? Or will these people be a one and out?

They bought their first bike, tried it out, found out that it wasn't for them. So a lot of other manufacturers, okay, were cautious. They saw the sales increases. They were very happy with that. Okay.

But didn't say, oh my God, this is going to last forever. KTM obviously took a different approach. They went on an acquisition spree. Wound up holding notes at interest rates that they really couldn't afford unless they continued to sell motorcycles as rapidly as they had been. And they hadn't.

They just didn't. You know, the figure I saw in a story out of Italy was that they had something like 130,000 motorcycles, unsold motorcycles in inventory. And, you know, that's a that's a quarter of more than a quarter of all motorcycles of all types sold in the U.S. over a year. That's a big backlog, you know, and nobody's I nobody saw it.

That's just wow. I mean, I get it. I get you're an engineer. Are you familiar with the phrase incident pit? That's where I've heard the phrase come from.

I've I'm not really I that's an that's a different one that I've never I don't think I've heard that one. So an incident pit, if you can imagine, sort of looks like a funnel. Okay. At the top of the incident, there's a lot of choices that you can make with relatively small consequences. But each choice you make brings you down to the next level.

So you're and at the at the bottom, it's sort of curved. The sides are curved on this. So when you get to the bottom of the pit, you have very few choices. Every one of them is catastrophic. It's just easy to fall into that.

And I really do wonder if that's what happened with KTM on the business side. On the on the motor sporting side, you know, a lot of what they do there is paid for by Red Bull. Yep. So you're you're OK for twenty twenty five. Red Bull's new CEO is not as enthusiastic about motor sports as the as the old guy was.

The biggest problem that you're going to have, I think, with KTM is on development costs. So you've got you've got a budget for fixed cost for running a series. You know, it's going to cost you this much money to roll the the the hospitality to the races in Europe. You're going to you're going to spend this much money on bodywork. You're going to spend this much money on air travel and hotels and all that.

That's all fixed. But if I had to guess, I think what you're going to see is the KTM Moto GP bike become less and less competitive over the duration of the season because development is expensive. And that one might be a hard that one's a harder sell to the bankruptcy court. Right. So that would be my guess as to what happens.

You know, remember Kawasaki in 2009 with the Hayati project? That's the one where they keep calling refresh memory. Yeah, they did the Kawasaki pulled out of Moto GP. Right. One more year on their contract with Dorna.

Yeah. Yes. One bike. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Melandry on it and basically didn't develop it over the course of a year. Wasn't a bad motorcycle. It wasn't a bad bike at all. But they just didn't develop it.

And the difference between a not bad bike and a race winning bike is small. But to make that difference, it's the law of diminishing returns. You got to spend a lot to make it to make that change. I mean, you know, we were talking about Mark earlier today. You know, right.

What's the difference in the 23 and the 24? It, you know, the 23 was capable of winning races under the right circumstances, but it could not run with the 24 on a regular basis. So we'll see KTM on the grid 2025 the whole way through. But really what you're going to see in the future is going to be dependent on what happens in bankruptcy court. I think it's February is when the final plan is due to be the plan is due to be finalized.

And then we'll see how much money they have left to go racing and see if Red Bull wants to pick up the slack. If I'm Pedro Acosta, am I looking for an exit clause? Yeah. So the short answer is kind of because so here's your problem with Pedro. And I've already read articles that said, you know, people like Colin is manager going, hey, how you doing?

You know, hi, I'm with Honda. We got a very big checkbook here. And we can give you one with a blank and we'll let you put at least five zeros behind that. You know, I mean, I know Honda wants world champions on their bike. And he's a motor to champion.

So that kind of works. And I know John Muir is a world champion. And don't get me wrong, they're all superstars at this level. But I always thought Muir was a little overrated. OK, I had that opinion, too.

He's very just like he's an intelligent guy. But it's just like, yeah, I don't see what you see. Yeah, he doesn't what he doesn't have is the raw speed that that Naya or Martin or Marquez or even what's his name? Basquini can pull out of the air. You know, I mean, all of a sudden, part of the fun of watching India is like there's 10 laps to go.

He's 20 seconds back. He's not out of this. Right. Exactly. Right.

Yeah, I have yet to see Muir do that in Moto GP. So Honda might be tempted, you know, to replace him or Marini, who I think is also, again, really good, but hasn't shown that sort of, you know, oh, my God, where did that? Where did that where did that where did that lap come from? They had he hasn't shown that kind of speed. So your problem, your problem with the cost is, oh, sure, I'd love to jump ship.

OK, where are you going? But where Yeah, but where do I go? You know, Ducati's got a no vacancy sign. Yeah. OK.

I mean, really. Wow. Talk about an embarrassment of riches. You know, they've got a team in Moto GP that they just, you know, they can put new people on and just go, hey, you know, see, let's see if you work. Every other team is trying to find the best person they can find.

So Ducati's got a full house. And trust me on this when I say that Marquez takes up more space than just one seat. OK, it's a big presence in your in your man, your manufacturer. Aprilia has promised they're probably the fastest bike other than Ducati and they're probably the fat. I think under certain circumstances, they're the fastest bike out there.

The bike is amazing. What they lack is consistency. You know, Miguel Oliveira just told somebody that he had the reason he got injured was that he high sided because it was a short in his ECU and it cut out all the traction control and it launched him over the bars. And talk about I mean, this is this is quality control issues that you're talking about. Plus, I think that previous spent all of their spare money on Martin.

And then where do you go from there? Yamaha and Honda are there so far behind. I, I really don't think that people really understand how hard it's going to be for them to catch up. Because it's not just building a bike like Ducati or Aprilia. It's like learning to optimize it.

That was the thing that Ducati has over the rest of the field. You know, yes, they have a lot of data from eight bikes and all of that. But data is useless unless you know what to do with it. And Honda and Yamaha are just now getting into the game of trying to play with aerodynamics to the to the extent that Ducati and Aprilia have. And it's going to take them some time to learn how to use those things.

KTM is ahead of them on that front. And I think I think a KTM with no development, no physical development, just you try to optimize the bike from week to week. I think that's still going to be better than a Yamaha or a Honda for at least two seasons. Yeah, I can't disagree with you on that one. You know what I mean?

So it's like, yeah, it's if you're a Costa, okay, after you get done screaming profanities in a room for about 30 minutes, you go, where do I go? Where do I take this talent? But isn't racing always like that? The pyramid gets very narrow at the top. Yes.

So maybe you do maybe you do the Fabio Quartararo thing. You take your huge check, you buy yourself some really expensive watches, you know, and smile on your face. Yeah, and just go, you know, I can't believe what I get to do for a living. Quartararo, my God, he put in some rides. I mean, he pulled some I just the challenge of what he faced was this absolutely monumental straight up vertical wall of a magnitude that I don't think you, I or anybody else could probably relate to in any shape or form.

Right. He had a smile on his face. He enjoyed his time with the crowd, and he had some qualifying magic where he just like you're going that Yamaha's there. Right. That's almost next to impossible.

How on earth did you find that? It's that it is that little he had that is that little magic that the greats bring to it that they find that somewhere. The only three people that were finding that that kind of little magic was Quartararo, Martin, and Ben Yaya because when it came down to finding a lap, those three guys, I would throw money on to just bring the magic is amazing to watch. Absolutely amazing to watch. I loved Saturday morning watching Saturday morning.

Q2 was wonderful, because especially Ben Naya and Martin, one of them would throw in a lap and you're like, no one can go faster. He just broke the lap record by half a second, and then one of them would go faster, and then they would do it again and you're just like, I mean, yeah, it was that was magic to watch. It was, I think. Okay, so again, and I'd love to talk about the psychology of people. I don't know.

Because it's fun, right? You should read the book. We had them on the show a long time ago. The two guys, they wrote about the science of the brain and how you go fast and how it learns is basically it explains like I've got a cop. I think I got extra copywriter somewhere.

I might have to get you one. I would not be mad about that. Anyway, one of the things was the like it explains how the guys at the TT, how they go fast, because they use this brain recognition and it takes this database of potential scenarios and builds it up over the three years it takes them to learn the 37 mile course. Sorry, I'm diastract that one. But anyway, continue.

Sorry. It, it, it, it's fabulous to look at to talk to those guys. They have sort of accepted that they wake up in the morning, they might not see the sunset. They're, they like they're like, okay, that's a possibility, but that doesn't help me to go faster. And they're able to focus 100% on what makes them go faster.

And that the end of the day, they can go holy crap. What was I thinking? Fabio has something that Jorge, Jorge Martin now has and Jorge has said this now. He said, I have accomplished my goal in life. I am a world I'm a MotoGP world champion.

That's what that's his goal. Fabio is a MotoGP world champion. Okay. He's probably never going to win seven titles. But he's he's to he's gotten that.

Fabio is extremely well paid. That helps. What anybody else says. Money cures all ills right. You know.

And the other thing is that I really think that he was world champion at a time when he didn't beat Valentino Rossi so the Rossi peep Rossi fans don't hate him. He he's well liked. He really is. And he feeds off of that. So I saw him at Saxon Ring.

I remember this moment very clearly. Some people across from the pits were Fabio fans and they had banners and everything out there like that. You know, again, you wake up in the morning, you're like, I'm not going to win this. I'm not going to win today. I know that I'm not going to win.

And he looked out the garage and he was grinning and he grabbed his phone and did a video of the fans. He feeds off of that. He knows he's doing the best job that he possibly can. Nobody on a Yamaha is beating him. He is trouncing his teammates and everybody, you know.

And I think that's, you know, and he's doing better than anybody could have expected. So that's I think where the motivation comes from. End of the season, I saw a little bit of the same thing from Johan Zarco. Okay. Not happy about not winning, not happy about you not even you wake up in the morning.

You're like, I hope I'm not last, you know, but the last part of the season, the results were better. He's by far the best Honda rider and he was like, I said, I'm going to have an okay off season. You know, yeah. So I think he didn't. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there, Michael.

But the thing was Zarco was that Zuka when changed it for me for him. I think. I just sort of, Hey, here's here. Go ride this Exotica super bike in Japan for for us. Okay, cool.

Really are special bikes. They are one off magical kids. Engineering unobtainium that you just go over. Over. Yeah, it's it.

You know, it's like me. It's like some people want to find the latest playboy and look inside and like, no, give me the latest road racing. I want to see what's happening. Zuka. I'm going to go over that for a while.

Their bikes. So he goes there. He does that. And then like he suddenly started being real near to that that cut off to get to Q2. He was he was he was, you know, or he was putting in a great lap at the end.

And then, you know, what's the paying the bike stalled at the end of the pit lane and they barely got started. He had one chance to get that bike through and he just had his head down just boom. And it just did it. And then, you know, they're towards the last few races. Automatically in Q2 with that Honda.

I don't know what happened. I don't know. Was it a confidence boost that he won? Was it some he saw something at the factory or he got something that he wanted from the factory? But it just all seems to just line up.

Winning winning a major race does not hurt a professional motor motorcycle racers mindset. Okay. And that race is important to Honda. You know, he did a really good job for the people who write his paychecks. So they were very happy with him.

That's got to make you feel good. I noticed that his bike looked different aerodynamically than the factory bikes. So I suspect that some development parts were showing up and some of them were working. And not only that, I also saw some stuff happening that you remember, you know, you talked about top 12. So you're not talking about necessarily relative times, but you're talking about competing against the other bikes in the field.

And the KTM factory bikes went through a very difficult period. Binder and Miller really struggled. The poor raw Fernandez, they gave him the 24 Aprilia and his results nosedived. Trackhouse really struggled and I thought they would honestly, I thought they would do a little bit better. The GP 23 was tricky on the 24 tires.

And you saw some of those, at least one of those riders struggling, you know, most weekends, they did have that amazing sprint race. I think it was Thailand were or supang one of the two where they put maybe I'm sorry. I don't remember which race it was, but all they the Ducati's were the top eight finishers. Okay, that was amazing. But in qualifying, you didn't always see that.

So it was a combination, I think of the Honda getting a little bit better. And at least some of the other teams becoming less consistently fast. So there was somebody that you didn't have to beat a couple of people that you didn't have to beat to get into the, you know, into the top 12. So I think it was a combination of the two. Three.

Lack of consistency in the rest of the field. Zarko's head is in a better place. And some of Honda's development work is starting to pay off. We'll see how we'll see how that moves. Because I think Ducati and I think Aprilia are going to move the goalpost again in 2025.

I think so. Yeah. Yeah, you know, we'll see where that goes. Let's talk a smidge about Aprilia. So Jorge Martin gets on the bike at Barcelona.

Yeah, within a few laps, he's got a signature style shoulder down at turn five, riding style, right? He did. He did wind up crashing the bike there towards the end. Okay. So I looked at it from what I could see watching the video feed was that was a crash of a guy.

And especially when the key was his attitude for me was his attitude when he walked away from the bike after the crash. That was a rider who walked away from that crash and he knew exactly why he crashed that motorcycle. Right. So there's a huge difference. You and I both know this.

There's a huge difference about when you walk away from a crash and you go, yeah, that was too much brake. That was either too much gas. Okay. That was too much lean angle. You know, I was offline about that millimeter and that's the slick part of the track.

And I took it. You know, that's what happened, right? You have no, but there's those crashes and then you've had them. I know you've had them. I know I've had them where I'm sitting in the gravel trap going.

I have no flipping clue how I got here. This makes no sense to me. And that was not the kind of crash that he had. Where is Martin and Aprilia going to be next year versus the Ducatis versus everybody else? I mean, I can't see Martin challenging for a world title simply not that there's not the talent there, not that there isn't the passion there.

It's like you said with Olivera, though the ECU had a short in it. There's going to be these little I'll call it. I hate to be this way, but the characteristics characteristic Italian sort of hand waving. The so it's an it's an open question. I don't think you can read too too much in the Barcelona test, especially from the lap times.

Okay, again, it was cold. Nobody wanted to have a major crash. I think, or he knows where the bike needs to improve. Okay. And that's a very bad.

I mean, like you like you said, no, no, knowing where to get better is half the battle just knowing where to improve. Okay. The new head of development, their racing manager over in Aprilia next year is going to be the guy who came from KTM. And when you look at KTM's move from pretty good to race win challenger. It was under that guy's they can pull his name up now.

And it was under that it was on that guy's tenure. So, when KTM was under his tenure, they not only develop the bike in terms of, you know, parts and configurations that made it better. But it was consistently better. They did a reasonably good job of having a bike that was a front running machine. I think that the core of the bike, I think the bike is quick.

Okay, I think it's a matter of, you know, optimizing it every weekend, so that Sunday at two o'clock, it is as good as it can be. And I think that's the absolute optimum. I still believe that it is the equal of the Ducat. Okay, what I hoping that you're going to see in a brilliant now is more consistency. I talked to him after the the tests in Barcelona, and he was saying, you know, my first job is to rebuild the systems here.

My job is to change the way that we work on on the weekend. My job is to change the things that we do. And it's a big, it's a big ask it's not like I need to, we need a new chassis on the bike or we need this, you know, you don't know what to fix until you've got the thing working at 100%. And you can work it at 100% and then see what fails, you know where the weak spots are. If the bike is still remember what I think it was a leash came out of the pits at Austin, and I was shooting and turn one, and you hear everybody else come by on the gas and here comes a leash coasting pulls off right in front of me and a brilliant guy comes out on a scooter and pushes it back to the pits.

You know, if you're doing that, you're not getting the data that you need to find out where the weak spots in the bike are. So they can they can work on their consistency and work with track house to, you know, because roll rolls fast. Make no mistake, we're all Fernandez is fast. If they can work with them, share the data, share the technology, they have a they have a chance at doing a lot better than they did in 2024. I don't want to say that they're going to be a championship contender.

But I think that with Jorge on board and new management in place, they have a chance of winning a lot more than just one race. I agree. I agree. I agree with you there. What I'm what I'm worried about with Jorge.

He has shown at times and first of all, I agree with you. He's grown as a person. He has grown. I was not the world's biggest Jorge Martin fan. Again, these guys are incredibly talented.

I'm not taking anything away from them, but there's just something that about how he carried himself that just doesn't doesn't sit. Okay, that's fine. I'm not his cup of tea. He's not my cup of tea. We're fine.

But what I'm afraid of is that he goes to Aprilia. He gets close a couple of times, doesn't quite get it there, and then they kind of lose their way. And then he sort of throws his toys out of the pram. Now they've got to work not only with trying to get the bike back, but they've got to work with him in a mental state that isn't necessarily conducive to the idea of taking this forward. Somehow someone's got to hold that together.

And I think it's just very, very cautiously stitched together right now. And we're looking to find some ratchet straps and everything else to bind it and keep it together because it could be explosive. So I think there's two words that really sum up the difference between Jorge Martin of 2023 and Jorge Martin of 2025. And those two words are world champion. Okay.

Your And I've said this before, you have to look at the goals for each individual team and each manufacturer. Okay. If you look at the goals for Ducati, anything other than World Championships next year is a failure. Okay, that's the absolute failure. If you're Honda or Yamaha at this point, if you win a race, there might be a national holiday.

Or, or, or I'm looking, I'm looking in the skies for the signs of four horsemen. It's closed. Somewhere in the middle is going to be KTM and Aprilia. Jorge has reached, he's, he's won. He's, nobody can ever take that from them.

He is world champion. So a previous goals and therefore the pressure he puts on himself may be different. And that might, if you're, and I think the bike, like I said, I think the bike is good enough to win races. If you walk into the season going, all they need to do is win some races rather than that season long pressure of trying to accumulate points and win a championship. I think you might be able to keep your emotions under a little bit more of an even keel.

Now who knows, you know, he might get to race three and go this bike sucks. And, you know, and like you said, you know, toys out of the pram moment or year or whatever. But they're writing him a pretty big check. He's got a competitive bike. And he's got, he's already accomplished everything that he wants to accomplish.

If, if he went, I think he's in the position that Mark Marquez was in in 2024. If he wins three races, he's done okay. He's done okay. Yeah. I also feel like with Martin that while the move seemed to be shocking that he went to Aprilia, I'm beginning to wonder if he didn't know that Pramak was going to be a Yamaha team.

And so then that's not so shocking because he's looking at it. At that point, he knows he's not going to get a factory ride at the Akadi. Regardless of whatever happens that that ship sailed. I don't know what happened there. We may never know.

Right. We can speculate. Right. And a chance if they had a chance to get Marquez. Well, I was thinking more in the Bastionini when Bastionini got the seat over him.

Oh, that. So that's where I was. Sorry. I should have clarified it. That's okay.

Time frame. But going with but with that, where where did he have to go? Yeah. You like to do do do do. He's kind of like a cost of where am I going to go?

Right. Was he going to go to KTM? No, because the Wunderkin was there. Yeah. IE Acosta.

Okay. You could have filled different people in in the on the tech three. But now it's a satellite team. Do you really want to go there? So you want it factory money?

Right. I mean, you want it. I'll call it factory money. I think that's the best way to say it. You wanted a factory bike.

Well, where are you? Who's who? Where's the next best bike? Well, honestly, the KTM and a perl are pretty darn close. You can say that the Aprilia probably has a little better handling, a little better aerodynamics, possibly slightly maybe.

But but but they definitely they were they both have their ups and their downs or pluses and their minuses. But the KTM stable was full and he had already been through the KTM machine. Right. Because because because Martin was that that guy. And, you know, that's the other part of KTM.

Now they're talking about they they got to make this like a rider pay thing. They can't afford just to throw these guys out there on Moto three bikes and whatnot. So I think I think he made a smart move to go to to a perl. I mean, he's definitely now the leader of that team. And maybe with the with those two words, world champion, that changes you.

And you say, look, now this is a project I want to prove that I can develop a bike that I can take this and win races on it. You know, I mean, that's motivation itself. There's motivation there. The money's good. You know, if you remember, we were talking about Fabio Cortoraro, which is part of the reason that he's happy, in my opinion.

OK, he seems to be OK with doing what he does is that he is kicking the snot out of the rest of the Yalaha riders. OK, Martin goes to KTM. Martin is I'm not going to say number two to Acosta, but KTM has invested a lot of money in their thinking about him as their future. Martin would be one B. Yeah, there you go.

There you go. Martin's nice to have around, but he's not important. It's important to have Acosta there. He goes to Aprilia. I think it's reasonable to expect that.

Let me rephrase that. None of the other riders on Aprilia's in 2025 have proven to be as fast as he is. So you get more money. Worst case scenario, you know, you're just the fastest Aprilia out there. And if if you're the fastest Aprilia out there, then everybody looks at your results and goes out.

That's a problem with the bike. It's not him. He's clearly fast. He's world champion. Right.

Yeah. It's around places. Right. So I guess it was a question of, well, where do you go? You've really only got two realistic choices.

I mean, and again, if you're Honda, if you're Yamaha, you can wave big checks at people. But how motivated are they going to really be? You know, the. Aprilia is competitive. You've got a chance to win.

And there's really a no lose situation there. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's very it's very hard to see. Him being.

Unsuccessful at the goal, the Aprilia level. And again, you know, I think I think Aprilia, if they wouldn't know World Championship next year, it's going to be a surprise to everybody, including them. I think their goals are to win a few races. And there's a couple of tracks where that bike is just so bloody fast. It's magic.

Silver. Yeah. You know, and Kota. The asset is another place that that bike seems to excel. Like it's just it's a rocket ship.

So you're signing on thinking, OK, I might not win the championship. I'll cry myself to sleep on the huge pile of euros that I now have under my pillow. And I still have a chance to stand on the top of the podium. Not a bad gig. No, I think if you can get it.

So let's talk about the guy who's leaving Aprilia, the leash. So a leash hangs it up. He hangs up his letters, right? He then said he then, you know, and he goes and does what a lot of retired Moto GP riders do. He signs a testing contract, but he signs a testing contract with Honda.

Now that that that one that surprised me. It really did surprise me. But I mean, I I want I wonder for two questions. I mean, I just want some thoughts, your thoughts on the nation. Then I want does I want to thought on does a leash help Honda as much as we think he can?

Hmm. I think if Honda's willing to listen to him, that he can help them. OK, I think I think you do a lot of good race winner on a bike that's probably the second fastest, like the second fastest thing out there. And when it's on one, a leash knows what it is to ride a modern Moto GP bike that is that that is a race winner at race winning pace. OK, and that's what I like.

I like Stefan. He's a good company man who's putting a lot of work for them. OK, but he he's not a race winner. He can't he can't ride a bike at that level or hasn't been able to, I should say. So even at the races where he's shown up as a wild card, the factory teams, you know, they they kick his butt.

So, yes, if Honda listens, Alash is definitely a potential source of information and feedback that can help get them closer to the front. OK, if now that's assuming that race winning Alash shows up. OK, he's very much very, very much an emotional rider. You know, really. And again, funny thing, really nice guy, you know, spend some time talking to him in the pits and things like that.

It's just, you know, one of those people who's he knows his job and he knows it's serious business, but he's managed to keep it in perspective in terms of, you know, his whole life. He's got to. I hate to use this cliche. He's got a very good work life balance going on. OK, so the question is, like we were talking about before, you find the areas that need improvement only by going 100, you know, at 110 percent, 105 percent.

Part of the reason that Martin and Vagnaia crashed so much this year is they were both just 100 percent was starting. And you've got to be willing to do that. And that's question mark number one. Question mark number two is whether or not Honda will invest in the. Resources they need to turn that stuff into race equipment, race material to use to make the motorcycle better.

One of the things that Quateraro said at the end of the year about Yamaha changing the way they worked, he said we would do a test if the engine was better. We had that engine next weekend. It didn't have to go back to Japan for reliability testing and analysis and all this other stuff. You know, they were. So we need to see if Honda's willing to take some chances with that.

They should. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Right. You know, they should. So that part we'll we'll we'll see.

The other thing is, yeah, you remember you got a new formula coming up in two years. Yep. You know, so how much do you want to spend to go fast now? Yeah, there you go. You know, so there's that.

Now, if I'm a leash and so and I'm looking for a testing contract just because riding one of those things has got to be a rush. You know, you don't just you don't just quit. You can't call Turkey. I'm telling you, you cannot call Turkey that. You can't do it.

I mean, for me, I couldn't. I had to start weaning myself off with hair scramble races and stuff. Right. You know, you've got to wean the adrenaline rush out of you. It's crazy.

Anything. And so. So so I think. Hold on. Let me.

Please go ahead. Sorry. If you're if you're going to test with anybody, Honda's bikes are reliable. Honda tends to do it in safe places. Testing is dangerous.

Oh, yes. Testing is really dangerous. So if you're going to do it, you're going to do it. If I'm a leash, I'm going to do it with the company that's going to pay me well and have well prepared bikes on circuits that are going to be as they're not going to be sketchy. So go on.

I'm sorry. What's your next question? No. So I mean, me, I mean, if I'm looking at if I'm looking at this, I think Honda has a really big decision that they have to make. And I think it I think it revolves around a leash myself personally.

And that is, do we use a leash? In a 70 and 100 percent role of testing with the rules and regulations for the bike that appears next year, or do we take a lace, put him on the bike sparingly to give us directional feedback? And we spend the bulk of our time building an 850 with a lace riding that bike to make that 850 when it shows up in two years, the best 850 we could put on the grid. Which way do you play that game? So really good question.

That's why I'm here. I asked the right question. So my initial thoughts are that you've looked your Honda, you've already lost your major sponsor. Your dance partner's gone. You know, you need to find a new date.

Yeah. And for the next two years, you can. And I'm just saying this off the top of my head as I am as I'm thinking my way through this, you've got nobody to impress. You don't have to show up with results. Okay.

So you can experiment and try new things and maybe use a leash for some of that. But yeah, it's got to be really tempting to think about, you know, let's just build the best 2027 bike that we possibly can. On the other hand, you know, who knows what the world's going to be like in 2027. You know, you and I are never going to invest in technology today that a company says is going to pay off in 50 years. We have no idea what the world is going to be like in 50 years.

You can't think that long term. So I don't know. You know, I really don't know what Honda's thinking in 2027. Maybe they come up with a bike that, you know, just obliterates the field. Maybe they pull out of Grand Prix racing.

I don't I just don't know. You know, they've done it before. You know, they come in. They've been in and out of Formula One. They they won everything they wanted to win in in Grand Prix racing in the 60s and just bailed for you know, how long right?

They were comfortable. Yeah. So what 80 when they came back with 80? Yeah, 80. I thought it was like 80.

I have 81 in my head because I think that's when they had the first four stroke and are worried. So I I think it's there somewhere. Actually, it's the mid 70s. It's a mid 70s. Okay.

I almost forgot about it because the NR nickname never ready. Never ready. Was well-approved. But the concept of it was so cool. It was so outside the box.

Right. Cool. Right. I mean, I I have pictures of just those from Road from Cycle World from back in the day. I kept them because a 36 millimeter stroke on a piston that's an oval with eight eight of four intake valves.

We could talk that hold on. That's another conversation. Next time. Next time. We'll just talk nothing about the NR.

Awesome. I love it. Okay, cool. Where were we? What were we thinking before that money we're going to spend for 50 years?

You know, we were saying, okay, so you've got a leash. Where do you use him? I mean, do you if you're Honda, do you commit to 2027? Look at Suzuki. They pulled out in 2022 while winning races.

Yeah. You know, talking. That was a corporate board thing, though. You know what I'm saying? Crazy.

It's just I'm not I'm not going to slam. I'm not going to slam Suzuki or Kawasaki or anybody in the who makes these decisions about racing teams and where they go and what they do. Right. But okay, that's fine. Good.

I asked questions. You slam people that we got a great team. So but but it's like, okay, there's I've heard this many, many, many times and I've heard it from different people. And I've worked for a couple of Japanese companies as an engineer. Their their their culture, their people, the way they are is a very different thing than the way Americans are the way way.

I don't know. I have some British friends, which is I don't know if you want to say that they're European or not versus like people who are from Germany, France, Italy, that part. But because England's a little more closer, I think, to Americans without maybe the brashness. But but with like Honda, they are this weird rebel company that exists inside of a crazy contained culture that somehow works. And it's like, no, we are not going to not race bikes.

This is what we do. And maybe that's because Mr. himself spent so much time in the US that he sees he saw that and then he took that and you have a culturally rich country with a cultural heritage where culture is everything. Culture is the main, I think one of the main things of the Japanese is very much into their culture and their thing. And you take this guy, take Mr.

Honda, and you take him. You have he's in America. I have no idea how long he was in America. I know he was here for some time and then he went back home and he built motorcycles. He took that culture of winning and racing motorcycles and bikes.

And that's the love, right? That's the love is right there that I don't think they're they're never going to like just I don't think they'll ever walk away again, right? Despite the walk away from former the one anytime they want, but I just I just don't think they will walk away from walk away from motorcycles. So they're going to spend the money and do whatever they want. And they're probably the only people left on the grid who's got enough money to build a bike that may win the 26 World Championship, highly unlikely.

And then when the 27 or when the 27 World Championship on 850, there would be just a second. And I actually happened to have the letter that Mr. Honda wrote to his employees. I decided to go TT racing and I don't know what this says about me, but I have a framed copy of it in my. It says that you're cool in my book.

And he said, and I'll paraphrase what he said was that. Attention all employees, every screw that you insert every bolt you tighten speaks about our company and about Japan to the rest of the world. I want you to approach it this way. So, Honda goes through these phases where they do all their work internally. And they lose and then they hire outside help and then they win and then they go back to the other thing.

The goal is to try to win with only internal resources. So, the thought that came to my mind was, what does winning actually mean. You put engineers on your Moto GP team, your Moto GP project, and the bike is not that great. But what those engineers learn, they take to their next assignment, and they build the next, you know, I don't know hydrogen powered car or whatever, and it sweeps the world and they drive Yamaha out of business and. I mean, that's it's nice to win Moto GP races.

It's nice to have twice the net profits. Anybody else. Anybody else. Right. But I think what those engineers learn was how to build a three cylinder force induction motorcycle that's 300 CCs and is beautiful.

That bike is cool. Then you mean the new V3. Yes. That's amazing. I want one.

I haven't seen it. I just haven't seen it and I want it right. I've seen it naked right I have I don't know what the body work looks like on it but I don't care. I want one. So here's, um, here's one of my thoughts on that and again, I am not a motorcycle designer.

Okay, but if, but I've read a lot of books. So one of the challenges when you're dealing with a non force injection motor is timing the intake charge and everything with the with the feedback wave and everything in the carburetors and everything, and timing it with the valve timing to get the charge to right. Am I wrong. Am I completely wrong in thinking that if you have a compressor actively sending the fuel air mixture towards the cylinder, rather than just allowing it to be passively sucked into the cylinder, and you've got that compression run by a supercomputer, you're no longer worried about any of that stuff. You can just sit there at the laptop and go, we need this much pressure in the intake in the intake at any given moment.

And, you know, no matter what this is going on the compressor adapts to that. I think that might be your big advantage. Variable vein turbo technology to have it so that you, if you've ever seen them. There's a good great one of the Porsche one that he's in their 911, you can watch the veins will turn and they will be like the pitch of a propeller on an aircraft right. Turn in and cut hard at the at low speed because they want to get that big volume of air forced in there.

But then they slowly pitch themselves back when you're going fast. So think about it as a major. Yeah, but think about it from a motorcycling standpoint. What is the most important thing that we have to have a connection between throttle and rear traction right. So, OK, what do we want coming out of a corner?

We would like to have a very linear fat torque curve that we can ride in. OK, variable pitch it right with this supercomputer to grab air force it in there. Give me that torque curve, that fat, fat torque curve. But then, but then if I'm in a straight line, I want to turn that turbo back the other way. I want to turn that force reduction and take the pitch out of it because we're already going fast enough now that just the physical idea of the suction of that piston coming down is probably drawing more than enough air at that time to get there, right.

It's just crazy talk. It's just so it has. It has the potential for, I mean, like I said, doing a lot of things that that you've always wanted to try to do, but you couldn't, you know. So you look at active suspension. OK, we've spent decades playing with needles and valves and viscosity and all that to get the thing to do.

You want the shock to do X and to behave in X manner coming out of a corner. You can do that with all that passively or you could put a couple of active motors on the thing and program it and it'll do that all day long. You know, exactly that. My car's got that. Looking at that kind of change when it comes to motors.

Oh, yeah. You know, I'd love to see this. I'd love to see this 300 become like the motor like a motor three bike. I think that'd be super. So they're talking, you know, they're talking about changes in motor three.

They're talking about doing away with the two 50 CCs and going to 400 or 500 CC twins. Right now, one of the issues that they're kind of talking about in the background is, is it going to be is a motor going to be open to other manufacturers competition like in Moto three are they going to do a spec contract like in Moto two. But the idea is that to make the jump from Moto three to Moto two smaller to make the Moto three bikes harder to ride. So you break up some of those big packs which are kind of dangerous are, you know, probably the most one of the most dangerous parts about racing right now. But to do so in a cost cost effective way.

World Superbike is doing that with their super sport 300 goes away at the end of 2025. And they're, you know, Gregorio Livia, you know, I said to me that you're we're going to look at bikes that have 80 to 90 horsepower, as opposed to the 45 or so of the 300s. And he says, smaller jump from the junior class to super sport, harder bikes to ride breaks up the packs, all of that, you know, all of that is, is the goal here, plus more manufacturers that market that market segment has just boomed in the past few years. Do you remember when twins used to be 650 and they were really bargain bikes you know like PSV have gotten my garage. You know, I got in that Aprilia 660 a couple of years and girls like you've got to be kidding.

You know, and now you've got, you know, the are that that bike, the. There's a whole bunch of people with really cool 450 twins and 500 twins you've got Kawasaki with the 404. You know, that's going to be a really interesting class when they read when they rebuild that, because I think you're going to see, you know, the are sevens the Aprilia are said the Aprilia RS 660 is the Suzuki GSX 8R, probably the Kawasaki 400. It'll be fascinating to see what you wind up there. It'll be like Moto America's twins Cup on steroids.

It'll be a lot of fun. All right, Michael, we, I think we've covered some great ground I mean we've been at this like two hours I think maybe the cow is coming home I mean I do have a deer outside the window does that count. I'm totally envious. So, so we have all that. Man I have way I mean I had a notepad and notes and we never even touched any of that so we were just chatting I loved it it was great.

I think everybody's going to get love this one as much as I did this one. I appreciate you coming back on. I will definitely have to try again maybe after testing or something and talk a little bit more. These are, I love these long type format interviews, and I can't thank you enough for coming on and sitting down and spending two hours of your Saturday afternoon, Saturday morning I guess in California to to talk to the front to the everybody at Moto pod. It's absolutely my pleasure I kid like it's like I said I can, I can talk about motorcycles, all day long, you know, I spend.

It's been it's a big part of my life. You know, and I and I tried to learn as much as I can about it and racing and it is a fascinating microcosm of human accomplishment. And it says racing says a lot about human beings and it's just and it's so much fun to talk about it with somebody like you, who has a passion for it and know something about it, you know it's a real pleasure. Anytime you want me to come on, dude if you want to do an hour on Honda's and are yes yes. Give me a time and a date man.

We'll do that Michael. Thank you. Thank you for your time. You have a very good day.