Chatting with Gougis

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. Episode 804, for April 24th, 2025.

I'm your host Jim McDowell, riding solo as this is a special interview episode. But before we get to the interview, I wanted to talk about a few Moto GP news and notes so that I didn't keep you guys informed. First thing on the list is that Alisha Spargaro will wildcard for HRC at his home race in Spain. That should be interesting to see how Alisha actually does on the Honda, which has looked pretty good so far this season, you have to admit. Second news that I'd like to go over is the fact that Jorge Martín, who had broken 11 ribs in total, 8 on his one side, 3 on the other in a crash in Qatar, has been released from the Hamad Hospital.

Now he's not been cleared to fly back home yet, he's still trying to get the cleared to be able to fly. He's not cleared to fly yet. It's probably going to be one or two more weeks that he's going to spend in Qatar before he's allowed to fly home. I'd probably say that as soon as he is capable of being moved, there will be a special care air flight or ambulatory air flight that will take Jorge back home to Spain. I just hope, wish all the best in a speedy recovery for Jorge.

Hopefully Jorge will recover fully and be fully fit as opposed to trying to come back and just get fit enough to pass the physical to race during the weekend. I don't want this to linger on for a couple of years with injuries much like Marc Marquez. I think it's best that Jorge simply just take his time, recover completely, and then from there come back and see what he can do on a MotoGP bike. And the last little tidbit of news that we're going to go through, I couldn't leave off any kind of Pedro Acosta rumors, but the new rumor is that HRC has set down a contract in front of Pedro Acosta that is supposedly offering 30 million euros a year to race their motorcycle. That's a lot of money.

I think that's even maybe slightly more than what maybe Marc Marquez had in his last year at Honda. I think he was on 20 million euro. So now we're talking about 30 million euros for Pedro Acosta. That's kind of crazy. It is of course a rumor.

There is no hard truth to it. It's just a little tidbit I saw while scrolling through the social media platforms. And with that, we'll get into the interview. Once again, I rang up a good friend of the show, Michael Gujas, editor at large for Racing World. And we sat down to talk about everything MotoGP so far this season and compare notes about what we thought after the first three races of the year.

So without further ado, here's me and Michael. Hey, Moto Potters, Jim here again with good friend of the show, Michael Gujas. Michael, last time we talked, it was before the beginning of the MotoGP season. And I said, well, we'll check back in after a few races. We'll see what goes on.

We've been through three races here. And I just want to get your take on what's going on. Start anywhere you want, but we can start in Thailand, whatever you want to do. I want to know what you're thinking. Well, thank you very much for having me here.

It's always a pleasure to be on your podcast. I've gotten to actually attend one of the races for Road Racing World and Motorcycle Technology. I was out at Kota. I guess I was like, oh, we should have met. I had no idea.

I didn't even think about it. That's, you know, there was so many things going on. Although, you know, to be perfectly honest, that place was kind of empty. I was trying to figure that out too, because I was like, well, there seems to be the same number of people in the campground. So that seems to be normal.

And then I was like, I'm like, well, wait a minute, there's the big grandstand there at the end of the back stretch, which is parallel to it. And I'm thinking, well, there seems to be a few more people over there. But then you look at the ones by 15 in the Mickey Mouse little section, it's like, well, that's not packed at all. So I have no idea. Anyway, the weather probably didn't help.

Although I have to say, on my, the web posts that I did from the event, that I have some of my own photography, that was the first time I've ever shot a rain, a rain race, you know, I've done some stuff in England, but that was the first time I'd ever really shot for any long period of time in the rain. And some of the backdrops were just fabulous, because you could, you could shoot with the overcast in places where you couldn't normally shoot in the direct sunlight. So I've got some photos, like it turned one from the inside with this textured red background. It's just anyway, so that was really good. So my first thoughts were, last time we we chatted, we were of the, I believe both of the opinion that Mark was going to wipe the, you know, wipe the floor with the field.

And I've seen nothing to contradict that. No, definitely not from Thailand. That's for sure. Not from Thailand, not from Argentina, not from Argentina, not from, and honestly, not from COTA. I mean, racers make mistakes.

So, but I mean, it, that was the crash on Friday at COTA was his first crash of the year. And this is, I mean, how many times did he crash at the Saxon Ring in 2023? Like 18? I don't know. I was, I was at, I was at six real quick.

I had six. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you know, he was overriding the bike and he's not doing that this year, you know? So that's my first impression. What's, what's interesting is, when you look to me, one of the interesting things when you look at his crash in, first in practice, he was literally said later, he was having fun.

He was playing, you know, he was riding like he was in the dry. And I was out there at that corner. I didn't catch the crash, but I was out there shooting. That was not dry. It was just sheets of water coming across the pavement.

So, you know, that's a rider who's really, really, really confident on the bike. The other thing, and you hear about it happening and people write about it and racers talk about it, was when you're comfortable and you slow down and you lose concentration just a little bit. And that's what happened during the race. You know, he had already settled into cruise mode. Then you start missing your marks.

And that particular stretch, have you ever written that, Dakota? No, I've never written it, but I've, my favorite part is to stand there in the S's and watch everybody go through. Actually, I think the hidden gem of that place is seven, eight, nine, over to 10. It's exciting. It really is.

You know, that's why they're, they have the grandstand there, but they don't let you sit there. I'm like, I would just camp out. I'd put a tent. I'd stay there. I wouldn't move.

It's the most perfect place. It's fabulous from on the bike because I think that's where we're talking about as the elevation changes. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there are apexes and turning points that you can't see.

And then, you know, just a place where you just hold your breath and hope that the track hasn't moved. You know, when you go, because you, 10 is the one that leads into the hairpin, which is 11, which leads up to the back straight. Yep. Yep. Yep.

10 is exciting. 10 is just kind of all that down there. Yeah. Because there's, Fernandez is over that curb. Yeah.

That's mid. Oh, by an inch or two. But what I was saying was that going into the S's, you have a rhythm, a line that you are doing on reflex, you know? And when you slow down, you're not changing your line. You're changing where, when a racer slows down like that, they're changing.

Usually they go, they break a little bit earlier and a little bit less hard. And then they come out a little bit later on the throttle. And that, that will change your line if you do it wrong. And then it just, any mistake early in the S's there is magnified later in the S's. And, you know, you add that to a rain slick painted curb, you know, and that bad things happen.

You know, a lot of the riders were talking about just how slick it was, even though they had all changed to dry weather tires, which was fun. But I think, you know, when I think about it, that looks like what happened to me. But still, like I said, I don't think anything has changed in terms of who the favorite is. And I, as it's from the preseason, you know, what you and I were talking about. And I think everything that we had talked about has absolutely come to light.

The bike is comfortable on the tires. The rider is comfortable on the bike. And, you know, nobody is cruising. Okay. Nobody is cruising.

But there's a difference between riding at a hundred percent and riding at a hundred and ten percent. And riding at a hundred percent looks like it's enough to win races at this point in the game. It also tells you something else. I think Alex Marquez has been overlooked a lot in his career. You know, he's not the genius that his brother is.

But when he won that Moto two championship in the middle of the season, he was just riding away from the rest of the field. You know, he went on a streak of wins. The guy is good. He's a Moto three and a Moto two world champion. You got to be good.

Exactly. It's like, sorry, but they, the Marques is kind of have, I think people have Hayden syndrome. You know what I'm saying? Oh, yes. Because you had, you had Tommy, you had Nikki, you had Roger Lee, right?

And they were all very good. Yes. No question there. Each of them was very, very good. But if you had been around them long enough and I grew up dirt tracking against them, did road racing against them.

You knew Nikki was the best of the best of the best, right? Nikki just was that he just had that whatever else you needed that didn't make Tommy a slouch. He won numerous super sport championships that you are no slouch to win a super sport championship at the time against people like Hayes and do Hamel, I think was, and you still ride the super sport here and there and yeah, et cetera. I mean, you had the running joke back then. You may remember this as the bikes were same, but not same same.

Right. Exactly. Yes. It might look the same, but they're not the same. Yeah.

I want to know, I want to know which dealership those motorcycles came from. I don't disagree with you on that. But yeah, they, the, I think, and like I said, I think Alex is underrated. I think he's getting to show what he is actually capable of. But there's one more thing about it.

It also goes to show to me, one of the things we've learned is just how deep Ducati's well of knowledge is and their ability to adapt to new situations. The last year when Michelin changed their tires, the GP 23 was all of a sudden basically uncompetitive. Ducati figured out how to make that tire work when, you know, essentially nobody else did. The company, I mean, they're, they're not just their knowledge of how it works, but their ability to sit and go, okay, this is what the track is like on Friday morning. This is how it's evolving through Friday afternoon.

What do we have to do to change the bike to make it work? And they do that so much better than anybody else. You know, Gigi, Gigi walks around on the grid before the race, holding a laptop. He has one in his hands at all times. And on Saturday, I was on the grid just before the race started, the sprint race started at Cota.

And I saw him going around to the tech guy who was on the grid with the bikes. He didn't talk to the riders. They already knew their job. But he went to the tech guy, the guy who was sitting there with a laptop plugged into the bike and tapped him on the shoulder. It's like, is everything okay?

It's like, yes, we've got this dialed in. And it was like, I mean, it was like watching a rocket launch, man. It was amazing. So those are my initial impressions. Other than God, I wish Martine hadn't gotten hurt.

Yeah. That's going to put Aprilia behind the eight ball the entire year because two of the four tracks where I expected them to see them be the most competitive are behind us now. Yeah. Thailand and Argentina, Argentina and Cota. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Because one there with the Aprilia a year ago or whatever. Yeah. And came from like 12th in the field or wherever he was, you know, he started down in downtown Austin or wherever and just wrote, it just wrote through everybody.

It was crazy. And don't get me wrong again, Maverick is insanely talented, but nothing to touch him and the Aprilia that whole weekend. It was just like, wow. So anyway, what were, what were your thoughts? So well, I got many, what does that matter?

What did they matter? Not who cares? So the first, my first thing was because being at Cota and getting to watch the bikes is much different than watching it on on TV. Yes. There are things you see, you hear, you understand, right?

You hear the application of throttle, you hear when traction control kicks in, you hear how the bike moves. You can, if you're paying really close attention and you have the tuned ear, you can hear the tire on top of it all. Right. So for me, it's like, it's this versatile orchestra of noise and sound that's so special. That's beautiful to me.

And what I picked up on quickly was just how, how good Ducati's ride height system is compared to everybody else's. Now, I don't know if it was because it was wet Friday and on the back straightaway and Marquez went by and Mir on the Honda was with him. Now the Honda seems to have got some squirt out of the corners. It seems to get there quick, but it dies. It starts chugging and there's no more left at the top.

And in the rain down the backstretch, you could see that visibly Marquez's rear of the Ducati had to be three or four inches lower than what Mir's Honda is. And it's like, okay, if you think about why there's a ride height device on there, it's because you had put wings on the front and the more you turn the wings up, the more drag you have. So if you let the bottom of the bike down, the wing pulls back to a flatter condition, if you will. And you're turning it out. Yes.

Turn me out. Thank you. That's what I was going to say. And the bike goes faster. Honda doesn't lower enough.

So maybe their top speed isn't because they don't have a motor, it's because they don't have the back end squatted enough. So that was a part that I was saw first real quick. That was visual. So that was, that's really interesting to me because Zarco and Mir were talking post race and they were both talking about how we don't have the motor. Mir is talking about who he's trying to do everything on the brakes with the bike leaned over.

And it's like, well, there's a reason that you're crashing so much, dude. Tires don't do three things. You can break and kind of turn, but you can't break, turn and break. You can get away with it for a while. But I used to watch Indycar back in the day and they would talk about having the car in qualifying configuration, which means it was trimmed out for top speed.

If you were really talented, you could hang on to it for four laps. Okay. When you did not try to race the 500 in that configuration, because you were not going to be able to keep the car out of the wall for over 500 miles. Very true. So also, I think we've, you know, we've talked a little bit about formula one, the Lotus 78 and Lotus 77, I believe were the two that initially came up with the ground effects.

Oh yeah. 77, definitely. I think 76, 77 is correct. Okay. There was an all, when those cars came out, there was an ongoing battle between the drivers and the engineers.

The drivers wanted as much downforce as they could get because Mario and Dredi said the car was painted to the road and there's nothing, there's nothing better than driving a car that you cannot spin out, you know, right? Yes. I, yes, I know the feeling. And then the engineers are like, well, you can't complain that it's slow in a straight line. You have so much drag because you have so much downforce.

I wonder if that's not where the Honda is right now. Very possible. It's the fattest bike. If you look at it head on, nose on. Oh, I thought the Yamaha would have been fatter just because of the inline four, but apparently they must've sucked it in.

They, they aren't as far down the road. I don't think of aero as, as the Honda is really. Okay. So yeah. So if you look at the Honda, I, this is my impression.

They were like, we're going to make this thing handle no matter what we can't keep having riders throwing themselves off the bike. We can't have them parking it in corners. So we're going to figure out how to make it handle. And I think maybe they have gone too far in the way of mid corner ground force arrow. Okay.

That would be, that would explain why the bike is fat and now it feels good mid corner and it feels good coming out of the corner. But you combine that and the fact that you don't have a ride height device, it's as good as the Ducati and now it's way drag year in that upper third to upper quarter of the, of the top top end. So it might not be that they're lacking motor. It might be that they haven't quite figured out that drag versus downforce ratio as well as Honda and Aprilia, you know, to have done. Sure.

That's something that's my observation because they're not. Yeah, they're not miles away. They're not miles away. They're not miles away. And the riders aren't as afraid of the bike as they used to be, you know, the Honda riders.

Yeah. That's, that's the other thing that I saw was how Mir was riding through it all. Right. So he was crashing before like everywhere, like it made no sense where, where he was crashing, right? Like there's not a pattern to it.

It's this random walls, the front this time, the back that time I fell over in the middle of the corner. I, okay, what are you doing? Right. Yep. Right, left, slow corners, fast corners.

It didn't matter. Poor guy. Poor Juan. But if you, but looking at Kota, you look at every accident he had, it's on the brakes, predominantly running wide at 12 or yeah, 12 because okay, you, you have a Ducati that just went by you or is putting a bike length or two on you. You want to make it back up on the brakes.

So if you're falling all the time on the brakes, you know what's wrong there as opposed to having no idea why things are happening. I always hated that when I had a crash, if, if I crashed, I'm okay. If I crash, as long as I understand why I crashed, it's the ones that I have no idea why I'm on my head and I roll through the gravel trap and I sit up and go, how did I get here that you makes you go? What am I doing with my life? Then you forget you get that.

You go, where's my bike? I want to ride again. I just, it's a fleeting thing that happens, but yes, that's like, I'm trying, I try to count here real quick. I think it was turned five at Chuck Walla. I was, I had switched tire brands and I was getting used to it and I talked the front and I saved it.

And then like five turns later, I crashed and I'm like, well, at least I know what happened. I completely ignored the warning sign from three corners ago. I mean, you know, if I had looked over at the bike when I was sitting there in that desert, it would have looked at me and gone, I tried to tell you. But, but yeah, they don't, like I said, they don't look, they look more comfortable on the bike. They're not a million miles away.

It's, and we go back to what, why is Ducati so good? Because Ducati has refined their package and they refined their data processing package. They, the process is what I'm looking for. I think the Ducati is the embodiment of a completely harmonious set of devices working in true harmony to create the ultimate motorcycle. Whereas I tend to think maybe not as much now, but early on you could tell that the Japanese were just simply bolting things on.

Absolutely. Where Gigi has understood that it's the whole system. The whole system must work as one and then it becomes magic. It's kind of like the all singing, all dancing, all active suspension, everything Williams that Nigel Mansell had in 92, right? You can put anybody in the car and make it work because it did, because the car was one harmonious system.

And as you saw other people try to throw active suspension on their cars, it was a hit or miss situation, whether it really worked or not. So two things real quickly. On top of that, what Ducati has that other teams don't have, to me, what I see, they don't have the process for moving that harmonious vehicle, excuse me, from 99.5% to 99.9%. They're not, like you said, they're not bolting new parts on it every weekend and then trying to figure out how that works or how that doesn't work. They're adjusting, they are refining, they are optimizing what they have.

Okay. And don't forget, Honda got Albiziano from Aprilia this year. That guy built a bike that was the only thing that really could run with or even occasionally run away from the Ducatis. So he's starting from a really high point. Okay.

He has an idea of how to make the bike work completely all together. I mean, remember last year, Raul Fernandez took one of the satellite Aprilias and was leading at Barcelona. Okay. He'd qualified front row or it was like, whoa, where'd that come from? Miguel Oliveira put the bike on the front row and on the podium at the sprint at the Saxon Ring.

So he did, as I wrote on roadracingworld.com when Honda hired him, they shortcut the learning process. It wasn't like, how do we build a bike that wins races? It's like, this guy knows how to build a bike that wins races. He can leapfrog through several weeks of the class, so to speak, because he already knows what's on the final. He wrote the book.

Yeah. He's got a few chapters of it at least. There you go. So you know who looks uncomfortable this year? The KTM?

Yeah, exactly. And it's just, they were talking about vibration and they can't figure out where it's coming from. And basically all they can do to get rid of the vibration at the rear is to set the bike up with less traction. So it just spins instead of digging in and then causing the bike to rock and shake at the back. Again, to me it was interesting.

Even the Ducatis were struggling with that at Cota in the dry because a lot of the track had been resurfaced. So the grip levels were different. And when we did our media interviews with Binder on, I think it was Saturday after the races, he was talking about how much the bike was vibrating. And I asked him, I said, do you think it's due to the resurfacing? And I said, because even the Ducatis are having trouble with vibration at the rear.

And his eyes lit up and he said, the Ducatis are having this problem? And one of the other journalists said, yeah, a lot of them are complaining. He said, thank you for telling me this. I always sometimes wonder about my role in some of this. Thank you for telling me this.

I'm going to tell the crew not to go too crazy tonight in trying to solve it because they thought they were on their own with this problem. And they kind of are, but it wasn't as bad as they had feared at least at that track. And what that tells me is that they just don't have the time or the money or the resources to dump into all the virtual reality, all the data analysis, all the modeling, all the things that the other teams are spending a bunch of money on. They're trying to figure out where it's going wrong. And they can't spend the time in the classroom to learn.

Does that make sense? No. Yeah. Yeah, especially. So since we're at KTM, Acosta, he even said that the Hondas made huge advancement over the winter.

Yes. I have thought for a long time that Acosta will be on a Honda. Now, this rumor keeps dredging up again and again. And now there's this rumor of the Honda super team that Acosta somehow, either Honda buys him out, whatever, they've got the money to get him onto their bike. While meanwhile, they move top rack and world super bike onto their Honda.

And then they move him to the 850 because he has the most knowledge of anybody who's going to be in that paddock with a Pirelli Moto GP tire in 2027. I think it happens. There's too much smoke for this one, right? It doesn't die. And I know some of it's clickbait.

Yeah, but Acosta can. How much? Yeah, I know. I know. But how much is this?

If you're a journalist covering Moto GP 2025, how many times, how many different ways can you say Mark is kicking everybody's butt? You know, I mean, yeah, okay, fine. Right. And be writing about rumors in motor sports is like being a weather forecaster. If you're wrong, nobody remembers.

You're right. Everybody cares. And yeah, sure. But I mean, it sort of makes sense for Honda, right? Because you take, I mean, let's go back through history and look at Honda's world champions, right?

Okay. So my memory starts back in the 80s. And so Spencer, phenomenal talent on a bike that probably wasn't as good as the Yamaha wins, right? Let's call that one there. You've moved forward and you've got Wayne Gardner, who wrote a bike that completely wasn't right.

Eddie Lawson showed up on the bike and wins on it. And that bike, he sits there and tell you, hey, look straight at you. Well, you got to tighten the steering dampener all the way up. Otherwise it's never going to turn or stop wobbling. I can't remember which way he said it.

And so there's another world champion, right? Well, then doing is the dominant player. And he, you know, real rips off what four or five in a row. I can't even remember now at this point in the state. And then you, then you're sort of like, it kind of, there's nothing in there because then it becomes the Rossi era.

Well, you know, Rossi is extreme talent, right? He wins the last two fifth or last 500 title, wins the Moto GP title. And then he just leaves because like, I just don't want to deal with Honda anymore and takes his magic to Yamaha. So then you're, you're waiting for the next one. Nikki shows up, right?

He gets a title there on a bike that was completely a developmental bike. Like that bike wasn't anything near, look, if you looked at it, it was not anything that Pergrosso was riding. It was sort of very experimental, at least in my mind. If, you know, when I stood at Indian, you watched Nikki's bike and you looked at Danny's bike with those, those two don't look alike. And so then you get Marquez.

He's now the next great phenomenal talent and they win titles. So it's like, go ahead. So it makes logical sense to me. You find the next great talent and that, I mean, Acosta is going to be a superstar. Alonzo is going to be a superstar, but he's in Moto too right now.

So let's calm down for a second. But he's learning. Yeah. Well, quickly that jump from Moto three to Moto two is big. Yeah.

That's why they're talking about one of the reasons we're talking about changing Moto three bikes. Yeah. Twin five, twin cylinder 500 with big wheels. And I think they should. I, I good a little more weight, bigger tires, you know, I, I think that will definitely help.

And we're going to see, you know, the, the, the super sport 300 class disappear next year and world super bike. And they're going to be replaced, you know, basically by what I'm generously calling the six 50 twins class, you know, the gap between a Yamaha R three and a Yamaha R nine, which are now running in the super sport is just too big. But I digress, um, you know, one thing about all of those champions on Honda that you talk about, one of the things that those, every one of those riders did was constantly put pressure on the factory to build a better bike. You know, um, there's, um, there's a really good book, um, but I don't have his, I think it's, I don't have the title in front of me or the author in front of me now. Um, but it's about, it's a book on the history of Honda's GP race bikes.

And he did another one on the history of Yamaha GP race bikes. And if you look at the story of guys like doing, doing argued with them for three years before he got hurt to make changes to the bike. And it was constantly, you know, on paper and this is the engineer's job. I'm not criticizing them. The engineers are like on paper, this is going to work.

And then he, they, he'd get on it and he's like, no, that doesn't work at all. And it was this constant back and forth. But the reason he ripped off five straight titles was that by the time, by the time he got injured, because if he hadn't gotten injured, it would have been a lot more titles. Okay. Um, by the time he got injured, they had sort of had a meeting of the minds.

The engineers understood what he was talking about he understood what they were trying to do. And, you know, there were not a lot of revisions, major revisions to things like geometry in those, in the golden years for them. So, you know, I think right now Honda is trying to figure out their path. I think it makes sense to hire the next superstar. The question is who it's going to be.

I think Acosta is, you know, just again, one of those generational talents, you know, one of those people you could put on any bike and win. AT&T was going to want a lot of money to let him go. Then again, you know, you're talking about corporate race budgets, what, you know, the amount of money that, you know, you, you and I, if somebody handed us a check with that many zeros on it, you know, it'd be, you know, paramedics yelling clear, you know, to try to restart our hearts. Right. And that kind of money is a rounding error on corporate, corporate balance sheets.

Right. So it's not, it, so there's that, I don't think that's going to be the obstacle. I think it's going to be the question of whether or not he thinks the bike will be competitive enough to win titles and the bike is way better. And if anybody's going to build a bike that's going to, you know, challenge the Aprilia and Ducati, it's going to be Honda. But it's a question of when, how long is it going to take?

27, maybe 27, maybe. But on the other hand, look at top rack, he's going to be toward way closer to the end of his career. He's going to come a lot cheaper. And he does have experience with the Pirelli tires. I'm sorry.

That'll be critical. Having someone who understands that tire very well. So, you know, when we talk about logic coming into this, to the extent that it does, you know, it's almost, you're almost looking at Honda going, you know, we could, we can see top rack as an intermediate step. And a person to, if you will, he can be a proof of concept. You know, he can, I think he can come in and he's not going to have to unlearn how an old Moto GP bike worked.

He's going to jump, hey, he's going to jump onto something that has less in the way of pure aerodynamics, has no ride height control, has Pirelli tires. You know, you can make an argument that a super bike. Sounds like a super bike. There you go. Right.

That's it. That's exactly where I was going with that. So, you know, you know, I mean, yeah, I can see a cost to jumping ship. I can too. But I wonder, I really do tend to wonder if somebody at Honda's like, oh, maybe we should make some intermediate steps.

Because as somebody's, Jack Miller was on a podcast recently. I heard this. Yeah. I was gonna ask you some of this stuff, but go on. Yeah.

He said like, nobody's making that kind of, nobody, you know, factories aren't throwing those big dollar deals at people like they used to. Yeah. And remember, Honda's gotten burned with, with Polis Fargaro, with Jorge Lorenzo, you know, which I love. Did you hear the story that Mark was the guy who got Jorge onto the Honda? No, I didn't hear that one.

I read, I read somewhere a transcript of another interview he, Mark had done where he went to his team in 2018 and said, Hey, that Ducati is a really good bike and Jorge is really starting to gel with it. It's going to be very difficult to beat him next year. Maybe we should get him onto our bike. Then I could beat him there. And that's what they did.

And Jim, look back at 2018. You're right. There were a couple of races towards middle of the end of the year, where you're like, Lorenzo has got this thing going. And there were, then there were just like weird, you know, weird racing incidents that happened that first corner at Aragon, where Lorenzo went wide and high sided himself to the moon. But he was going to be pushing Mark hard there.

So anyway, like I said, the big money deals are gone. If Miller is right, and the big money deals are gone, Honda might say we've gotten burned on spending huge amounts of money to hire the, you know, the next great talent. Maybe we'll try a different approach and that might be where top rack comes in. I don't know. We'll find out.

Yeah. I mean, you know, you gotta have you, I mean, you have to see top rack race. You have to see him outbreak somebody. It's bonkers. I mean, I've stood at the side of the track and turned one at her ass and just watch him look like, you know, I look like he's coming from downtown and outbreak guys.

You know, it's just, and he doesn't, when he does it, he doesn't look out of control. He doesn't look like he's doing anything stupid. It's like, it's really good. And now that I'm talking through this, okay. You've got a guy who, I mean, I don't, I'm not going to vouch for anything else that he does anywhere else in the, in on the racetrack.

Okay. But he brings magic to exactly the point of the cornering experience that the Honda riders are struggling at might be your guy. I'm just saying. Yeah. Sort of like Marty.

So, so right there. So, okay. So again, the BMW rumor exists that BMW is going to buy KTM. I don't, I think that's clickbait. I think that's complete hogwash.

Yeah. I just don't see. I just don't see that happening. So, so another, another observation here, I'll start with this, this one from Koda is we were talking about Alex and I'm going to go back to that. And Alex is significantly taller than his brother, which is, you know, he's just a taller dude, right?

Right. I think, I think that his problem late in the race is his weight because he's taller causes him to use more rear tire than his brother could be. I mean, I don't know how much they weigh. Yeah. I don't know either.

I mean, every Moto GP guy is pretty subdued nowadays. Yeah. Whatever that word is. God, they're just, I mean, no, they're, they're, they are some of the most fit athletes I've ever, I've ever, you know, seen. And they're not, not big, but fit, you know, is, is what I mean.

Because there are, there are some linebackers that, I mean, I don't know if I'd call them fit, you know, just because they're, they're huge or I should say NFL linemen. They're just huge, but these guys, it's just all muscle. It might be something for Alex. It might be something as simple as weight distribution. I think he can't get his weight right.

Maybe, or they just haven't figured out how to get it right yet. Right. Like it might. Yeah. Not that Gigi and the boys don't know how to do it, but maybe there's a page missing out of the manual for Grissini, you know, exactly.

Right. I mean, that, that could be it. You know, you're talking about such fine adjustments now, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to, to convey just, I mean, so there was a quick Nikki Hayden story from a long time ago. I was at Suzuka for the eight hours when he was there the last time he was there. Right.

And he was talking about trying to find a compromise for, with the other two riders and under the rules for the Suzuka eight hours, you cannot change transmission internals. You have to, you have, they're homologated through the super bike, super bike class, whatever. Right. But I remember Nikki saying to me, it's been a long time since I had to change a whole tooth on a sprocket. Wow.

I want you to think about that sentence. I thought about it. That's wild. Yeah. That's really wild.

So you really, so, you know, maybe with Alex's weight, you know, a couple of kilograms here or there, you know, as far as front to back on the bike, here's another one. You know, it's exhausting to ride these things. Ian Oney got a, you know, thank you for welcome back to the Ducati ride last year. Yeah. You know, and, and he talked about after five laps of just being done, like, and this is a guy who was winning in world super bike, right.

You know, so if he's taller and the aerodynamics are built for shorter bikes, he might be a little more exposed to the wind, you know, and it's small margins. It's one of those things. You just, you go, okay, well, there's the difference, right? Yeah. And just tiny, just tiny things.

But man, you said you just have a little bit more of your head poking out from behind the bubble at 200 miles an hour. Yeah. I don't, that'll bounce you around. You know, I'm again, the fastest thing I've ever ridden is that BMW HP four carbon fiber frame bike. And I rode it at Kota.

You know, you're going down that back straight, every bump feels like a hammer blow to your chest. Your vision is bouncing around. You know, you sit up to break and all of a sudden your head is in 180 mile an hour wind blast and it's fatiguing. You know, it really is. So I wonder if that's not what's going on too.

On the other hand, it's not holding him back much. No, not at all. The man's got six straight podiums. Yes. I mean, he's looked magical, right, at this time, but it's like there's just that little piece of the puzzle missing.

Well, is it you get a stop and go, okay, is it his height? Is it his position on the bike? Is it the fact he can't quite tuck into it? Is it the fact that the Grissini boys don't know everything about the bike that like everybody in Ducati knows all of those things? Right.

I mean, I haven't seen Gigi making too many steps down to the Grissini garage lately, you know, so it's I think on the other hand, let's look at this from just a slightly different perspective. Okay. You take Mark out of the equation and all we are doing is writing about the genius of Alex Marquez, the revelation of the 2025 season, the reincarnation of Rossi. You know, he's got five straight wins if you take his brother out of the equation. That's true.

Yeah, that's true. So these things might all what you and I are saying might very well all be true, and yet not all that relevant. It's entirely possible. You know what I'm saying? So it's funny.

Hey, I want to try to wrap this up. Okay. So was there anything else that you wanted to touch base on? Yeah, just with Koda, the track, it seemed as though this year that they had the bump in two was gone because a lot of times it seemed like a lot of guys were catching the bike on the elbow because the front's folding because there's that little hump there. And it seemed also that at, was it 16, 17, 18?

My God, the Moto3 bikes were flying through there. So were the Moto GP bikes because the bump, the really bad bump between 17 and 18 was missing, which is probably the only reason Marquez stayed on the bike because there wasn't a bump there. And they would have had to throw away my leathers after that race. And just the mental strength to go, yeah, that was really scary. Let me pass these other two best riders in the world here real quick.

And that was bonkers. And then I'm like, okay, I'm just going to pass them back again. So that was that. And so then the track looked like it was in better shape. I thought it was in great shape.

I haven't been on it since the resurface, but it didn't, but it did look like the bump in turn two was gone, which just, you know, again, you look at the people who crashed there, it's probably because they were like, this is amazing. It's a wonderful turn to go through. You're hard on the gaps, you're leaned over. It's a really nice piece of pavement without the bump. You just kind of hold your breath and breathe the throttle just a little bit over it, you know, for a track day guy.

So there was nothing that I saw them really struggling. I watched them come over 10 as well from the outside. And I don't know if that was part of the thing that they repaved or not, but I didn't see the bikes bottoming out there as much. So I don't know if they've repaved it there or they're just getting better at dialing it in, the suspension, you know. All right.

Yeah. One other quick anecdote. Yeah, sure. And then I'll let you go. I don't think sometimes that we appreciate just how magical from an engineering point of view a MotoGP machine is.

So I was coming back from shooting on the outside of 11, okay. And they run photo shuttle vans. The vans are not driven by racing fans, okay. So we were driving back from 11 and the practice start point is just past 11. And we were going past there just as the MotoGP bikes were starting, they were doing their practice starts.

I told the shuttle driver, it's like, stop, stop, stop. Watch this. This is going to look like magic to you. And you'd see the bikes pull up and then they just sink down. And he's like, what is going on?

And I explained it to him. And he's just like, I had absolutely no idea. And we see that happen. Every start, we see it happen, you know, at for practice starts. And we as fans don't really even pay too much attention to it anymore.

But you know, it takes sometimes it takes somebody from the outside to show it to you and go, we have really gone a long, long way down the engineering path with these things. That's true. Because this year, I was able to bring my son with me. And my best friend who goes with me, his son came. Okay.

And I, you know, my buddy had an emergency phone call from work, he was dealing with it. So I just had the two boys. And I did the same thing, like, watch this, see this. And you just watch their eyeballs just light up like that. Like that shouldn't be possible.

Like physics says that you shouldn't be this far over and be able to come back up and go that far over the other way. But it happens. And it happens lap after lap and total precision. And it was just, it's fun. It was fun to watch them see all that.

And you know, you kind of get that chance in your life to teach, nurture and form. Like this is why this sport's so cool. And to expose others who aren't familiar with the sport to the sport. And when they and when, like you said, when their eyeballs light up, realize, wow, it really is as cool as I think it is. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I was gonna add one other question. I just had it. I just lost it again. But the idea of Liberty Media, oh, that's still lingering around there. And to me, I don't know what's going to happen anymore.

Now. It's like you kind of feel like there's some Liberty influence and what kind of some of the content. Oh, I know I really wanted to talk about this scratch that Liberty Media things go through that. So I'll go to the real good stuff here. Yeah.

The officiating Simon Kreyfarr, I think has done through the first three races of the year, and fantastic job of calling it the way I see it. I saw good hard racing. I saw people close, but anybody who did step over the line immediately got hand smacked. And it was 100% quick done deal. I think I like the Simon Kreyfarr era.

Simon's a smart guy. He really is. I've spent a fair amount of time talking to him. He hasn't been away from the game that long. So he has an idea of what the bikes can and can't do.

He knows what you should and shouldn't be doing on them. And he still has the respect of the riders. Yeah, it's like any other quasi political situation when the leader loses the respect of the troops, then it's time to change leaders. And I just don't think they trusted Freddie anymore. Man, I really don't.

Freddie in professional sports coaching parlance, he lost the room. Yeah, he lost it. Absolutely. It's just that simple. Right.

Riders would get penalties and they didn't know why they were getting them. So far with Simon, when he says there's a penalty, they understand why they're getting them. And that's the difference. That's the difference. And I think because Simon knows what they should and shouldn't be doing.

Not to criticize Freddie, but how long was it between the time he had raced a motorcycle professionally at the GP level and the time he was named chairman of the committee there? Gosh, what? A good 20 years? Yeah, decades, right? I mean, a MotoGP bike would be unrecognizable to him.

All right. So one last quick question here. We'll wrap this one up. Were you at Daytona for the 200? Yes, I was.

Ooh, okay, cool. What? What did John Ulrich say to Josh Herron that lit Josh Herron up? I have no idea. I heard Josh and Chris got into it.

Oh, was it Chris? I thought it was John. Okay. I have zero idea. Really?

I figured if you were there, I wanted to know the real skinny. No, I was far away from that. And I honestly, I couldn't even speculate because the rest of the year, I mean, the rest of the, sorry, the rest of the year, the rest of the weekend, they seem to be just hard competitors, people who were trying to do the best job they had. I do feel a little bit of empathy for Chris because if it weren't for the Ducati and everybody complains about the balancing rules when it comes to a Ducati, no matter what series you're talking about, if they were racing pit bikes, people would be like, the Ducati's got an unfair rules advantage, right? But you take the Ducati's out of that equation and Team Hammer has the bike.

They absolutely had that dialed. Tyler is still, he's still really young. Tyler Scott's still really young. I spoke to him for a while. He, I mean, he had the package and his riding for Daytona dialed in.

He had gotten the best out of him and he'd gotten the best out of himself. And I can't, again, I don't know anything about why they were arguing or why they, or if they were arguing, I didn't see any of it, but I can understand their frustration of knowing, like any racer knows, we have done absolutely everything that we can and it's not going to be good enough. And also, in all seriousness, just props to Heron because that was a very, that was an easy race to make a mistake and throw it away. I don't know what kind of condition the track was in when they went back out after the rain delay, but there had to be places where it was just like, you're learning the chicane, which is kind of new. And again, much like the S's at Kota, the racing line is, you're cutting some of that.

So for Josh to put in that lap that he did with 10 to go, I mean, just massive props for that. I mean, he was like, it was, you know, that deep in the race, the bike has got, I mean, he said, think about this, Jim, in some racing series, okay, the engine in the bike would have been taken out and thrown away with that many miles on it, right? It's hot, it's humid, and just to run a lap that was a blink of an eye just off the outright qualifying brain in the toolbox lap record, just wow. It was impressive. No question about it.

Nothing but respect for that, man. Nothing but respect. I got to respect those guys who ride Daytona anyway. I was like, that's too fast with walls too close. Sorry.

I don't have enough attachments to do that. Poor Bradley Smith, man. He showed up and tried to learn a bagger at Daytona. On Friday, man, he was seriously questioning his career choices. Most people would.

Bradley said he couldn't tuck in behind the fairing on the banking on Friday. He was too, and I'm going to use it, he was too scared. He couldn't see where he was going. He's riding 620 freaking pounds of Harley Davidson around, and he's just like, he couldn't do it. He figured it out.

These guys are pros. He wound up putting it on the box for one of the races, but man, hard way to earn a paycheck, like I said. Nothing but respect for those guys. All right, Michael. I've taken an hour of your time.

That's cool. It's an hour that's well spent. It's an hour that will not come off of the time that has been allotted to me here on Planet Earth. I'm sure it won't be. Oh, we got to do this again.

We'll have to do this again sooner. I was just busy with things and didn't have a chance to have a time or whatever. We will reconvene here and talk more, I think, and try to kitch up and keep it going because I think the fans of the show love it. They love that perspective. Always a pleasure to be here.

It's really nice to talk to another race fan and somebody who's as informed and whose knowledge of the sport goes so deep. These are the conversations that are really, really rewarding. I appreciate that, Michael, very much. All right. No worries.

Have a good day.