Domination!

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 Welcome to Motopod, the internet radio show all about motorcycle road racing. This is episode number 808 for June 12th, 2025. I'm Jim McDowell at the controls of this podcast and with me is always the guy who does all the hard work in the background behind me, makes me look good, Richard Jowett.

Richard, how are you this evening, sir? I'm overwhelmed by the compliment, Jim. You're in the car, man. You're hell of a closet journalist, sir. I'm not entirely sure it's true, but thank you very much, Eson.

Good to see you again. Welcome back from your holidays. Thank you. It was enjoyable. It was a very pleasurable cruise that we took around the Caribbean.

Nice. Very, very nice. That was quite nice to be away for a long time. That was nine, ten days away from work. I've never been away that long in my life from a job.

That was really different for me. Got a chance to actually relax. I think it was a little difficult at first and then you like, oh, I don't have my internet. What am I going to do? I can't do that.

Finally, it was just like something finally reset in my brain and realized you remember the world before internet, so you don't need internet. It was like, okay, let's just have some fun and relax and enjoy, which we did. Get in the holiday groove. Yeah, holiday groove hit. Yes, it did.

All right, folks. With that, we want to thank... We had a very nice donation one time from a person here in the US. That was from Brian Shear in Arizona. Thank you, Brian, for your donation to the show.

Everybody, I'd like to remind you to donate to the show if you can. Subscribe to the show if at all possible. The money goes a long way for helping me and Rich go through, do things, get stuff, the things that we need to keep the show going. If you can, that's great. We would love to have more subscribers, people that are continuously donating to the show.

If you can't, that's fine. We understand, but hey, do us a favor. Go to where you get your podcast. Leave us a review. Tell your friends about us.

Share us. Do what we can to spread the word about the show. We'll just keep on trying to build it and make it better. Everything we want to do is to make it better for you guys on that side listening to the show. Oh, Rich, with all that craziness out of there, we went to Aragon, right?

We had that, but I guess before we actually go to Aragon, we should technically talk about listener feedback that came here. Now, this one came from Scott Bolden. Many of you will remember Scott was a host a while ago, and he sent this one into it. He was talking about time. Okay, Rich is calling time out here.

So we will bow to Rich. Scott Bolden. Bolden. What did I say? Scott Bolden, that show host.

Sorry. Okay, well, for someone who has real trouble with the English language, spelling, okay, I'm an engineer. I'm only really good at math. So it's Baldwin, you said? Yeah, Scott Bolden.

Yeah, it's got one of our subscribers, I think. No, we really messed this all up. No, no, no, no, no. No, it is confusing. We do have a Scott Bolden people will remember.

And actually, I'm still just editing my way through some of the Moto A stuff that Scott got from Barbara and elsewhere. So that's going to be coming out just after this, actually. But no, Scott Bolden is one of our Patreon subscribers amongst the crowd that do that for us. And thank you very much again to them. So yeah, this was from Scott Bolden.

Sorry, Scott Bolden said something about semi-automatic ride heights. Now, the kind of paraphrase, the Facebook article that was sent to us was there was a gentleman who was posting this who's claimed to be to know someone who was in the know in the paddock that Aprilia was using a semi-automatic ride height device. And Scott was saying, well, hey, maybe somebody else in the pack can create technical wizardry in the vein of Gigi Delignan Ducati. The cool part about this is the fact that the way they claimed it worked is that the rider would trigger the system. So there's the manual part that's required per the rules that you must manually actuate.

Now, you could actuate this, let's say, let's just use the example of the Aragon. The last two turns are 16 and 17. So you could be going down the back straight and any time going down the back straight, you could arm the system to allow it to be ready to work again. You'd brake hard for 16. The bike would ride rise up as it would because it's been lowered.

You go through the turn and as you come out of the turn, the ride height would then automatically lower itself for the squirt down the front straightaway. Now, how are they doing this? It was in the article. It was stated that it was done by GPS system. So GPS, OK, supposedly all the teams are walking around with a GPS unit, taking different points and mapping the track, which they could easily load the map into the bike and the bike could then figure out where it is without contravening the rules.

Because if you remember back in like the run, the run though days and the what can I say, like the early 2010s and whatnot, remember how the rent though shortcut it somewhere and in the trash control and GPS and the 800s didn't work. I think it was like Gunaseka and he wound up high sending himself viciously like turn seven. Because the bike didn't know where the bike got confused about where it was. So, OK, that's really cool. And if Aprilia did this and figured this all out, then that's a really cool thing that they've done.

And that's true. Then the people over at Aprilia are pretty darn close to what the GDL and the other people are doing at Ducati. Now, if it is a semi-automatic RedHite device, perhaps maybe Yamaha have one. And that's why we've seen a problem with Quattroraio's bike breaking and not releasing because maybe it doesn't understand where it is in the track. Maybe that's what happened to Bez because there's looked like at Aragon that Bez couldn't get his bike to release.

And I think Miller had a problem at Silverstone. But someone had a problem earlier on. Rins definitely had a problem. So he had the same failure, I think, on the sprint race that Quattroraio had in the main race at Silverstone. So this also made me then go back and I wanted to watch some onboards on the Ducati's, particularly Marquez and Vagnaia.

And I looked at it and I think Ducati has the same type of a system because you could watch Marquez's thumb using the lower left button on the left-hand side handlebar to engage something in the middle of a straightaway. So he must be arming the system and preparing it for the next go-round for it. So I think Ducati has that. I think everybody sort of who had it first? No idea.

But I do think that everybody kind of came to a conclusion that, hey, we can do this and use a GPS map and, hey, we can take a bit of the mental exhaustion, if you will, away from the riders and make their life a little bit simpler. So I thought that was pretty cool. I love this sort of geeky, nerdy, engineering stuff that happens, all that. But again, you get into all this tech wizardry and what happens, it's like your phone. Half the time it doesn't work, so what do you do?

You got to turn it off, turn it back on again. It's like, maybe that's what's going on. Who knows? I mean, listening to a couple of the other podcasts that we, you and I, would generally listen to, time allowing, this came up a week or so ago. So I don't know if that is what instigated Scott looking into us a bit more and finding the post that he did or whether that was just coincidental timing.

But I distinctly remember, as I say, a week or so ago, because it came up because of these Yamaha failures. Obviously, Fabio Quattrorairo's was the prominent one because it lost him the race at Silverstone. But I think it won't come as any huge surprise to anybody at all that this was a Ducati evolution initially. And I think that's probably borne out in the fact that we're seeing failures from Aprilia and Yamaha in particular, because these things are insanely complicated and the packaging around them is just mind-bendingly difficult, I'm sure. So if you're introducing these systems in a bit of a rush to react, because clearly that is a huge advantage, having a primed system because it takes that little margin of error, which might only be a half a tenth or whatever.

But all these things are out, don't they, Jim, in racing? So if you can have the bike figure it out, then you can understand why people would rush to try and implement similar systems. But obviously that does come with the peril that things don't work as you expect straight away. I think that's what we've been seeing. My immediate take on all of this is they are perilously close to the spirit of the rules on this, aren't they, really?

Because as far as I understood it, when they made the big or when Dawn of Force the ECU standardisation through, which was all caught up in that CRT thing, if you remember, it specifically outlawed the bikes being able to know where they are on the track in terms of engine mapping and power and traction and all the rest of it. So whether they're running a separate system of GPS that is specifically linked to the ride height devices, I can only assume that's what they would be doing and how they would get away with this. It can't be part of the main ECU that they're running for everything else, I would think. I mean, otherwise I would have thought that would have been technically outlawed. And I suppose the fact that the rider is still required to press a button to pre-arm the system technically means that it still is a manual system.

But again, you're skirting close to the rules, aren't you, because it is effectively now a semi-automated system. So it just goes to show that these factors just keep on pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, even though these things are going to be gone in a year and a half, or a season and a half, let's say, just over. But yeah, it just never stops. It's just warfare, isn't it? As we always say, the beauty of sporting warfare, any little advantage.

And they go for it at a huge expense as well, it must be said. Part of this could be why Yamaha has been so quick at breadth and other places is because the system's primed. So Quattroal can just pound the gas way faster than if he has to activate the system coming out. Because the Yamaha, one of the things that like post Coda that I noticed was the Yamaha dropped real quick. Like that was a thing.

Like if you watched at Coda, I'm sorry, not that you could watch at Coda, but if you were at Coda watching, one of the things you can visually see is how fast the Ducati drops the back end and how low it gets. So obviously everybody was like watching this and they get thinking like, okay, well, wait a second, this has got to be completely weird and how this is happening. And everybody can back figure it out once they got an idea. Now, my take on the GPS part of it is from the article that Scott sent us. My inference to this is that the teams were mapping the spots with a GPS.

I think, and I don't know the rules and I should have probably tried to look for it in the rulebook, but I think that they did not want to be like actively using GPS during the race. I think that's what they were trying to get rid of back in the day. Where the bike was looking for, was truly triangulating itself through satellites to figure out where it was. So if you give it a pre, hey, this is where you're going to be and you turn it on, say at the start, which is a known place, the bike then figures out where it is along the way. Maybe that's how they're doing it.

That's speculation. It's what my mind thinks of to circumvent the rule of having GPS. It's like, that's how I do it. It's like, well, I'm not using GPS. I used it off the bike and I simply put a map in the bike.

So I'm not doing what I'm not using. I'm not actively using GPS. And again, it just goes to show how close to the wind they sail really with a lot of the, but that's the trick of being the fastest, isn't it? It's breaking the rules or getting as close to breaking rules as you can without breaking them or getting found out. Not that we're accusing anybody of cheating because that's not what's going on.

If there's a gap in the rules, then it's for the rule makers to close the gap off at the end of the day. But I would think, as I say, they always talk about the spirit of the rules, which always makes me chuckle a little bit, even though I said it myself earlier on, because the rules are the rules. I mean, you have to comply or you don't. And if you don't, you should get found out. And I suppose they should do something about it.

But I do wonder with this latest generation or iteration of the ride height devices, which again only serve to make the bikes even quicker again because they're more efficient if they're pre-armed in this way. And it's no surprise that perhaps, as you just pointed out, Jim, this might be a small factor in Yamaha's improvement because we know that the Yamaha in particular is always, well, in recent seasons anyway, has struggled with rear grip. So anything that they can do to improve that situation is obviously going to be a huge advantage. So yeah, let's see what happens with the rule makers. But yeah, it's a good spot and a good article that Scott sent to us.

Interesting stuff. So thanks for the article, Scott. Now, you and I were talking before this. And this is all related to ride height devices and whatnot. So you had listened to the race and talking about, I think we all know Benya had some better form on Sunday at Aragon.

That's not a surprise to anybody. But the reason maybe he has this better form. So Rich, if you'd like to share what you had learned. Okay. I mean, we're jumping forward, I suppose, a little bit towards what happened on the Sunday, but it is relevant.

So as I heard it from, yes, it was the race and also Paddock Pass podcast, which is the other one that I generally listen to fairly frequently because all of these people are permanently in the paddock down in the garages talking to people. Absolutely. You know, full time professional journalists, lucky them. And so in Sunday morning warm up at Aragon, for whatever reason, and I don't know why, I haven't sort of quite gathered this piece of information, but Benya stuck on the, I think the 355 mil, the larger of the discs, carbon discs that they're allowed to run. Maybe somebody in GKG just thought, what the hell, just puts a little bit of extra weight into there.

Now, part of this wider discussion around these newer ride height devices and what Ducati in particular have been up to, I'm pretty sure it was David Emmett on Paddock Pass podcast. I apologize if I've got that wrong, because I do listen to quite a lot of stuff. He was saying that after a bit of investigation, it sounded as if the new 2025 Ducati ride height device system was about 650 grams lighter than the previous version. Now that's quite a small amount of weight, but certainly enough to create a change in the feel and might be behind what's been bothering Peco Bagnara. Mark Marquez, we know as a stellar talent, he would generally ride around a problem, but he's never ridden a 24 Ducati, so he didn't have that as a reference point.

So having come off the 23 bike, the 25 bike probably feels like a major step forward to him, irrespective. So it then transpires that the 355 versus the 340 mil carbon discs, I think I heard were about 300 and something grams heavier, but obviously that mass is situated lower down and at the front of the bike. So although it doesn't make up for the reduction in the weight of the ride height device, it kind of shifts a crucial amount of weight further forward and lower down. Bagnara tried it in the Sunday morning warm up, I believe, and certainly ran it in the race. And suddenly we were starting to see in terms of how you were watching him on the bike.

Interestingly, one of the comments that Jack Miller made, who was behind Peco in the sprint at Aragon, and bearing in mind Jack Miller has been on track with Peco Bagnara and was his teammate for several seasons as well. He said that Peco looked very neutral on the bike, i.e. he wasn't really committing to the corners like he would normally have done, i.e. he was a bit frightened of what the front end was going to do, so he wasn't fully committed. Whereas that clearly changed on the Sunday.

Now it's history that Mark Marquez won the race, as we'll come to. Alex was second and Peco was third, but Peco was a strong third. And in terms of body position and just the whole way, as far as me watching him on the bike anyway, he looked like the Peco that we've been used to seeing for the last few seasons. And it's going to be very interesting to see with Mugello coming up next, which is the first track for a while that we've come to, which is one of Pecos favorite tracks. Whether, A, does he run these larger discs again?

It's a pretty heavy braking track at the end of the main straight, of course, at Mugello. And does this form carry forward? Because again, although we didn't have the luxury of being at the Media Scrums post-race on the Sunday at Aragon, of course, he apparently cut a much happier looking figure and he didn't sort of tear up the rule books or the record books, rather, on the Monday test that happened at Aragon. But again, I think he had a pretty solid day and the more reports was, again, looking like a guy that for once or for the probably for the first time this season was looking forward to the next race. Yeah.

So, Jim, I mean, you know more about the engineering aspects and the weight distribution and so on and so forth. So that's the the pockets of information that I've gleaned over the last few days over to you to sort of analyze a little bit. Yeah. So you can choose between a 320 millimeter disc, a 340 millimeter disc, a 355 millimeter disc, and those are all in what they call high mass and standard mass. So most people don't use the 320s, but they are available from Brembo.

Everybody is usually on a 340 or a 355 when you're at Motegi or Burirama or these other places. Now, I saw a picture posted by Simon Patterson that showed the bottom of I don't know what bike. He doesn't say what bike, but he says these ride height devices are highly complicated. You can see the accumulating cylinders with the hydraulics where the fluid is. I don't know if it's actually hydraulic fluid.

It could be brake fluid. It can be whatever, shock oil. It doesn't matter. It's a hydraulic fluid of some type. And they have the accumulators that collect and hold this pressure and then disseminate and move these linkages to make these ride height device move up and down.

If you change that and you can make it lighter and smaller, every engineer is going to go that way because that's going to make the bike better. However, the consequence may have been, as I've said earlier, I believe Ducati moved the position of the engine to take or did something to take more advantage of the rear grip that the Michelin rear provides. So if you're going that way and perhaps maybe this smaller, lighter package allowed them to move the engine in some way, again, speculation here, but if you do that, you take weight off the front. If you have weight off the front, the field that you're looking for is not necessarily there. And I can tell you that because when I was racing, I used to run Dunlaps all the time.

We got into a series. You had to run Pirellis. That was a massive change. It was a night and day difference between a stiff sidewall Dunlap and an ooey gooey squeezy Pirelli. Both are fantastic tires.

This is not a Jim Hates Pirelli tires moment here. It's just it made the bike different. And it took, we couldn't wrap our head, my dad and I could not wrap our heads around what we needed to do to make the bike work for me so that I could feel again. And so I get where Benya is through all of this, especially. And if that's what they did and they repackaged this and made it smaller so they could shift that weight and now it's taking that weight away from Benya, putting more mass on the front end is a great idea.

Now, did they just happen to stumble on and say, let's just try this? Because at the end, when you listen to Benya and you look at his reaction, they said, well, you seem to have found some form. He goes, yeah, well, we tried something a little and he kind of stops. He trails off. He doesn't really tell you what they did, which implies that whatever they did was so off the wall and so out of the side of the bounds of setup.

Which makes sense in all of this because Marquez left you that little nugget that I love about Marquez. If you got the same bike and you got five different setups on the bike and the change hasn't fixed, it's you who has to ride around the problem. Oh, okay. That's a great little dig. It's a great little nugget, but he's true.

He's right, right? There's so much you can do fundamentally in the bike to change and make it go fast. You sometimes have to change a little bit to get the last bit to it. I don't want to say Benya is uncompromising that. I'm sure he's trying.

In his way, he's trying. He's just not being successful in it. I wasn't successful with my bike, but later on I finally realized that if we would have taken and pulled the rake in on the forks, we would have put more weight on the front and the magic of the field would have came back. It's that kind of wild idea. That's maybe what happened here.

It makes perfect sense. All of this, if you think about it, really starts to add up. It's kind of fun that we were sort of halfway close. We weren't there all the way with it, but we were pretty close. That's what he's feeling.

If he has feel back, that's great. It's too late for the championship at this point. He'd have to be a run of form that you can't possibly imagine. If you think Mark is not going to just win a few more of these things, be real. But again, if we head to Mugello and Benya has another really strong adding on a track that he likes, then this might be the thing.

I think Mugello is going to be, even if the racing itself might... Well, I mean, hopefully the racing will be good. I don't know if fully back into his feel zone of happiness, Peco Benya, if that is going to be enough to beat Mark Marquez. I mean, again, as you said, Jim, we were just having a quick chat pre-pressing record. And we were commenting on the fact that Mark isn't sort of disappearing 10, 15 seconds up the road, but it's almost that he doesn't really need to.

And if he wants to pull out a fast lap right at the very end, that's exactly what he does, even if it's just to keep himself motivated and interested, it seems like. So, I mean, my mouth is sort of salivating slightly at the idea that Peco is now on a path that's going to bring him back to his top performance. Obviously, what we don't know is taking that challenge to Mark Marquez, what does that do to Mark Marquez's relative performance? Does he just say, yeah, no problem, and just opens the throttle a bit wider and leaves the break off a bit longer? We just don't know that.

But Mugello is kind of a fascinating round because that is Peco's backyard. It's where he's won a lot recently. And Mark Marquez has never done particularly brilliantly, it has to be said, at Mugello. It's not been one of his kind of happiest hunting grounds. So it could be quite the battle there.

I mean, hopefully it won't be, well, I say hopefully, I mean, I always love a bit of rain at a race because it generally sort of tends to spice things up a bit. But it's one race where we could really deal with seeing a consistent weekend so that everybody gets into the setup zone and it's a proper inverted commas fair competition. So, yeah, I mean, just taking your point of, Jim, just the thought occurred to me that perhaps people might have been a little bit tight lipped about this because it does seem like if you're lacking a bit of feel on the front, to me, in my very simplistic mind, seem like quite an obvious thing to try to put a bit of extra weight and extra mass down low at the front. Whereas they might have been playing around with pivot positions, the swinging arm, you know, engine breaking strategies, all these hugely complicated, multi-dimensional changes that you can make. And perhaps it is just as simple as adding, you know, two or three hundred grams worth of weight at the front and running with that almost seems too simple.

But what Simon Patterson said the journos were doing post-racing Aragon and possibly during the test was kind of they figured it out for themselves, I think what had happened because Ducati weren't commenting, not explicitly. This is what we've done and this is what's happened. So they would go to some of the other Ducati riders and say, oh, yeah, we've been told by Ducati that what Bagnari did was this. And I think it was Fabio Di Giantenio sort of said, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what's happened. Sort of corroborated the inference.

So it is as simple as they've just bunged some bigger discs on which were a bit heavier and that suddenly got him back in the zone where he was starting to feel the front end again. And sometimes it's the simplest things that cause a turnaround, didn't it? I mean, that is what happens sometimes. And that's what Bagnari has been looking for all season. And these any racing motorcycle in even even when I was dirt tracking, which seems incredibly simple, there are literally two turns and they're both left.

Right. The smallest changes affect things in ways that you can't possibly imagine. They are like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube without understanding any of the algorithms that are necessary to actually put the cube back together after it's been scrambled. One of the things that I learned and this is oddly helps in my professional career, that I make a living as an engineer, was we learned that if you got lost, because you can chase it for a while, right? But because there's such a short amount of practice time, road racing club and stuff that was going on, that if we get lost, go back to what we know and then work out again.

Because we went somewhere we shouldn't have. So let's go back to what we had the weekend prior and do that. And these teams know that, right? They know it, but they're also faced with the idea. And of course, this is where you sort of get stuck.

Is they know what they want to do. They're not sure how to do it because somebody would have sat down and it would be very easy to overlook this and go, well, okay, we got to put more weight on the front end. How are we going to do it? Well, we can change his riding position. We can change the motor a little bit.

Well, we can't move it enough to get what he wants. Well, we can't just add weight to the bike in that way because maybe the rulebook states you can't have any bass and weights to it or whatever. Those kinds of things. Because you know how they change flywheel weight now because they can't take the motors apart and it's external and who knows, maybe there's some of the rules or whatever. So you're stuck there and they don't want to think, yeah, what are we going to do?

And then eventually, it's not necessarily an engineer, but some mechanic standing there going like, why don't you put the high mass 355s on the front of the bike and see what it does? But it's close. What the hell? Give it a try. Give it a try.

And boom, all of a sudden it's there because Benyana's reaction, because he was so different between what happens on Saturday and what happens on Sunday that they did something. That's completely obvious that they changed something. The question, when it was what, and I could not figure out what he had changed. Like that didn't, I don't know. Nobody knew.

It's like, but it is sometimes the simplest things are the best things. And there are times for me racing and I can think of three examples in the whole time that I was racing bikes. There were times that I had to stop and go to my dad and tell him, do not touch this bike. Where it is right now is exactly where I want it. We're not going to make this any better by tinkering with this.

Don't touch it. Those are like the races that I remember the most because those are the races we were untouchable. It's one of those things. I think everyone also gets kind of blindsided by it because you are chasing perfection, which you will never get to. Even as good as it is, you still want to make it better because you want that last half of a tenth.

Yeah. Anyhow, that went on way longer than I thought. You guys loved that explanation and the detail and all that. The other point, just very quickly, Jim, just as a finishing thought, is of course that because there's, okay, they had the test on Monday, but in-season testing is so limited now. In the old days, they would have just gone off and done hundreds of laps trying to find, and they would have tried all these simple things as well as the complicated ones.

Yes, they could have. You just, by and large, during a race weekend, which is all the bike time that they get pretty much all season long, really, they just cannot afford to try, in inverted commas again, radical things. Now, you might say that up in the brake disc size is not that radical. It's quite a simple thing to do, but they wouldn't normally do something like that. I don't think it's a coincidence that they just thought, what the hell, we'll just try it in the 10-minute warmup.

Probably not thinking it was going to make the blindest bit of difference, but it would have something that they could have done to try and say to Peco, look, we're trying everything. Yes. We're getting all the bits out of the bin. We're trying it. Hey, Presto, maybe that is as simple as that.

They just turned them out in the 10-minute warmup, and all of a sudden, he's got a smile on his face, and he's got something that he can at last start to work with. We really do need somebody other than Alex Marquez, who's been doing a great job. Okay, Bears did well at Silverstone. Fabio Quattrorra has been stellar on the Yamaha, although he hates Aragon, and Yamahas never go well at Aragon, so they weren't really featuring. Let's be honest, this is between Mark Marquez, Alex Marquez, and Bagnaya.

That's how we all thought this was going to be. We really need Peco up there giving Mark a bit of a harder time than he's having at the moment. This is going to sound really stupid, but you made me think of this. I know that Ducati's got a simulator for their bike, and they're simulating gearbox settings, suspension settings, things like that. I wonder if the guys that built the simulator or whatever didn't think about being able to change certain elements of the simulator.

They couldn't go simulate adding weight to the front because they didn't think that they could do it, or whatever. Do you understand what I'm saying, Rich? Yeah. They missed that part of being able to, well, hey, can we just add a little weight here to see and simulate it and see if it actually works? I know they like to talk about it in Formula 1 when the computational fluid dynamics data and the wind tunnel data don't match each other.

They get really wigged out, and they gotta go find where the difference is. Maybe that happened to Ducati. Who knows? We have no idea, but it's just fascinating to think about. I know this isn't necessarily what happened to Aragon this weekend, but if you get a track temperature that's 5, 10 degrees lower from the Saturday to the Sunday, that's going to have a massive effect.

Aragon was very dirty and dusty when they turned up on the Friday. Obviously, it rubbers in because there was no rain, so the track rubbed in and cleaned up across the weekend. It was at its optimal position come the race on Sunday afternoon, as in the MotoGP race. There was more grip available, and that will obviously have an effect on the front end feel as well. That's why Mugello is rather crucial, I would think, is because if Bagnari is sort of...

As we've seen in past seasons or recent seasons, he tends to build through the weekend, doesn't he? He's never really been the king of the sprint. He's always been the Sunday guy, and very often Fridays have been a bit of a struggle for him. With this extra spring in his step and his tail up a little bit, it'll be kind of interesting come Friday, Mugello, to see just how well he goes. If he, for example, if he makes it into Q2 straight away, I think that will be a crucial sign as to how he's feeling.

I'm just happy that he looks as if there might be a glimmer of hope, because we have said numerous times in these recent shows that it's been pretty painful to watch really a guy that's completely all at sea and has no realistic expectation of things getting better. Then all of a sudden, something changes, and it does look a bit more hopeful again. But there's a long way to go. We don't know if this has solved the problem or not. It could be Aragon specific, but let's hope not.

Let's get to the news. Not too much news. I enjoy these technical things. We've been talking for half an hour already. Everybody's going to hate this podcast.

It's going to be long. The Jorge Martinez saga still continues. Well, last we left off, Aprilia says, look, buddy, you got a contract, and just because you weren't riding the bike doesn't mean the bike isn't good enough. Hey, guess what? Some dude named Bizecki kind of one on one of them.

So you might want to get your butt back on this bike and ride it. Jorge Martinez, I will talk about this in my own time, and I'm going to paraphrase here, Rich. So if I get something a little bit out, please correct me. Jorge's statement that he posted to Instagram was basically, look, I have a contract. The contract was agreed to with these closets by both sides who signed on the dotted line for this, and I am merely exercising my right as legitimately enabled by the contract that we both agreed to.

So, well, this makes me think that we are not going to see Jorge Martinez on an Aprilia at all the rest of this season. That is what I think. What do you think about all of this, Rich? I mean, obviously we're not contract lawyers, or I'm certainly not a contract lawyer, so and nobody outside of that type band of people that would see it have seen exactly what the contract says. So clearly, Aprilia have a position and Jorge Martinez and his camp have a position.

They're obviously saying rather different things, although it must be said that Aprilia appear to be taking the more conciliatory approach, which is that, you know, the bike is good. You've seen that with some results that we've had recently. Come back, let's get going again. Martin's statement was, I think, precisely what we all figured it was likely to be. I mean, he is saying that he is a free agent, which is a rather bold thing for him to be saying, given the circumstances.

I mean, he may well prove to be true. I mean, it depends precisely how the contract is worded, because this all comes down to nuance at the end of the day, and Aprilia certainly wouldn't be the first factory, as we were talking about last time out with KTM, to get caught out in terms of a, you know, it's not this, but, you know, like a full stop in the wrong place. I mean, little things can have big effects when it comes to contractual law. So, yeah, I'm with you, Jim. I mean, people were saying that the earliest that he would be back would be Saxon Ring.

I think in his statement, he alluded to the fact that he would sort of countenance a shift in the performance aspect of, you know, this break point for him. But of course, that's very much in his favour to say that, because he could get on the bike and just wobble around if he wanted to, and he still wouldn't be hitting some of the performance markers. So, I don't know, I just think with everything that's gone on, it doesn't seem to me that that's a retrievable situation from the relationship aspect, because clearly he doesn't want to be there next year. And what does that do to the morale of the team? I think at this point, Aprilia's play would probably be if they feel that they have a firm contract that he is bound to, then they could, as I said last time out, I suppose they could try to fight so that he cannot ride another bike for another team or another factory if they wanted to be sort of punitive about it.

And I wouldn't blame them if they were, because, you know, this is not really the way to go about doing things, in my opinion, but that's just my opinion. You know, this is sport, and it is warfare, as we keep saying, and this is part of the game. I don't know if you want to talk about the Miguel Oliveira situation quickly, but because it's pertinent to the next piece of news. Let's move on to that then, Jim, if you just go down that road and then we'll pick it up. Sure.

So the big news that sort of drops after the testing happens at Aragon is that World Superbike double world champion Toprak has signed to ride in MotoGP, but he's signed with Pramac Yamaha to do this. Okay. And as you informed me, learn a little pre-pod chat, it's only for one year. So explain that to me. I mean, I think Yamaha steals a march on almost everybody because I think everybody kind of wants his knowledge of Pirelli and Pirelli tires to help develop their bike for MotoGP.

And yet somehow Yamaha slash Pramac, I'm assuming Yamaha is paying the bulk of this money to him, I would think. They steal the mark and they got the most, well, I would think is probably one of the most coveted World Superbike riders to transfer over to World Superbike. And definitely within recent times, I mean, you could argue Troy Bayless was definitely at the top of his game when he transitioned over. Right. So, yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, well, I think throughout pretty much the whole of the history that I can think of since Superbike came onto the sort of scene in the eighties, I mean, you could count on one hand riders that have come across from World Superbike and made a big impact in MotoGP. I would probably say Bayless was probably the best example of that because he did have a pretty good solid first year on the Ducati in what was that, 2003, but tailed off pretty quickly after that. Yes, I know he came back and had the wild card at the end of six, was it? Yeah.

It was the last race for the 990s, wasn't it? He came back wild carded, having won the World Superbike Championship, the Ducati game, they gave him the wild card at Valencia, which is the 511 990 race and he won it. So that was pretty cool. Ben Speas has come across, he won a race, but never really kind of quite worked out. I suppose Cal Crutchlow would be the other guy that came across and did make a very good career in MotoGP.

I'd throw three races in his career, but. I'd throw Colin Edwards in that mix. I mean, Colin never won a MotoGP race. Well, he never won a race, did he? That's the problem.

He never did, but I'd throw that in there. He was solid. Yeah. I mean, he was definitely solid. He had some difficult times.

He was much better when he was on the Tech 3 Yamahas at the time. I mean, he had a long career in MotoGP, didn't he? I mean, you can certainly say that. I guess that was more, wow, long way around to me saying, yeah, Edwards had staying power. He got there and he stayed.

The other people you could say sort of, and Crutchlow as well, right? He had a fairly stiff, still fairly long stint in MotoGP as well. I would actually throw in as well, although I'm not to the letter of the law correct, but I would obviously throw in Nicky Hayden as well, because he came across from AMA Superbike, didn't he? He did. Okay.

So he didn't do World Supers, but he was AMA champion, I think, when he came over to partner Rossi. That was 2003 as well, I think. His first season on the Repsol Honda. Yes, I believe it was 2003, yes. Either three or four, but I'm pretty sure three.

Anyway. Three. I mean, top rack, I've been saying for as long as I've been on this show that I just wish he came over to MotoGP, because unless he does, or until he does, we just don't know. Obviously, the jury is massively out in terms of how he's going to do. A few people are rather surprised that he's chosen to come in next year and put himself through the last season on Michelin's, which is a tyre that's not what he's used to.

It might sort of count against him, but I think he's 31, I think. So possibly the feeling was that leaving it another year when you've got some of the guys in Moto2 that are starting to show the form, and they're like the next generation riders that we've been talking about. So it's not your Dixons and your Vietis and your Canettes. That ship has sailed, I think, on those guys. But you've got your Marreras, your Alonzos, your Gonzales.

There's a lot of guys ready to come up. And again, when you get like Ayagura and Firmin Aldega popping up into MotoGP and doing what they've been doing this year, clearly there aren't going to be lots of free seats available. So Toprac had to do it now. How he's going to get on on Michelin's on a prototype chassis, because we are seeing this year on the BMW, which has had its frame amended. So because of the way the concessions were running, BMW last year were able to run a much flexier frame.

This year they're being forced to run something that's a bit more road based, I think a bit stiffer. And so he's finding that a bit of a struggle. That's obviously borne out in the results. I mean, he's finishing second all the time, but Boulogne on the Ducati is kind of by far and away the poor man at the moment. However, I will still come back to the point that I think it would have been a big shame for us not to have seen Toprac have a decent stab at it.

The fact that it was initially announced as a two year deal and then it became a one year deal. I suspect it's a one plus one with lots of clauses. So they're committed to a year and then there'll be various performance elements to pick up on. Now, the interesting thing that comes out and just segues back into what I mentioned a moment ago is that as Toprac comes into Pramak Yamaha and he couldn't go into the Monster Yamaha because Toprac is very much a Red Bull athlete and I don't think he would become a Monster devotee. Although we have seen that happen, but I don't think that was ever going to happen in this case.

So Pramak, which is a fully work supported thing, as you say, Jimmy, he's almost certainly going to be on a Yamaha works contract and they'll be paying the bill. Miller's on a one year deal, but is the former man in Pramak this year. Olivera is on a two year deal and is very much not the former man, although he has been injured as he tends to be. But let's be honest, Miguel Olivera outside of one or two little flashes on the track house, Aprilia and some decent rides when he first came into MotoGP on the KTM. But I mean, I think again, that's a ship that's sailed a little bit.

So there are some clauses that has emerged again, a few things I've listened to in the last day or two that says that if he's not the last of the Yamahas out of the four, then even though he's been injured and therefore he could reasonably argue that while he hasn't had a chance not to be the last of the Yamahas in the standings, but if that's the contract that he signed, then Yamaha can sort of play the sort of Jorge Martin game and say, well, maybe you were injured son, but you're still last in the standings out of the three other or the four Yamahas that are on the grid because Rins is doing a bit better. Obviously, Fabio Quattraro is an alien. He's not going anywhere. And Jack Miller, despite being on the one year deal, is the second best Yamaha out there. Let's be honest.

I mean, he's wiping the floor with Alex Rins. So why would they get rid of Jack Miller, who's known to be a good development ride? He's very solid, doesn't want to leave still, doesn't want to go to Australian Superbikes or Superbikes yet, but I'm sure he will do at some point. So although this is not official, but I'm almost certain it'll be top-racking Jack Miller in Primark next year and the guy that does have a deal next year will be gone. As to where he goes, he won't be in MotoGP.

I think that is a vanishingly rare kind of scenario that he would pick up a seat elsewhere. I don't see him dropping down to Moto2. Why would you want to do that? So there's a seat available at Ducati next year in World Superbikes, which will be coveted because Ducati have made it, I think, fairly clear that Alvaro Bautista won't be retained. Bulliger's just signed on a massive contract because no doubt BMW will get in their checkbook out for Bulliger as a replacement.

And Bulliger has MotoGP tests as part of his new contract. So who's to say he won't come across in 27 once the Pirellis arrive? So there's a lot going on, Jim, basically. But top-rack is coming. I'm very pleased.

I'm a little bit worried because we are in a sport where you get three or four bad races and you're written off immediately and people start asking questions. I can only assume, bearing in mind this is Keenan Soffel or Glu, who's his manager and has always said, oh, top-rack will only come on a works bike and in a works team and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they've obviously had to compromise a bit there because top-rack is not getting any younger. And then if he'd left it another year or two, there just wouldn't be an opportunity for him to come at all given the talent that's lingering around in Moto2 and Moto3 for that matter. So I'm sure there's some protection clauses in there that means he will ride in 27 and potentially beyond once we get into the 850.

And it's a sort of a level playing field for everybody. But maybe he's got his options open. Maybe Honda remains a possibility for him as the 850s start to emerge. The wisdom now is that he just didn't want to ride the Fireblade for a year next year in World Superbikes in order to then jump on the 850 Honda in 27 because quite frankly, nobody really wants to ride the Fireblade in World Superbikes. So he's back with the Yamaha Capon.

So yeah, it's going to be an interesting one to watch to see how he gets on. Well, and just add more confusion to all this. At the test, one Manuel Gonzalez or Moto2 World Championship leader was on a track house Aprilia. Yeah, and did rather well, it must be said. Domaday was completely impressed by what the young man was able to accomplish.

Uh-oh, Mr. Fernandez, I believe the door is over here. Please go to please step to the right and see yourself out. Yeah, just see that happening. Well, you've got Ayagura and you've got you got another great potential rookie coming.

Again, listen to something that was at the race. I think it was Simon Patterson I was listening to earlier on. For whatever reason, and I really don't understand it, but Aprilia and track house and David de Brivio you were referring to there, appear to be standing behind Raul Fernandez for whatever reason. I find it hard to understand myself. And the indication is that they will honor his contract, which does run to the end of 26.

But it's very likely that Ayagura, if the Martin thing isn't resolved, which let's face it, it's hard to see how it possibly could be. I think Ayagura would be the guy that slots up into the works team alongside Bazzacchi. So then there is a track house ride available. And interestingly, we've all been speculating and or it's been speculated that the natural person to get onto that bike, given that we've got a race in Brazil next year, would be Diogo Marrera. But it's our trans would not allow him to ride in the test.

So for whatever reason, the Liqueur 1 Lee team said, okay, off you go, Manuel. And yeah, he did, I think getting on for 80 laps during the day, didn't crash and put in a lap that was only a couple of seconds off compared to the fastest. And it was, you know, a competitive time. So, you know, you got to take your chances when they come up. And I'm surprised Marrera and his team didn't fight a bit harder for him to have seat time on the Aprilia, to be honest, because he was being touted as the one guy that would naturally fit the bill.

Unless he didn't want to do it. Unless he just thought it was a bit of a hiding to nothing. Because the trouble with a test like that is if you crash on lap five, destroy a bike and you know, it just kind of tarnishes you forever more. And this, of course, happened to Toprak himself when he came over and tested for Yamaha a few seasons ago, if you remember. I think he did ride the works bike and then he did a wild card on the Patronus bike as a stand-in for somebody in Assen and didn't have a great weekend.

I'm pretty sure that was Toprak or maybe I'm getting that confused with somebody else. But anyway, he definitely did have a couple of tests with Yamaha a few seasons ago and didn't go to plan and that kind of scuppered his chances at that point. Because of course he was a Yamaha world superbike rider at that stage. So these things go one way or the other. But yeah, it certainly worked out for Manuel González on Monday and yeah, fair play to him.

He's given himself a decent few hours in the shop window there. And he might well win the championship this year, Jim. I mean, he's leveled in the championship now. We should just say that with Kinet. But there's no way Kinet's coming up to MotoGP.

I just don't see that happening. There's not the consistency that people want. There's not that magical. There's not that magic that you're looking for. They've been in Moto2 for such a long time that people will say, like Joe Roberts, I mean, if he was going to make it happen, it would happen by now.

Agreed. With all this, let's actually go talk about the racing. I mean, what's been happening off-trap is absolutely fascinating. But let's get to the on-track action. Let's start with Moto3 and qualifying.

The first qualifying session, you had Fagiya Rossi Pireth. There's actually a, the Z is apparently an H, like Pireth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So we'll hopefully try to beat that. And Quiles was there, which kind of, well, okay, wait a minute. This is like his third race weekend or something. I guess you came back to earth there, huh, Max?

Right? And then Nepa and Furusato. When it was all said and done, Quiles, Yamanaka, Furusato, and Pireth all went through to get into the second qualifying session. It was pretty straightforward in that one. Now, when we got down to the actual second qualifying session, we had Munoz and he had a major high side at the reverse corkscrew.

Like he flipped himself to the moon and actually back again. It was crazy that he did that, but that was pretty wild. Fernandez was also down. He kind of like went off track as a result of sort of that Munoz thing kind of avoiding, and it was not the world's worst crash, but he got back up again. Now halfway through qualifying, Quiles, Lunetta, Carpe, Rureta, Almanza, and Picaras are your guys that are going to go battle this out for the pole and all for what was going on.

Now Almanza went down, which sucked. Adrian Fernandez would not set a time because he had no bike because the bike never ever did make it back to the pits in time for him to bust out a lap. Now, the Rureta had blown by and had basically shot up to the pole position, but there were other people that were still trying to work their way around, and there were some people that were going to throw down some times that maybe could have beat him. Everybody took a shot at it. He was left, right?

Lunetta had a couple of good sectors. Quiles had a good couple of sectors. Carpe had a good couple of sectors, but in the end, nobody could touch what Rureta had done. He would take pole followed by Lunetta, Quiles, Carpe, Furosado, Rolston, Almanza. His time, even though he crashed, stood up for seventh.

Kelso having an off weekend at Aragon. Munoz, he had the crash and couldn't get back out, so he was ninth. And then Picaras was tenth, which is really bizarre. So that is how this was going to work. We got into the Moto3 race.

Now, Fernandez was ruled out of the race. He was declared unfit. He had broken his left thumb, and I believe he went from there, from the track to probably Dr. Mir, or whatever, the new in-demand MotoGP orthopedic surgeon to, I'm sure, screw together, plate, whatever, fix his thumb so that he could get back into the action. But to start this off, Aragon had been resurfaced just before the race last year.

It apparently, for whatever reason, has still remained extremely slick. The high temperatures didn't seem to be helping, and it was quite greasy, kind of spotty. The surface is just odd here. For whatever reason, the dust, maybe that plays an effect on all of this. Not really sure.

But that caused all the Moto3 guys to go absolutely scatter tires. Everybody was on something different. There was nobody there. I think Rureda was on a soft-soft. Basically, I think the easy way to describe it is that your top nine guys had every possible combination of Pirelli rubber that was possible to use, and they were all on it.

So it's like, okay, if you cast yourself back to last year's event, and some guy named Rureda had a soft tire, which nobody thought would actually take the distance, and he actually came, or was he had a soft or did he do a medium? I can't remember which one he did, but whatever it was, Rureda had the opposite of everybody else, and he wound up winning that race for his first win. So you think maybe Rureda is the guy who's going to pick correctly here, and after the whole shot and how he started, he kind of thought that maybe he did pick right. He was followed out of the start by Lunetta Chiles. Chiles quickly got to second, and he got there.

Munoz had made moves to be like third. It was insane. We know Munoz is aggressive, right? We know he's going to ride elbows out. That's one of the understatements of the century, Jim.

Yeah, I could have probably came up with a better way of saying it. He was going to bully everybody on the racetrack until he was at the front. Is that a better way to say it? Maybe I don't know. So you're kind of like, wow, that's crazy.

Then Lunetta kind of just fell all the way back to ninth. Oh, wow, this is just all over the place here. Very quickly, the top three riders got about a half of a second gap between the guys that were running fourth and fifth. It was really quick at these moments. So it was like, well, that's kind of all the guys who kind of went with the soft tire, and this will kind of work its way back.

There's like this chess match going on like, well, I'm going to sacrifice that pawn here for a little bit, and then that'll allow me to move my queen. You kind of were watching that whole scenario run through. Five laps down, it's Rureda Quiles Munoz Almanza, who was looking good. He was the best Honda all weekend, quite frankly. And they had a half a second on Carpe, Kelso, Picaris, and Raul Fernandez.

That was kind of what was going on. So it's like, okay, well, what's really going here? We got to figure out what to do. Now, Rollstone, he's got a little battle that he's having going on. Almanza's got a battle that he's doing with Munoz.

They're kind of going back and forth. Now, this dropped them back to like fifth. Lumena has now worked his way from ninth back to second. And it's like they kind of changed places, but Rureda's still out front. This is like a repeat of last year.

He's got the right tire. Because if you think about it, Rureda's pace is slow. They're not going anywhere near the speed at which they could go. And at this point, I'm thinking, well, this is like brilliant by Rureda. It's like, well, the idea is to win the race doing it as the slowest speed possible.

I know that sounds weird, but we called that in the US at dirt track. We called it pole putting. Get the hole shut, get to the bottom on a slick track. Nobody can pass you. You just run the bottom, run the bottom, run the bottom, and you pull putt to the wind.

– Dictate the pace. – You dictate the pace. So this is really kind of interesting as this is going on. Now, first, Soto has made his way to fifth, which is great. Chiles is out of shape at 12, and so that really dropped him down the field.

He went falling from his third all the way back to eighth. That was going on there. With 10 laps down, it's Rureda, Munoz, Luneta, Imanza, Fursado, Chiles, Carpe, Kelso, and then Piqueras. Now, Chiles was making his way back to the front. Like, okay, kid made a mistake, got it, going back to the front.

Okay, we're good. Then Luneta winds up getting himself past Munoz there, and we now know that Rureda is losing time. He can't really hold up the pack anymore with this. This is with roughly six laps each to go. It starts to go wrong for Rureda.

He gets pushed backwards, and within a couple of laps, he had been pushed back from his position in the lead to sixth. When Chiles is now back to third, basically now it's like game on, and it becomes crazy in the last five laps. Imanza, Chiles, Luneta, they trade the lead every which way, you know, but Chiles gets himself to the front with three laps to go, and he's kind of pulling away a smidge. It looks like Chiles has this under control. Well played by the kid.

This is a kid who's going to win in his third race weekend, is going to win the race, right? He's looking absolutely solid for all of this, but then the dreaded track limits warning shows up. It's like, oh, for God's sakes, don't lose a race over this. I can foresee that he's going to run wide in the last lap, and they're going to dock him, and oh, you know, it's just, oh, God, please don't let that actually happen that's there. But there was so much action happening in the front package, I did not know where to look, because somebody was passing somebody in this lead group somewhere by all that.

Somehow, Munoz would go by Chiles at 16, and that left them with like one lap to go. Now, Rueda was wide, and he at that point, because he's going backwards, and Piqueras has gone by him, sort of barges his way back by. But as it worked out, Munoz would go by, and he would hold on for the win and beat Chiles. The kid was devastated that he lost it, because they kind of ran it down to like that last corner, and it was just a good time there, and it was going to be what it was going to be. Chiles tried everything he could to break the draft, but Munoz got him going into 16.

He couldn't retaliate, and Munoz winds up winning the race. He gets his first win. We've long thought Munoz would have had one of these before now, but his riding style hasn't lent himself to being patient enough, if you will. I thought that this was a really good race by Munoz, because it was a controlled amount of aggression that got him there. He was very aggressive at the start to go from his bad starting position that he had to get himself to the front group.

He sort of hung out in the front group the entire time. He let Ruraita do the donkey work and never passed him, realizing he was on a different tire and that that probably wasn't going to work, especially because he could tell the pace Ruraita was running. Having said all that, it was a masterclass by Munoz to win his first Grand Prix. Congratulations to him, because I must say, I was impressed by the kid this weekend. He really finally showed us what he actually has.

Right, Rich? I wouldn't like to make light of the fact that that was a nasty crash that he had in Q2, was it? Did you say? Correct. Because he came down hard, and your initial thought is, he could be out for the weekend, and hopefully he's not badly injured.

So having said all of that, I've got a sort of smirky grin on my face, which doesn't work on the podcast skills, but you are tempted to think that that crash knocked a bit of sense into him. Sorry, that's funny. I really shouldn't laugh because it was very serious crap. That's why I've been a bit tongue in cheek about it, but this is the Munoz that basically every team he's run for in Moto3, including his own current team up until the last race, this is the version of Munoz that everybody has wanted to see, because his speed has never been in doubt. And in Moto3 in particular, you do need aggression, but you need controlled aggression, and you need to peak at the right moment, which is on the last lap.

We've seen this season in season out, in Alonso we waxed Lirical about, but he was devastatingly good on the last lap. Hanging around in the front group, and then over the course of the last five laps, just work your way to the front, and then just do it with a lap or half a lap to go. And that is precisely what Munoz did this time, and he was outstanding. So I don't know what could, I mean, we've been hearing all year that, who's the team boss there? Peter Oetel, I think it is, has been sort of pleading with him to just, you know, knock it back a bit, you know, just buy your time, let the race come to you.

And this is the first time I can recall where he's actually done it. And yeah, hey Presto, he wins the race and he won it, I would say convincingly, because Quiles was, it's clearly he's going to win a bag full of races anytime soon as well. And Munoz is quite experienced by comparison, obviously, because this is Quiles' what, third or fourth race, would you say, Jim? Third race weekend at this level. Yeah, which is kind of a scary thought in and of itself, but anyway, putting that to one side.

I mean, Rueda made the wrong tire choice, I think that's clear. Once out front, dictating the pace, he was able to run his lines, but once he got overtaken, he just didn't have anything left to fight back with. So it was, I mean, I just wrote in my notes, normal Moto3, because again, you just didn't know where to look and half the time you didn't want to look. So I mean, it's just classic Moto3 as pretty much as always. And yeah, just a great race by Munoz.

The only thing that I was a bit disappointed about was Rulston, who was running up front early on and had qualified pretty high up in sixth place, I think it was, went out with a technical issue. Other than that, it was just a great race. There weren't many crashes, you know, some hard moves here and there, but yeah, just a great race, a great track, you know. So fair play to Munoz. This was, as I say, yeah, he ran the race that he needed to run and he got the result that he's been waiting for.

So brilliant, really brilliant. Yep. The 17 year old sensation, Keles, would be second on the podium. He will win a bunch of these people. Beware.

Then it was Carpe with his first podium, I think, as well. I think, or did he have one earlier? No, he podiumed in Thailand in the first round. Did he podium in Thailand? And that seems like it's forever ago that that happened.

Yeah, well, yeah. Time flies here, right? Almanza was the best Honda in fourth and Linetta, Picaris, Kelso, a terrible weekend, one to forget for Joel. Then Rueda, obviously wrong tire choice, ruined his race. Yamanaka, Buchanan for Asaro, Ogden, Peroni, Moodley, and then Foggia with the last point.

Given that, well, the championship standings has still got Rueda on top at 149 points. He's now 52 clear of Picaris. Yeah. Wow. We really underestimated what Rueda was capable of.

Kelso remains in third. He is on 86 points. He is 63 behind Jose Antonio Rueda. Then there's Carpe, Forasada, Linetta, with a couple of great races. And then I think we don't really talk about Linetta enough.

He's on the Honda. That's a bit of a deficit, let's say. He's in a team. He's in the sixth Corsa 58 team. And a lot gets said about him through, gosh, it's Sixth Dad, who writes his blog or whatever.

The name escapes me off the top of my head. So Simicelli writes, Marco's dad writes his race weekend report or whatever. He hasn't been kind at times to Linetta. So for Linetta to be at sixth in the championship, that's really pretty good. Then Fernandez, then our 70-year-old sensation, Quiles, Almanza, and Munoz.

And that is how it was when it comes down to Moto 3. It was a classic Moto 3. I don't think Moto 3 really ever disappoints, quite actually. This was just a little different intrigue on this one, that's for sure. So with that, Rich, let us move to Moto 2 and see what's going on here.

Moto 2 in qualifying. In the first session, you had Solache, Guevara, Perez, Arbolino, Artola, Garcia. Really, Lopez, Guevara, Arbolino, and Slatsch all get through. So those are the guys I got through. We get to the second qualifying session and everyone wants a tow from Gonzalez.

They are strategically trying to figure out how to follow Gonzalez because Gonzalez has been magical all weekend. And basically, when it comes down to it, he was good. But Gonzalez does the unthinkable and crashes at turn five. You make those mistakes, right? So that kind of hurt because he couldn't get his bike back and he couldn't actually qualify.

So that was kind of bad. Well, that left us with like Slatsch and he was sort of like the lead guy here or whatever. And he had a great save off the knee. That thing was gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. Got it back.

It was a turn one. Now, Anciu had been fast all weekend and he was always faster than the last sector. And Anciu had a good time going, but he lost it due to yellow flags. So he had to get that taken away. But then, at half way, Kinet is on top.

Then it's Marrera, Lopez, Aegis, Holgardo, and Barry Baltis. So Anciu then comes out on fire like he was going to throw down a lap. And he did. And it was one of the fastest laps of the weekend for Moto too. But Baltis had got a great run and he would push Anciu back.

And Marrera came through at the very last second to get one more lap and he made it count to take pole. So Marrera, Baltis, Anciu, then Kinet, Holgardo, Alonso, Slatsch, Van de Gerberg, Roberts actually showing a little bit of pace more like the Joe that we know. Where have you been all year, Joe? Yes, I know. Your wrist has been terrible and you're now getting your strength back, mobility back, all that stuff matters.

Plus he's becoming, there's no substitute for race fit, Rich. I mean, you can go work out in the gym all you want, but race fit is a thing. And then Lopez was there in 10th. So that was all through qualifying. And what are we going to do in this particular race?

Well, on Sunday, Marrera gets the whole shot followed by Anciu, Barry Baltis, and Kinet. Now Gonzalez was 20th and once he got through the first couple of turns, he had made his way to 16th. So he sort of gained a few positions. Going to kind of keep a Gonzalez watch out here to see what was going to happen. But Anciu jumped to the lead.

Now Holgardo takes out his teammate, Alonso, turn 12. My notes say no, no, no, no. The cardinal rule of racing is do not crash your teammate. And here comes, you know, Holgardo was just in a little too deep. It's that very tricky, I think it was at turn 11 that then turn 12 was the rock wall face that we see all the time.

And yeah, it's on, you know, if you look at it from an onboard, from when they leave the reverse corkscrew, which I think is 9, 9, 10, through to 11, the bikes are never upright on the center of the tire. They're on the side. They're on that side. Maybe it was one of those things where the tire was a little too late. Maybe it's a little greasy, maybe the tire's a little cold still, who knows.

But either way, they're in the gravel trap and Grissini's got to repair a bike, two bikes and not just one. It was a Aspa, not Grissini. Yeah, I get this too mixed up. Ugly crash. Almost to the extent that, and I've been a bit kind of unkind to Dani Holgardo, I was almost tempted to think that maybe he'd had an issue with his brakes or something.

Because, I mean, he was like way out of control. But as you say, it just could have been a, yeah, just tire not quite up to temperature. You know, it's the first time they're turning left for a little while. I don't know. Well, no, it's not.

I mean, they've been going left all through the reverse corkscrew. So no, it was just a bad one. And I don't know what the outcome was with Alonso. There was a thing that flashed up to say he'd been taken to the medical center, which obviously would have been. But I'm assuming he wasn't kind of collarbone broken or wrist broken or anything as a result.

I've not seen or read anything to say that. But you did worry because he got taken out hard and unexpectedly as well. You wouldn't expect to be kind of T-boned like that there. So no, it was a nasty one. Yeah.

So after that little mishap, we had basically, Anciu is leading followed by Baltis, Marrera, Canet, and then Lopez and Solache. Now, Baltis had run wide and that's where he fell back right after that, at the start of that lap. Gonzales had moved his way to 14th and Canet had made his way past Marrera. Now, Baltis kind of had worked his way back to the front, followed by Anciu and Canet. This is a pretty good race.

It's more of a classic Moto3, let's just change positions all the time because we can race as opposed to the sort of classic Moto2 race that we're used to seeing. It's like, ooh, this has got some intrigue here now. I'm really thinking this is pretty spicy. I don't know how long it's going to last, but I'm enjoying it because there hasn't been this much passing for lead and the shuffling of the group and the shuffling of the pack in Moto2 in a long, long time. But Canet would get by Anciu at turn five in a fantastic move.

I would like to try to paint you a picture of how hard it is to do the move that Canet pulled off on Anciu. You are turning left the entire time as you're approaching from four to five. You are turning left the entire time. I believe if I count it correctly when I tried to watch it back, Canet would have to downshift three times before getting to that corner. For those of you who may not know, race patterns in a motorcycle for road racing is push down with your foot to go up in gears and then pull up with your foot to go down in gears.

It's considered the quote unquote race pattern. Now, the only person who raced with a street pattern, which would be up, up, up to go higher in gears and then down, down, down to go down, was Matt Malladon. Think about it this way, folks. Canet is on the side of the tire. He's now got to get his foot under the shifter to pull back three gears while braking on a fine line to not tuck the front, which is very possible because we've been turning left for a while now because you're braking on the lean.

You're not braking on the fat of the tire like you'd want to be. Then slid through with absolute precision like a surgeon to take the lead away from Anciu. What a fabulous pass. That was like one of my big Achilles heels in racing was if I had to be on the side of the bike and downshift for the next corner, that was extremely difficult. If you don't think it's that difficult, remember way back at Motegi, the victory chicane at the end, some years ago, Divizioso was leading on the Ducati.

This is back when Skyler and I were doing the pod to give you some reference point. Divizioso would go through leading Marquez all the time through there. Every time in the middle of the chicane, Divizioso would have to pick the bike up and downshift. Marquez never did. The gearing was different.

Last lap, Mark waited and went through the opening that was created by leaning the bike back up by Divizioso. If you remember from that point forward, Ducati has never ever changed gears in between that chicane since that race. It always fascinates me, Jim, and you hear it on the bike. You went on the side of the tire. How that change in circumference with the curve of the tire.

The gear is the best place to hear that. The monza in that first set of turns, you hear the bike just go, and just smack the rev limiter because it's changed the diameter of the tire. There's a huge amount of, I'll call it roll or fall off as you roll over the edge of the tire. You shrink the diameter of that tire. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I guess you do technically shrink the diameter of the tire, but yeah, the circumference changes significantly. It's now what wasn't there. That was a move. I was like, whoa, that was a great move because he didn't hit anybody, didn't touch anything, and he performed it perfectly. It wasn't like he used onto you for a stop and then finished the quarter.

It was just perfectly done and very well done by Kinet, which shows the skill level that these guys have, which is absolutely amazing. After that, we return five here. Oh, yes, so that move. Anciu winds up getting backed by Kinet or whatever because Baltis has worked his way back to the front here because they kind of, he did there. Then Anciu got by Kinet for second.

On lap 10, it was Baltis, Anciu, Marrera, Kinet, Lopez, and Salas and Gonzalez is now ninth at this point in the race. Kinet was dropping off of the front three. He could not keep the pace and he was going backwards. Whether he used up the tire, wasn't feeling it after that, I don't know, but he just started to slowly work his way backwards. Now, at one point, Anciu, he just whistled past Baltis at turn one.

Like, it was like he had so much more drive and so much more gumption balls, whatever you want to think of in that last turn to hang it out, that his drive was incredible. It wasn't like he had to wait and outbrake Baltis at turn one. He just flew by and said, okay, now I'm going to break. It was like he had a jet booster or a turbo button or nitrous on that bike. It was just insane.

It was one of those moments where you just sit back and go, wow, that was a hell of a drive out of that corner, which at the time I didn't know this, but that was foreshadowing of things. Gonzales is eighth now. He just got past Robert. Anciu was trying to break Baltis. We're about five laps to go in the race and Anciu is like, I'm going.

Anciu has decided, I am dropping the hammer. I'm going to pull away. This is what I'm going. So we dropped back into the fast laps of the 150s. We were back at the 152s or something like that.

We were now back down to the 150s. Anciu was going. Kinet can't hang with anybody because he's running high 150 ones, so he's definitely done. It's Anciu, Baltis, Marrera, Kinet, Aegis, and Salatch. Salatch is now creeped in there.

Marrera would go by Baltis and so he can try to chase down Anciu because Marrera knows that Baltis is fading. Anciu has pulled the pin. I've got to go. I have to go. I need to get there and get with Anciu.

So he makes the pass. He forces the issue and they get going. Two laps to go and Gonzales is seventh. Now Anciu is now fonding off Marrera because Marrera is coming. Anciu's time starts to drop.

Did he ruin the tire? Did he not have any left? I don't know what was going on. All I know is Marrera is coming and he's coming fast. Marrera was taking huge risks at this point.

Going into the corner, that bike was every which way but straight. He was breaking at the maximum or the, how do you say that Rich? At the absolute latest point possible and still possibly make that, I was going to say breaking at the maximum but that didn't make sense in my head when I was thinking it. But he was breaking at the absolute latest point he possibly could and he is absolutely just going. I mean Marrera had like 150.3 and Marrera would go by Anciu at turn five.

You really don't see passing at turn five yet here we are with another pass at turn five. Again, the complicated on the left side of the tire back shifting the whole nine yards. Absolutely crazy. He was by it five. Now at this point, basically Anciu is trying to hang with Marrera.

Marrera is just riding the lap of his life to do this and Anciu is trying to hang on to him. Where is he going to go? What can he do? I thought he'd try going into 11. I thought he might try going into 13.

He never did but they got to the back straight away and honestly Anciu is a little bit off the pace out of that corner and Marrera has a good drive out of 15, a down the long back straight away. But the draft is a powerful weapon. It is your ally. It's your best friend. It's your worst enemy.

It just depends on where you are. Slowly Anciu starts to pull into that draft and he gets close. He gets close. He gets close. Oh wow, they are going to go into 16 and this is where Anciu is going to get him.

Marrera covers it. Marrera goes to the inside, breaks his lazy dares and okay, this is it. There's no lap, nothing left to do but Anciu, I thought Anciu was done. I thought Anciu had tried his shot. I thought Marrera had covered it.

We're done. Anciu says, uh-uh, I got one more trick up my sleeve and he rides around the freaking outside on the last lap on the last turn, rides around the outside on what we had. What was this race? 19 on 19 lap old Pirelli rubber to beat Marrera by three thousandths of a second at the line and what was an incredible pass to win. One of the best motorcycle races I think I've seen.

It's got to be like in that top five because everything you wanted in that race was there. Intrigue, people winning who didn't want to win, back forth, it was just amazing. Anciu gets that victory which is amazing. I don't know which pass is better. Is the pass that Marrera puts on in five better?

Is the pass that Kinet puts on him in five better? Or is the pass that Anciu puts on Marrera to win the best pass of the race? Rich, put you on the spot. What do you think? Well, it's got to be Anciu in the last turn I think because it was the race winning pass.

You have to pick that one I think because it was so audacious wasn't it? It was. And he was up on the curb as well. Did they say this is the closest finish they've ever had in Moto2? It might be.

It's literally a tire width on the photo finish image because they obviously would have had to have checked that. Although it seemed to me fairly clear that Anciu had just nicked it at the line. But like you Jim, you're just thinking where the hell is his rear grip coming from? Because so many other people have tried Balthus Kinet. So many people had been up front early on and had just kind of burnt their tires out.

And let's be honest, Denis Anciu is not famous for kind of getting to the end of races. And he's been, I don't want to say mediocre in Moto2, he's been kind of a bit of a slow burn. Certainly slower than I thought would be the case. But he's been making obvious progress in the last few rounds as indeed has Diogo Marrera. And those are two guys that know how to ride around with diminishing grip.

Marrera's kind of world-class motocrosser. Obviously Anciu is part of the software glue top rack camp where they just muck about kind of taking lumps out of each other, stunt riding, etc. So these are two stellar talents, these two guys. So it's not a big surprise now that they're both starting to really come on strong. But I mean, I was convinced that Marrera had it.

I have to say I was absolutely amazed at that last corner that Anciu pulled off. And it was just a little moment of brilliance, wasn't it? Which is the little things that you just wait for in this sport. And they don't come around all that often, but it was just stunning. I mean, I love the technical precision by which Kinet and Marrera passed at turn five.

I've ridden, so I know how hard that is to do. So I'm like, wow, those two things are really great passes. There's no margin for error. There's no margin for error there. But I think you, like the old dirt tracker in me, has always admired a guy, whether it was Speedway or whether it was just dirt track, that just hung it out on the outside and just said, screw it, there's enough width for me to go between the hay bales or the fence or the airbag, whatever.

And this guy, and I'm just going to stick with it. And I'm just going to nip him at the line. I thought that race was just brilliant. What a way to win your first one, right? People are going to talk about that race for a long time.

Like that highlight is going to be shown for years. Particularly because neither of them had won a race before Iver. So there was a lot riding on it as well. And I have to say, Marrera, I like him a lot. He was really gracious in Verti Commons defeat.

I mean, I'm sure he was pretty pleased with his race, but he would have been gutted not to have won the race, particularly by the fact paper width that he lost it by. But in part for me in the interview, I thought he was very measured, very gracious. As indeed, you know, I mean, Dennis Ontu is kind of box office off the bike as well as on it, isn't he? And he's a very, very amusing young guy. Again, I'm not going to go off on one, but these are the people, these are the characters that dawn a stroke liberty, as will be before very much longer.

They need to be kind of making hay while the sun's shining with these personalities, because Ontu in particular is really, really good in front of the camera. So, yeah, as you say, Joe, I mean, just all in all, it was a very entertaining race and great overtaking, a lot of tactics going on. And then towards the end, people just defying physics by keeping the grip going really, when you thought they must be running short of the stuff, but made it work. Yeah, gut it for Marrera, but he's going to get one here. So Ontu obviously wins.

Marrera gets that second. Balthus on the podium. Three guys there that had never won a Moto 2 race and all of them occupying the podium, which was great. Aegis, Slatch, Canett, Roberts, Ramirez, Gonzalez, Lopez, Guevara, Aranis, Dixon in 13th, good golly, or Tola 14th and Daniel Munoz in 15th, scoring the last championship point. Now, what does that do with Gonzalez?

Because like we get, we Gonzalez finishes ninth, right? So he only gained seven points. That puts him and we'll start, sorry, where can it, Canett was, sorry, Canett was sixth to get 10 points. That puts Gonzalez dead level with Aaron Canett. Now, obviously he has the tiebreakers of wins, right?

So Gonzalez is there. This is a blip on the copy book of Gonzalez. He will learn from this experience. He will not worry about it. And I still think he's the man to beat in this championship.

Although apparently there are other people that are going to be coming because Canett, obviously on 118 points, leaves you with Marrera, the Brazilian on third. He's on 90 points. We put him only 28 behind. Now, Gonzalez cannot afford another mistake weekend like this because then he will be in some trouble and we will put a lot more people back into it. Balthus is fourth in championship on 89.

Dixon falls to fifth at 85. Aegis is at 77. Anshu jumps up to 62. Ramirez is on 55 and then Vietti ninth and Juanso Lopez tenth. And that's Moto2's world championship standings as of this moment.

I'm going to be keeping an eye on Diego Marrera who's, what was he, 28 points back, not a million miles back. No, not a million miles away. Canett, I mean, I think if I cast my mind back, I think Canett was my pick for the title. And he is joint leading the title challenge at the moment. But again, quite up and down form, but it's up enough that he's level pegging on points at the top of the table.

Gonzalez, he had that clumsy crash last time out in Silverstone, which as far as I was concerned, that was on him, that one. Then he crashes in qualifying this round. He's now just ridden rather successfully on a MotoGP bike, which might be a bit of a distraction. Could have been. As well.

Could have been. Going forward, you know, because then he has to go back on the Moto2 bike. Do you remember, I mean, I'll never forget the look on Pedro Acosta's face at the first test in Valencia when he fucking took three in KTA. I mean, once you've ridden the Moto, I assume, none of us will ever get the opportunity. But I'm sure once you've tasted a MotoGP bike, anything else is going to feel pretty tame by comparison.

I hope that's not the case for Gonzalez, but these things can sort of interrupt the flow. And as I say, this is the second clumsy weekend that he's had, having been really good most of the year, other than the wrong tyre choice in the damp conditions at Cota. So Marrera feels like the guy is sort of having a bit of momentum at the moment, even though he didn't win the race, but he was obviously very, very close to doing so. I mean, it's an entertaining championship Moto2 again this year. One disappointment, I will say, is what's gone wrong at Bosco Scura.

I mean, the first guy home on that chassis was Lopez in tenth. Lopez, as in Alonso Lopez, has been nowhere this year, relatively speaking. And Dixon, in particular, seems to suddenly be having a proper struggle. I think Kalex has figured out that they are too stiff, and they have figured out a way to soften that chassis over the winter. And I don't remember where I saw this, I apologize, folks.

I believe that all the Kalex's were running a different rear swing arm. Okay. So you don't think it's that the Bosco Scura has gone backwards, particularly? No, I think Kalex has caught up. Regardless of whatever may be going on at Kalex, Bosco Scura has just not moved the dial enough to where everybody else now has caught up in the situation.

People have wrapped their mount, the setup that's required for the Pirelli with the Kalex chassis has sort of been conquered now, and they'll be fine. Now, there are going to be tracks that are more corner speedy tracks that they should work, and temperature is going to be a lot in this variable as well. But Bosco Scura is going to win more races. But I'll say it because I can. If you look at the guys that are on Bosco Scura this year, are they the creme de la creme of people in Moto 2?

That's a good question. I tend to think that no, because I think that the guys like Anshu Murerabaltis, Aegis, Kinet, those guys are all really good riders. I'm not trying to put shade on Jake Dixon. He's a great rider. They're all there on a world championship.

They are good riders. But just the talent, like again, think about David Alonso on a Kalex with, it's not Garcia, it's Guevara. Those guys are talents. We've said this before in this class, there is a definite shift here that the people who used to be at the top, the Dixons, the Vietis, the Kinetes, take your pick. Those guys are now getting to Roberts.

These guys are coming to end of life cycle, and they're going to be phasing out, right now, a year or two, and they're going to go somewhere else. And these kids are coming. And I just think the talent difference is that way too. Yeah, no, I don't think anybody could really argue against any of what you just said. And yeah, it's weird because Bosco Scuro looked like the chassis to be on in the first two or three rounds, didn't it?

And then all of a sudden, like you say, in fact, the logic of what you just said makes total sense. Perhaps Kalex made a change to the chassis and it took them a few rounds to figure out how to get it to work on the tyre. And now they figured it out. It's the package to be on again, which has been the case pretty much solidly for the last number of seasons anyway. So it's kind of back to normal service, I suppose, in that sense.

But interesting. I suppose, are we at, no, so we've got Mugello next, then we've got Assen, which might be a bit of a, could be a bit of a Bosco track. I think Assen will be. But who knows, because the weather factors in there. Yes, it does.

But I mean, the good news before we move on to MotoGP, which shouldn't take us too long to talk about. No, we can get to this one pretty quick, I swear. Moto2, I'm almost tempted to say is the best championship this year. It's really hard to call. And it's obviously with two people on level pagging at the top of the points standing, that is born out really.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. So yeah, no, I'm really, really, really enjoying Moto2. And trust me, I would never have thought I'd be saying that a couple of seasons ago, because I literally would fall asleep in a Moto2 race. Yeah, if you wanted to nap during the Moto, well, you could take a nap.

And because me, I can't. That's make breakfast time for me. Well, yeah, okay. That's generally how it is because of the time difference here. The five, six hour time difference.

So usually it's like, oh, I can get up, I can watch Moto3, I'm hungry. I'll make myself breakfast during Moto2. And then I'm probably by that time, I'm not really interested in watching MotoGP. Then there's other things that need to be done house or whatever. And so yeah, that's enough about my schedule.

You just didn't really need to know. Well, let's move into MotoGP. Talking of falling asleep. Let's talk about MotoGP. Well, yeah, there you go.

If you wanted to snooze. Anyway, in the first qualifying session, I thought qualifying was probably the most interesting thing that happened all weekend for MotoGP was this given the fact that also in Yamaha, every one of them are in Q1. Bocceros rapid rise to success has now hit a stall point and fallen off like a cliff. It was obvious that they could not make the software retire. Well, he hates Aragon.

Every Yamaha hates Aragon. Yamahas just do not work at Aragon for whatever reason. And I guess, again, a much cleverer engineer than me would be able to write a thesis on this. But I'm sure Lorenzo, I think was the last Yamaha to win. Yeah, way back.

And you know, you're going back some way there. Yeah. Well, also too, you got Yamaha. They, what was it? There's something about Aragon that they don't like.

And I can't, I had it and I'm like, oh, you got to think about this too. And I certainly can't just evaporated like gasoline out of a carburetor in my mind. Anyway, whatever. So they Yamahas were all in there. Now, Digia was in there too.

Oh, I know what I want to say. Just like how remember the only place the Aprilia ever worked was at Aragon. It's like the reverse of the Yamaha. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But there you are. Anyway, it was obvious that he had trouble with the soft tire. They threw a bunch of, they looked at the data, they tried it, they rectified themselves. Quattro came out with, you know, just basically with the, with the fire determination to get into, get into the QT. Bez crashed, you know, he crashed at turn three and tore the bike up.

He came back. There was, he had some problem on the second bike. I said, quote, is it a ride height problem, unquote, which potentially was given what we talked about earlier in the podcast, go back and listen to it, people. And then, you know, Miller had a problem too with his bike on the rear axle. Now, this one was a little bit weird to me because they were there.

The bike was running, they were getting ready to let him go and they stopped him. They, you know, they said, no, we're not, we're not going. They were working tightening the axle nut, which I thought was weird. And the, what I was, I was scared for the mechanic because the tire was spinning on the stand. He seemed to have like a, a lever or a screwdriver or something, wedging the spacers or the axles together.

But he was also sort of fiddling with the safety catch lock that was going on. So I don't know if they just forgot to put the safety catch in or if it was like, Hey, cause they kept turning the nut. Was it, was it spinning on them and they couldn't get it to stop spinning. And so they were, they were wedging in there to get it to go tight and get the right torque on the back of the axle. I don't know what it was, but they eventually had it, what I believe to be tight and correct.

They got the safety pin in there to keep sure that it doesn't go out. And then Miller took off. It was just interesting to watch them work and think about what was going on. And it shows you that even though these guys are at the absolute echelon of professionalism, these little things can happen to you as a team. And it's how you recover from them and what you do with it.

That is what makes you a good team or a great team or, or just a good, also ran at the back of the pack. And I thought those two guys, given the pressure of that situation, kept their heads screwed on. I mean, as you say, I mean, they are top, top of the game, aren't they? Those guys, but those are the little, I mean, obviously wouldn't send them out from a safety standpoint. Some of it wasn't right.

Yep. As to what it was, yeah, obviously we can only speculate, but no, given the circumstances and to be fair, Miller kept his head as well. Cause if that had been Alessia Spargrove, he'd have been in the back of the garage kicking things and shouting at people. And. But it shows you the trust that you have with your mechanics.

Yeah. Right. There's a huge bond there that if they say it's right, it's right. Go push that thing to the absolute limit. So.

I know we've got to stop talking, Jim, cause this is going to run way too long, but I'm really impressed with Jack Miller this year as well, cause he's having a really good year on that bike, but he understands what his role is, I think, in this overall thing now, cause he is one of the elder statesmen, if you think about it, and he is known to be a good development rider. And he just going about his business, you know, not getting the histrionics are just not there with him. And I personally appreciate that because there are a lot of riders that would unravel in a situation like that. Yep. Yep.

So Fabio DiGiantone was the fastest man. Quattrorra was second quick. Those two guys go on to the qualifying two. Now I'm qualifying to Alex Marquez and Juan Mir. Hey, a Honda, not named Zarko, is in the second qualifying session automatically.

They each only had one bike due to crashes that were going to, that took place in FP3. Mark went out on his first lap. He just threw down a 145, 986 like, yo, this is my house and this is what I do here. It's like, whoa, you can't have any more swagger than what that man has at that track. He just doesn't.

Benigno was actually 11th man. Now Alex did go to first for just a smidgen of it. And then it was like Morbidele, but Mark had a bad go of it. He sort of got stuck kind of in traffic. And when people were coming out after they got their second tires or whatever, but it didn't matter.

Mark Marquez dominated the qualifying at the end to take the pole, followed by his brother, followed by Morbidele. That was a great ride by Morbidele to be quite honest. Benigno was fourth. So it was like, well, that's not too far off here. Things kind of look, things were a little positive for Benigno a little bit.

Acosta looked decent on the KTM to be fifth. And then the other KTM, a Bender was like right there. Like, oh, Aldiger kind of had his rookie success kind of struck down just a smidge because he was only seventh quick. Then Benigno, Quattroraro, Digiantonio, Mir and Zarco. Now we go to the sprint that afternoon and basically everything that you need to know about the sprint happens in the first run to the first turn.

And that is the fact that Mark Marquez got wheelspin and didn't go anywhere, which put him into the clutches of Pedro Acosta, who put the knee and elbow on him to which poor old Pedro got a whole bunch more knee and elbow back from Mark. And basically Mark right around the outside of Acosta to wind up third as they went through the first turn. Alex I think was leading there at the beginning with Morbidelli second. Then Aldiger was up there and Acosta because Aldiger kind of squeaked by to get there as well. So basically by the second lap, Mark had got by Morbidelli and he was going to go hunt down his brother who was only like a half a second up the lead.

I wrote in my notes, cue the jaws music, because this is a foregone conclusion that Mark was going to just blow past his brother. He did and literally after about a lap, he had about a 2.3 second lead on his brother. Mark goes on to win the race, Alex is second. Now the interesting thing is that Aldiger had chose to run the medium tire in the sprint. And everybody else had gone with the soft.

And Aldiger mounts a charge at the late part of the race to basically hunt down Morbidelli and nick the podium off of Morbidelli near the end of it. So the sprint podium was Marquez, Marquez, Aldiger, who again, Aldiger is on a run of form for a rookie in MotoGP. I mean, he's, you know, again, he's got the 24 Ducati. I understand, but you have to produce and Aldiger is he is showing you the brilliance that Ducati saw that Ducati signed and then had that terrible year when they migrated to Pirelli's. It was Acosta, Digiantoni, Vignale, and Bender rounding out the last people to make points.

So that's the sprint. You got anything to add quickly, Rich, before we go to the MotoGP race? Well, I need, yeah, just Aldiger, really. And the one person who isn't getting enough credit in all of this, I think, people are mentioning him, but Frankie Carcetti, who is Aldiger's race engineer. I mean, he is really something else.

And I mean, you hear it on the TNT commentary a lot. Carcetti is not really interested in single lap pace. He's always about race setup, which equals race pace. And I mean, obviously, you need a rider that can deliver and Aldiger, yeah, I mean, Ayagura kind of blew us away in Thailand in round one. But since then, it's pretty much been Aldiger, isn't it, really, from the rookie point of view.

And it's hard to see, particularly as Ayagura is now injured, it's hard to see sort of Aldiger not getting kind of the rookie prize for this season. And he's just, yeah, really outstanding, which I suppose is a bit more of a surprise to us versus Ayagura because Aldiger had such a wretched season last year in Moto 2. And I've always been thinking, oh, bloody hell, G-Cat, you've made a bit of a balls up here. But it just goes to show that there are very clever talent spotters there. And yeah, and obviously, Aldiger is part of the Marquez and Alex Marquez kind of romance kind of club as well.

So it all kind of fits together. With Kiles as well, yeah. Yeah. Kiles is in that group too, because Marquez walked down in the podium celebration or part for mayor, whatever you call that, and told him he did great to finish second. It's like, okay, if you're under the wing of the Marquez brothers, you are a talent.

Yeah. You've got a bright future ahead of you. Yeah. Yep. All right.

So there's nothing really to say about the sprint, was there? No, it was, I mean, again. Although arguably more exciting than the main race, which is not saying anything. Yeah, for a few laps, right? So the race on Sunday, well, Mark didn't screw up the whole shot this time.

So it was 93, 73, 63, then Acosta, Bender, Aldiger, and Morbidele, who had the horrible start this time. Acosta would get by Benyaya at 13, and then Benyaya would go back by showing that fighting form that we used to see from Benyaya, especially with him and Martin on the opening laps of sprints or opening laps of the actual Sunday race that was going on there. Morbidele would get by Bender, and then he runs ones wide and gets by five laps into it. It's 93, 73, 63. Still Acosta, still Bender, still Morbidele.

Zarko goes down on lap nine. By lap 10, Mark has a one and a half second lead. Benyaya's hanging tough at this point. I mean, he's looking good. We talked about that.

We kind of know why Benyaya actually is back, and he's got some feels. Looking good. We realize at this point, Alex does not have the pace to stick with Mark, and that pretty much is it. Bender goes down at one point. Quattrora was down the first turn.

The front just folded in on him. We did have a pretty good battle for seventh. That was Mir Didgea and Vinales. They kind of went after each other for a little bit in there. Benyaya started to lose touch with 18 laps in the books.

He started to lose touch with Alex. I think Benyaya thought, fight another day. I'll take this podium, and we'll build on the success of a weekend where we're not crashing, and we actually have some magical feel back again. The Aldegir Morbidele battle until the end of the race is actually a great little bit of tit for tat. We actually saw that because honestly, they were racing for fourth basically in the MotoGP race.

And it was like, oh, we're actually, I saw that Morbidele and Aldegir were fighting for fifth and sixth. So that's how far back things were. And the fact that we're seeing this was crazy. So it gives you an idea of how bad things were. Mark just basically had a two-second gap.

He just kept it there, watched the pit pork, rode it home for the victory. His brother had about a second, second and a half, give or take a little bit on Benyaya as he rode home. Acosta had a great ride nobody saw it, but the KTM seemed decent this weekend. Maybe they're starting to figure that out potentially. I like to call it the bat cycle because the bat wings were on it and whatnot.

But he would wind up finishing fourth. Morbidele fifth, getting the better of Aldegir for sixth. Mir finished seventh. That was a great spot for Mir. The Honda showing some form for sure.

I was really excited to see Mir there. I mean, we know Zarco is a talent. I think Mir is a little more of an aggressive go-getter kind of rider than Zarco. I mean, not by much. They're both very intellectual and they both think their way through most everything.

But it was nice to see Mir in seventh, I have to say. I'll say, Jim, just quickly, just cutting in because Mir was one of my sort of, again, inverted comma standouts, just simply because he didn't spend most of the weekend going down the road on his head. Which is pretty much what we see. Now he did crash in the sprint, but he was taken out by Miller. So that one wasn't on him.

But Mir, the problem with John Mir, this was the same in his Suzuki title winning year as well. And throughout his, pretty much in charge of his MotoGP career, is that he just cannot qualify. He's a good Sunday racer, but he's very much a front end man and he needs a front end underneath him. And obviously he hasn't had that on the Honda until kind of starting around about now. So that's the first decent race I would say Mir has had on the Honda.

He had a good result in India a couple of seasons ago or last year maybe, but that's such a weird race because of the heat and the humidity and stuff. So hopefully this is the continued signs of the green shoots at HRC because obviously Zarka had a weirdly off weekend this weekend crash, which is not like him. But at least, and obviously Marini wasn't present because he's kind of like massively beaten up at the moment. And well, we better not talk about Chantra, but it's a bit painful to watch really at the moment. But there's no obvious solution to that problem given that Idemitsu want somebody from Southeast Asia, kind of region, that part of the world to represent them on the bike.

And there's just nobody else really to fill the breach at the moment. So I think we're going to have to just sort of struggle on. But I mean, Chantra is just beaten by everybody, test riders, wild cards, you name it. He looks very uncomfortable and it's a bit sad to see really. I wish he could just be dropped back into Moto2 really, because I think he'd do much better and be much happier.

I don't disagree with you on that one. All right. So let's look at the points here after this one and we will get out of this podcast, which has gone to be quite long now. So Marquez is now on. Well, you know what?

One thing about Marquez, this is the first he led every session, every practice, every qualifying and the sprint and the race. It's the first time since 2015, 10 years ago when he did it at Saxon Ring on Honda. Yeah. This is his 99th career pole as well. So he's about to hit the century.

That's the century mark there. This is the Mark Marquez that I think we all thought was going to show up and just disappear on everybody every weekend because he got the best bike on the grid. It hasn't been that way, but it is definitely a different, mature Marquez, I think, who is actually riding now. But with all that being said, he's on 233 points. That's 32 ahead of his brother.

Benyaya is now on 140 points. That puts him 61 behind Mark. Not instrumental, but it's going to take some effort and a little bit of luck to go Benyaya's way to get back into this title chase. Morbidelli with a decent weekend winds up being fourth. DG Antonio is teammate, fifth.

Zarco, sixth. Bizecki, Acosta, eighth. Altegr, ninth, which is pretty good. And Quattrora slides back to 10th in the points. And that's all I got for MotoGP.

All I was going to just add, in a handful of moments when I was lucid enough and awake enough to make a comment about either the MotoGP races, I did write down that it's so weird to watch Mark Marquez with wheels in line. Particularly at Aragon, because of course back in the HRC days, he was famously sideways, all on the front end, and he looked so under control at the moment. To the extent, going back to what we were talking about earlier on, that I just don't think he's really pushing to the absolute maximum, which is how he came to set his fastest lap on the penultimate lap of the race, I think, just because he can. To prove to you if you thought in any way, shape, or form you had any chance of winning this race, I will throw down the fastest lap of the race on the last lap just to piss you off. Hey, Benyaya, guess what?

You might have some feel, but you got to get faster than that. I mean, that's what that was. It was a statement to Benyaya and then of course, Mark and then Paddock. I guess I have a lot more to say about this race. Sorry, folks, I lied to you, but you saw him grab Benyaya and go, oh, you're back now.

You're back now. That's great. Yeah. You're not smiling. A smiling assassin here.

Let me build you up. Why? Just while I remind you that I busted the track record on the last lap of the race, which is why, again, which is why Mugello is going to be such a, such a fist fight, going to be theater. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be amazing.

At least we have a weekend off to get ready and prepare for it because it's going to be amazing. Anyway, okay, now I'm done. I swear. Last thing, promise us the last thing because obviously the test happened on the Monday. We've kind of touched on it.

Gary will be delighted to know that Maverick Vinales was fastest in the test, world champion of the test, as always, young Maverick or maybe not so young anymore, but yeah, not much really to say about the test because I don't really get Monday tests after a race weekend because everybody's knackered. People that have won or had a good weekend have probably been out with the team having a bit of a celebration. So I don't know what's to be gained really, but yeah, nothing majorly sensational to report on in the test other than Maverick obviously being fastest. Other than that, we roll on to Mugello in just a little over a week, Jim, and I'm very much looking forward to it. We've got Mizano, a track and an event I loathe in MotoGP and World Superbikes because I just don't like the track in the direction that it goes now.

I never have done. Obviously, I know they changed it after Wayne Rainey's crash, but it just doesn't do anything for me. But we got World Supers there this weekend. I suspect we'll see a treble from Nico Bulliger on the Ducati to be honest. So probably won't be a very memorable one, but let's see.

I'm done. I promise. I'm done. So buckle your seatbelts, folks, because everything is a back-to-back race from here on out, with the exception of the summer break. When we get three weeks off, I think, before they reconvene in, I think for Mizano or whatever there in the Adriatic coast of Italy.

And with all that greatness yet to go, I'm just gonna tell you all to ride safe because we got to get out. That's fun, Rich. Yeah. See you everybody. See you next time.