MotoGP Barcelona – Miracles Do Happen (x4)

Hello and welcome to Motopod, the internet radio show all about motorcycle road racing. This is episode number 839, recorded on May the 20th, 26. Miracles do happen, times four, the title of this show. I'm your host, Jim McDowell. Across the pond, merry old England is Richard Gell with the vest again.

So obviously, Rich, you are still cold over there, are you not? Yes, we are just about to finish a unseasonably cold spell in the UK, and we're about to go completely the other direction, because by the weekend, it's going to be 27, 28 degrees. It's centigrade here, which is unseasonably hot, and it's going to last for a week or more by the looks of it. So yeah, the weather can't quite seem to make its mind up at the moment. But anyway, it's going to be a lot hotter, and the next time you see me, I will not be wearing my overcoat as I'm displaying to you tonight.

Well, here it feels like it is England, because it has been raining for two days straight, and it is very cold now. A north wind has come in. There's not a let-up in this for the next two weeks. There's a day of not rain, and then it's just more rain coming, more rain coming, more rain coming. Nice.

Yeah, really fun stuff. But we have even more fun stuff to talk about, Rich, because it was a race weekend from Barcelona. But before we can go through all that, I just want to take time to shout out the supporters of the show. Really appreciate everything that you are doing to help us financially to be able to bring you this content and whatnot. We would like you to hook up with us on our social medias.

It's official underscore motopod on Instagram, blue sky, whatever. What's the other one that I'm missing, Rich, somewhere? InstaX threads. Yep. They're all there.

They're all there. Everywhere that you do your social media, we're there, too. Follow us. Give us a like. That'll really help us.

If you could donate to the show, that would be great. We'd greatly appreciate it. Go to the website, www.motopodcast.com, PayPal, Patreon links. Anything that you could do is greatly appreciated. A big shout out to Danny and Carl for their Northwest 200 show.

I thought that show was a great show. I missed, have always missed, when you and I were doing the show, we're the only two here. That we couldn't do the Real Roads as well. This just wasn't the time. It wasn't available.

We just didn't have the bandwidth to be able to do that. Danny and Carl do have that. They're here. That's why they're here. That's why you should be listening to that show, because that Real Roads show that they did was great.

I didn't realize that Jeremy McWilliams is like 62, and he won a race there at the Northwest. Absolutely incredible. Listen to the show if you haven't listened to it. And Danny and Carl gave up the good work. And if you haven't heard Scott, Bolton, and Jake, talk about Moto America here in the U.S.

side, go give that a listen too, because that is some good stuff as well. Yeah. Can I just say, Jim, just very quickly, we did have a comment through from, I've only got the handle of Woodsy1. Woodsy1, okay. Very kindly commented through the Podbean platform, which is what we use to launch our episodes nowadays.

So, yeah, he came back with a complimentary note about the Northwest 200 show as well. And I very much echo your sentiment there, Jim. I mean, yeah, we just, haven't had a chance over the years to kind of watch like the TT, Northwest and so on. And clearly Danny and Carl are really big fans of Real Roads. I mean, we all are, but again, it's just trying to fit so much stuff in.

And then record and edit shows when you've got sort of day jobs and the rest of it is yeah, very, very, very difficult. So it's fantastic to have those guys on to help us out. And Jim, just before I forget, I'm trying to do a little bit more shouting out to people that potentially become listeners to the show, hopefully subscribers financially. Keep going. So, this is all a bit.

Slightly random, but a French colleague of mine or some French colleagues of mine, I found out that, so Jean-Francois was with us today in the office for some meetings and it transpires that his son, Dorian Garcia was actually at Barcelona last weekend. Oh, excellent. So shout out to Dorian and Jean-Francois. Also Lionel, who I think is also into the bikes as well. Those guys are based down in the south of France.

So they have pretty much lovely roads and riding weather most of the year around. And possibly this lady won't be listening, but very randomly, my wife was at a teacher training course of some description earlier in the week with lots of other teachers there. And she bumped into somebody called Dale Hopes. I hope I got that correct. He's a massive MotoGP fan, goes to quite a lot of the races by the sounds of it.

And my wife on finding this out was encouraging her to listen to MotoPod. So maybe we've got another listener there as well. So more the merrier. Everybody's welcome here. This is an open community where I think we want to engage with the fans and have these discussions.

And so we really want to encourage you to contact the show via social medias or MotoPod. Or MotoPodcasts at MotoPodcast.com. Email us anything. We love getting that feedback from you guys. We take it to heart.

We read them all. We try to reply to most of them, or if not all of them. Somebody in the host chain is going to even a lot. Sometimes you may get former hosts that will show up and throw something down there as well. So please do try to keep that interaction going with us.

And Rich, no segment. Sorry, thanks for your care. No, it's okay. And again, with regards to Danny, who's kind of picked up the social media part of what we're doing and is doing some really clever, interesting stuff. With the integration around the website and how all the social media channels link and how these things communicate to help kind of draw more people to the show and make more people aware of it.

And there's this excellent piece of software or application called LinkTree, which I see he's using on some of the posts that are going out on socials where you can basically see all of our social media channels in one place. Nice. Plus the website, et cetera. And we're moving on down the road a bit further just for Gary, who kind of wrote back after the last show that you and I did, Jim, about where we were. Kind of thinking we might look at going down the merch store route.

So yeah, I've got a bit of work to do on that and to share with the fellow hosts and co-hosts and whatnot. But we are moving down that direction as well. So yeah, trying to do lots of new or going back to some of the stuff that we used to do in the past as well. So yeah, all good. Hopefully we've got plenty of stuff coming up this year, along with masses of racing to talk about.

All right. So if you want merch, if you want a coffee mug, if you want a T-shirt, whatever, let us know. Email us. Put it on our socials. Tell us that you want merch.

Do you want merch? Yeah, that's a little shout out to Gary there because he wants merch. He definitely does. Actually, just on a bit of sort of a simplistic thing, but for T-shirts, because that's what most people would probably go for, what are going to be the popular colors? Because we might have to hold a little bit of stock.

I'm not sure. We're just sort of investigating some of this. I found out from the company that we're talking to that they can do camo gear. I personally love camouflage gear. I like that.

I like that. Which we can logo up with the Motopod stuff as well. Nice. Nicky Hayden used to have some great camo gear, didn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've always kind of loved that. She once had that great camo helmet at Laguna Seca, circa the 90s somewhere. Yeah, no, that was really cool as well. Yeah, so lots of things are possible. We just need to know what people want because we obviously want to offer stuff that people are likely to want to buy.

And obviously, we'll get a few quid out of it if people do buy stuff as well. Not a lot, but it all helps with the coffers. And if everybody listens to the show on a regular basis, we just subscribe one euro or one dollar a month. That would make a huge difference to us in setting some of this stuff up because we have a very hardcore. But small number, and I'm sort of thinking maybe 20 people or so that actually do monthly subscribe financially to the show.

I mean, it's very welcome, that income, but it doesn't build up to huge numbers and it does constrain us somewhat. So the more we can get people engaged, really, the better for the show going forward. So anyway, yeah, that's just a little bit more on what we're trying to do. All right, well, let's get into the news that's happened during the week. This one, I think, is no surprise.

I think we talked about this a little bit, but Brivio will leave Trackhouse at the end of 26. The move to. HRC is highly likely now that he at Alberto Puig has been announced as moving to an advisory role. A new team manager is to be announced, and that is unlikely to be Davide Brivio. So who is going to be the new team manager?

Can we get Neil Tuxworth out of it out of retirement? Well, again, I think possibly he's the wrong end of the age spectrum for that, which I suspect is why Brivio himself is not going for team manager role. It is a big role. Yes. Although.

Although, as some people were pointing out, it would probably be a lot easier at HRC, funnily enough, than at Trackhouse, where he probably has to do a lot of the heavy lifting on all sorts of different things, whereas in HRC, it's a works team. So there's lots of admin staff to do more mundane stuff. But I think both him and Puig, given their age and their experience, are going to have more advisory consultative type roles. And the chatter that was going on on TNT Sports at the weekend was that the team manager is going to be a bit of a left field choice from within the paddock. But I'm wondering if it's somebody like, for example.

Michele, not Piro, he's a rider. Michele, he's the guy that works at Grassini anyway. He's kind of like the, I'm not sure if he's the team manager exactly, but he pops up and gets interviewed a lot. So I can kind of see it being, yeah, somebody a little bit kind of unusual, but who is very good in front of the camera, which that Grassini guy certainly is. That's just a guess.

I mean, I don't have absolutely an idea. It could be the cook at Trackhouse for all I know, but possibly slightly unlikely. But I guess we'll find this out fairly quickly because I don't see any. I don't see any reason why they would hold that information up. I wouldn't think they would.

It begs the question, who is going to go in at Trackhouse? Because Justin Marks was at Barcelona all weekend. Yeah. You got to assume that he is trying to finalize a replacement or whatever it is that he is trying to do. I mean, it could be rider search as well, as we know that Ayagura is moving on from Trackhouse to Yamaha.

Just not announced, but we all seem to know that that's going to happen. So I'm curious to see how all this higher level shuffling. Is to go on here. I'd be tempted to say, I don't think I've said this last time. I think, is it Francesco Guidotti, who was the KTM team boss a few seasons ago?

He obviously got replaced ultimately by Akio, didn't he? Yes. He would obviously be a logical kind of guy to go into Trackhouse. I would have thought again, given his experience, but I guess we'll find out in reasonably short order. Yep.

Moving on to the next bit of news. Tech three stays with KTM. This really isn't a surprise. You had to believe that KTM was not going to let two bikes walk off the grid. I mean, I think Honda was definitely there.

I think Gunther was sniffing around with Honda to try to procure bikes, or he was just trying to use Honda to get a better deal out of KTM, take your pick. I don't think his intention was ever to leave KTM. That's purely speculative on my point, but KTM needed to keep two more bikes on the grid. They needed to be sure that they had that. And I understand how Honda wants to have another two bikes on the grid to get six so that they can even get more data, especially going into the eight 50 era.

Because we all know Honda has absolutely no problem building motorcycles. They could build as many of these things. They could supply the whole grid and not care. Because if there's one thing I'm pretty sure about, at least in the motorcycle side of Honda is they're just racers. So they would just do whatever it would take.

I give you the fact that they wound up building all of the bikes for moto two. When it first started the old 600 Hondas, it did was like, oh, you haven't found anybody yet. Yeah. Okay. We got you.

Don't worry. Yeah. Well, you don't have to go too far back in motor GP. Yeah. History to a time when half the grid was Honda's think back to the CRT kind of period when the grid shrunk down a little bit and it was Honda that were making up the numbers and also think back to the 500 era because Honda built that 500 twin that was arguably a pretty decent I'm going to use the term privateer bike.

Satellite wasn't ever an option back then. You had sort of the privateers in the factory at that point in time, but yeah, they have the resources, they have the money. It's never going to be an issue. So. It'd be.

Interesting to see what they do. Cause I think they are itching for two more riders and they've got to find it somewhere. I'm not sure who they're going to get, or are they going to now focus and really court Aspar so that they come back with a Honda branded CF, moto, moto GP bike, which would be really cool, but who knows what they're going to do? Well, I think it's quite hard and I don't want to get into troublesome political history here and well, yes, I know where you're I, yes, it would be hard to imagine a Japanese Chinese collaboration of that nature, but I think what is possibly going to happen is that Aspar would take Hondas for a couple of seasons or so while CF, moto, right. Develop a package that could come in as a standalone manufacturer to add to the ones that are already there.

I think that's quite likely. And I do wonder, I mean, there isn't actually any provision within the, let's say the current governance and rules of the sport for another two bikes to come onto the grid, but I suspect Liberty are going to start to agitate for, you know, another two to four bikes. So there might be opportunities for another team to come in at some point as well. I mean, we're not shorter teams, but they obviously capped at the minute at 22, I think. 22.

Yeah, I think they would, let's see, you've got three bikes per grid row, right? So you've got to have a multiple of three. So 26 doesn't give you that multiple, but what would give you that multiple thinking here quickly? Uh, what you could get to 30 is obviously a multiple. You'd have 10 rows of three, which I think that's a bit.

Too much, too many. Yeah. I think that's a bit too much. So that sweet spot needs to be like 20, 25, 26 bikes, something in that order. Yeah.

Anyway, the last bit of news here that we have is that Acosta has led the tests at Barcelona on the Monday afterwards, which I think is interesting. Although poor Jorge Martin, a sixth crash on the weekend and Aprilia promptly just packs it up and says, we're done. And we're out of here. I would imagine they were out of spare parts and leather suits for Jorge, I would think as well. The thing about that, that really I think about is how good Aprilia was with a leash on that bike at Barcelona for all those years.

And suddenly now you've got an Aprilia that doesn't really work there. I mean, it does, but it's not the bike that it was, which goes to show you that it takes a well round. It bike to work at every racetrack and you can't just have those couple of specialists tracks that you are prevailing well at motor land, Aragon with a leash, Barcelona with a leash. You could even say to some extent, Asin with a leash, Silverstone, Silverstone. Yes.

There's those four, right? You see that sometimes with formula one teams, they concentrate on tracks where they know they can win, not win at, but podium look good, attract the sponsors, bring the money. Then they sort of dial it back in. Yeah. Make a well rounded car where Aprilia has now made a well rounded bike that seems to work pretty well everywhere.

Yeah. Barcelona being a very weird exception to that potential rule. But I suspect it was due to track temperatures this weekend, which were right because we were way cooler than we thought we would be. And this is much earlier in the season than what it usually is. We were there in September last year, I believe.

And it was a lot hotter. Yeah. So I think you're absolutely right, Jim. I think that. Aprilia now works in a kind of a window of operation that's quite wide.

I just wonder if this weekend just gone with the cold wind and the low track and air temperature that they had, it just fell outside of that sweet spot. And I mean, we saw a lot of crashes across all classes all weekend long because of the track temperature issue, particularly on those kind of left hand turns, which are not prevalent at Barcelona. And tyre cooling was clearly a problem that was catching a lot of people out. Chief amongst them, Jorge Martinez, who probably was running out of gear at a certain time. Many times.

Yeah. In stages. I mean, he's back in my bad books at the minute, but we'll come to that later. Yeah. Yeah.

He's he's in my bad book, too. I have put him on to the naughty step again after having taken him off the naughty step. Yes. We'll get to that. It's kind of tongue in cheek.

But yeah, he didn't cover himself in glory, I'm afraid. Not at all. All right. So let's move into qualifying for the Moto three guys. Here's the first thing I'm going to have contention with.

Here's Liberty Media working to improve the show. And they screw up who is in and who is out of the first qualifying session in Moto. Three. I don't think it's that hard to create a graphic that is the correct graphic. Oh, is that what happened?

Okay. I missed that. So this is not the first time, but it's like, again, as our friend Jake has said, if you want to be professional, you need to act professional and do things professionally. So I'm paraphrasing what Jake said, but this was not professional. Like you really screwed up.

Like, you know, even, even left the commentating team off the rhythm because, oh, well, wait, but that isn't what you're seeing. I'm sorry. And then. And you have this, the unexpected I'm okay with as in what may have happened during a race where you may have missed a replay or you confused a lap count or something of that nature is to be expected as the race is going on. And you're trying to shuffle through that data that, you know, who is in and who is out of qualifying once you're done on Friday.

So you have plenty of time to sit back and adjust that graphic and be sure that it's correct. Now, with all of that said, we will now talk about. The qualifying because Munoz, Pini, Carpe, Potama, and O'Gorman were all there as along with Crucious and Moodley. Halfway Carpe, Munoz, Crucious, and Potama were all there, but in the end, Pini, Carpe, Munoz, and O'Gorman got through. Good to see O'Gorman go through.

He's Irish, right? Yes, correct. Ladius. So I thought that was really good. As we go into the second qualifying for Moto3, Rios.

Jesus Rios. Jesus Rios. Thank you. He went to P1 and that was really cool. But this is a kid who he knows that track really, really well.

He done really well in the juniors there. So that wasn't really a surprise. But Uriate was going well. So was Fernandez. So was Munoz.

And so was Perez. Keelys had not set an official lap time. One, he didn't go out with the big crowd at the very beginning. I thought that was interesting. And then when he was out, Keelys couldn't put a lap together that didn't violate track limits in some way.

I think we've seen in Keelys' style of how he rides that he wants to. He wants to carry as much momentum as he possibly can. And if that means running off the track wide, he's going to do that. Yeah. The problem here in Barcelona is that the, the no-go areas of the track are generally on the outside of fast corners where you're trying to carry a lot of corner speed to gain your lap time.

And Keelys was always just to the wrong side of that. He had a rough go of it in practice. He had, was having a very. Very rough go of it here in qualifying and I'm like going, wait a minute. This is a kid who has dominated in a way we have not seen in years.

And he couldn't put a time together, which I found incredibly shocking. Ariate would wind up being fast. Then Almanza, Rios was still staying there with Fernandez Munoz. And then Danish would jumped up to P2 and with about a minute left to go Morelli and Rios were there and Ariate. But the problem was everyone was now.

Turning a red sector at the very, very end of this. So you didn't really know where to watch. You can't pick up everybody with the camera, but Peroni went to the pole position. Munoz would be second Ariate stays on the front row and third Almanza Morelli, who fell down Rios was down then the sixth Keelys actually got a lap time in, and he was the seventh quickest, just pipping Kelso for that then Fernandez after Kelso. Danish.

Oh, Gorman was 12th then Bertelli Carpes. Somalia, O'Shea, Peeney and Yamanaka. So it was a rather interesting qualifying. Now we see something at a different out of Keelys. Keelys isn't on the front row anywhere.

And most of the races, I think maybe Texas. No, I think he's been on the front row everywhere. Maybe Brazil. Well, he was on the second row. I think I don't remember.

Yeah. Either way, this was very different than the normal Keelys that we've been seeing. Like, whoa, this kid is now seventh, but it's a track that drafting plays a huge part in and it's like, okay, well, let's just see what. Happens when we get to race day. So Sunday was a cloudier, cooler day than it was on Saturday.

Certainly cloudier. Yeah, definitely cloudier. We were going to go 18 laps on this one at the beginning. Ariate jumps out, grabs a whole shot. Hedda Munoz, Almanza, Peroni, Keelys and Danish.

Everyone went to what would be rider left at the start, except for one person. I'm thinking is right or right. Wasn't it? It was up to the pit wall. If you're sat on the bike.

Yeah, right or right. Sorry. Right or right. Yeah, I'm sorry. Got me confused, aren't you?

Well, you know, this lexicon me comes out and can't figure out which is left and right because I was trying to do it from the rider perspective and I screwed it up. So everybody goes right or right, except one person. And that person was? Maximo Keelys. Keelys does it.

Completely on his own. Completely. 100% on his own, doing his own thing, which I thought was personally brilliant and simultaneously actually worked because Keelys actually got to think third. So he got by four. Bikes using that technique, but then Keelys started going backwards slightly.

He was moving backwards and then Keelys sort of found himself in the second group of people as the first group was starting to pull away and it's like, oh, wait a minute, hold on. Keelys has got to bridge this gap because he's got to do it here at the beginning of the race. Because as we've seen, if you let the guys in front run away from you, especially here with the draft being so prevalent on the front stretch, it was imperative that Keely turn a red helmet here or there and try to get himself back into it. Peeney then got a long lap penalty for contact and the lead group got back together again and it became a group of eight. So Keelys sort of bridged the gap, pulled the other guys with him to get there.

Now, Fernandez is out front with Uriate and Almanza, Rios, Munoz, and Keelys is hanging in there right now. The lead group was slow. Their pace was like a half to three quarters of a second slower than what anybody thought it was going to be. And it was really weird as the other groups were starting to come forward. Like this had a chance of being like somewhere in the idea of a 14 or 15 rider fight for the lead.

But the problem was then that as the pace started to up, because I think Uriate sort of got the pit board that, hey, this group is going to get bigger. So you need to do something about it. So Uriate bolted to the front and really he started to slide away from everybody. Uriate was throwing down some good sectors. He had a good top speed.

And he was doing what was needed to get himself there. You know, I thought, can he really break away? I don't think he could at that moment in time. But where I was thinking then was, what is Keelys response going to be to this one? If Uriate has the speed, which he seemed to have, and he was going to break away, that's got to change Keelys mindset about what he needs to do or could do in this situation.

Like Keelys picks up the pace and bingo, bango, just like you thought, oh, this will never happen. Track limits warning. So good grief. We are 10 laps into this and Keelys has got another seven of these to do without violating a track limit because he would get a long lap penalty in all of this. It's like, okay, so it's Almanza, Munoz, Uriate, they're in front, but then Keelys and Carpe were coming and they were coming like now.

They suddenly turned on the tap and they were just turning the red helmets. Five to go and Keely is magically up to second. Like you hold on. He just wanted to turn one on the outside of people. And just rode around it and be like, that's a hell of a move by the kid to be that bold to go that late on the brakes.

He definitely has the feel on the front of that particular KTM and made that one look real easy. I think at that point they went six wide into turn one and Keelys pulled that move off. I wouldn't have been expecting it if I was in that pack of people to suddenly look over to, I'm going to get it right this time, my left and see Keelys going around the outside of me going, hey. I'm over here almost kind of doing it for fun as well. Wouldn't it?

I mean, one minute he's 10th or 11th and then you think, oh, bloody hell, he isn't like the lead. How did that happen? Yeah. He just has so much speed to turn on when he needs to or wants to. In that moment, I understood that Keelys was riding within himself for a few laps to be sure he didn't get a long lap penalty and sort of sorted his own problems out and then said, okay, I'm going to go now.

It was almost like classic Rossi. I'm going to ride around the pack. I'm going to. I'm going to kind of be there, but I'm not really in the front. Oh, hey, there's five laps to go.

According to my pit board. Huh? Hmm. I guess we'll put some fast laps down, which is what the kid did. Yeah.

I think he was looking after his tires a fair bit early on in the race when the fuel load was on and stuff as well, Jim, because he's so kind of tactical again in the way that he rides. I agree. He sees tactics in races. Again, Formula One analogy. Don't hate me.

Like Michael Schumacher did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Schumacher always seemed to have. I have a reserve left of strategy.

I'm sorry. I said that wrong. Enough reserve of brainpower, fortitude, physical stamina, whatever, to think about how I will plan my last attack. There was always that ability. Keely seems to have that instinct as well, which is really crazy.

But I would say the nearest comparison actually, which is a close one, is David Alonso in Moto 3, who was very much like this as well. The difference with Keeles is Keeles is physically much, much bigger. So I think it's probably harder for him to manage a race. Compared to how Alonso went about it, just because he is so much bigger, much harder to tuck in, more vulnerable in a slipstream in battle. So, yeah, he's, well, again, people will be getting fed up with us waxing lyrical about his Keeles, but I mean, he really is something special.

Yeah, he is. Either way, we had one to go and Uriate is leading over Munoz and Keeles. Then Keeles is leading at turn two. It's a fight for a second. And can Keeles slip away?

Then it became Keeles versus Munoz for the win. As Munoz just got killed. Sort of dispatched Uriate in that moment. And then basically it's looking like those two are going to decide the win. Then Munoz tries to go up the inside of Keeles at 14, the last turn doing a Rossi, if you will.

But Keeles just cuts right back underneath, like completely and totally had like eyes in the back of his helmet that he knew it was happening, read the situation and then defended against it properly and carried the momentum to take the win. And so Keeles. Wines up as your victor in this one over Carpe, who just beat Munoz by the smallest of margins. I think it was, we always talk about, well, yeah, that was like a tire with, well, I think that was like about a half of a tire with, it was very, very small in there. Then Uriate and then Almanza, Morelli, Danish, Pratama.

So the Southeast Asia contingent looking very good here in Europe, I thought for those two guys. And then Fernandez. Having falling back to ninth, a Gorman with a top 10, a great finish for him. Then O'Shea, Peroni, Crucis, Vertelli, and Yamanaka gets the last point out of it. A great strategic race by one, Mr.

Keeles. I really want to see this kid on a Moto2 bike. Just his physical stature is much bigger than a lot of the other Moto3 guys. He would fit a Moto2 bike really, really well. And he has race tactics just in spades.

Everyone is going to complain that we are going to wax lyrical about Max Keeles, but he. Is a talent. He is a generational talent for sure. In our defense, Jim, I would say that we were waxing lyrical for the couple of seasons, full seasons that Alonso was in Moto3. And we did always caveat it by saying, you know, these kids have been riding that type of a bike for quite some years by the time they arrive in the full championship like this.

Now it's interesting with Alonso from a Moto2 perspective that, you know, he's kind of still not quite there where we expect him to be, although he does still have the shoulder injury that's plaguing him. I think it's reasonable to point that out. But the fact that he, we believe, has an HRC contract and a big one at that, they're gambling a little bit because he hasn't kind of done that Acosta thing where Acosta adapted to Moto2 instantly as we thought that he would. And Alonso hasn't quite hit those marks yet. Now, that's not to say that he won't.

He's only got, what, well, still two thirds or more of a season to go in Moto2, let's say, roughly. But he's not looking as if he's a, what you'd call a favorite for the championship just at the moment, is he? Young David Alonso. So Kylos, I think, will make that adaptation more quickly because he has more physical stature to sort of bulk up to the Moto2 bike, whereas for these really tiny guys, and Alonso really is a tiny guy, that's obviously an additional challenge on top. So I can't see any scenario where Kylos isn't in Moto2 at least next year.

And, you know, this chatter about MotoGP hasn't quite gone away. Again, the TNT crew were talking about it a fair bit over the weekend. I don't know where he would go. But, I mean, it wouldn't be without. Precedent, as we know.

Right. He'd be the first one to do it since Miller. You're going to a bike that is going to be hypothetically slower. It's an 850. It's not going to be, folks.

I hate to tell you, they're going to be right near the same lap time. Just the corner speed is going to be faster because the grip is going to be fantastic from a set of Pirelli's that they're going to have. I fully believe that one. Let's talk about Alonso just real quick because I thought of this when you were talking about it. Honda has taken a punt on him, but Fabio Quatturaro was sort of the same way in Moto2.

True. Fabio Quatturaro did not set the world. The world on fire at all, but there was something magical that you could see that Fabio could do if the bike got semi-close. And he had that race at Barcelona, I think one more, where on that day, that bike was close enough that you could see Quatturaro was actually riding that bike way beyond the limits of what it was capable of. And he's a MotoGP world champion.

And a lot of people were like, I distinctly remember talking with Skyler about it. He's like, hey, who would you take to go to MotoGP? I'd take Quatturaro. He's like, what? No way, dude.

You're awesome. You're on drugs or something. I'm like, no, man, there's something about that kid. Maybe I got lucky. I picked one out of all the years I've done this.

I picked one right. So I have a very large sample size of being correct here, people. But the point is, I don't think it's unprecedented that somebody who's struggling in Moto2 doesn't get on a MotoGP bike and make it work. And Alonso's really only, what, 19 still? Oh, he's incredibly young, yeah.

So one, may or may not be done growing, but he's at least now then, if he is done growing, can work on developing his muscle mass and being able to wrestle the bike around. But anyway, we should discuss the points championship here in Moto. One person with their hand almost firmly grasping the championship is one Mr. Keelys, as he is on 140 points, some 64 points ahead of Adrian Fernandez in second. Then Carpe, Morelli, Pratama, Peroni, Almanza, Pini, Ariate, and Munoz is on 38 points.

And he's intense. And that puts him, this is a shocking number to me, 102 points down on Keelys. Just looking at my notes, Jim, there are a couple of things that I noted down. So when Keelys was interviewed in the Parc Fermé after the race, he did actually point out, and I'd forgotten about this, that he was having some gear selection troubles early in the race. So that also accounts for the fact that he dropped back at the beginning, having made that great start, as you said, and kind of lingered it around the 10th place mark for a good few laps.

And then kind of either the problem solved itself, or he kind of worked out how to run. And then started to move forward, as we saw. And the other thing is that it always makes me chuckle. We know that these riders, English is not, in the vast majority of cases, is not their first language, but they do always seem to manage to drop an F-bomb or an expletive of some sort during the interview. It just cracks me up, Al, when it goes back to the, you know, the hosts, whether you're watching TNT or the main sort of door on the field or whatever, they always feel compelled to apologise for the language.

And it's like, why? It's not that bad, is it? I mean, you just, you turn on the telly and watch your average film. TV series these days, and it's, you know, it's either hardcore violence or soft porn and all the language you can imagine. So quite why anybody's worried about the occasional swear word coming out of a rider's lips in adrenaline sort of filled part for me.

I mean, it just always cracks me up and think, why do you need to apologise about it? Surely it's not that big of a deal. Yeah, I agree. I've always found that to be real weird myself. Did you pick up on, it was absolutely hilarious, and Danny mentioned it.

So a couple of rounds ago, was it, I'm trying to think where they were, was it Assen? Maybe in World Superbikes, or in World Supersport, I should say. Valentin De Bees, I think it is, who'd won the race. And James Tozin says to him, because he's got a bit of a reputation for swearing. He's a French guy.

Very, very sort of animated, enigmatic kind of a rider. So Tozin says, you're on live on TNT Sports, please don't swear. So he conducts this interview, and Valentin is very well behaved. And Tozin wraps up the interview, and just as Tozin's walking off away, De Bees goes, oh, James, just one thing. And James Tozin comes back over with the microphone, and Valentin says, I didn't say, beep, on live TV.

It was an absolute comedy classic moment. We're going to be one of the funniest things of the season. Danny, I think it was Daniel Cobb, mentioned it when they did the review show. And it was so, so funny, because he obviously did that absolutely on purpose to embarrass James Tozin, and he did a great job. It was very, very funny.

That is good. That is good. Oh, anything else from Moto3 before we turn our attention to the bigger bikes of Moto2? Let's get to Moto2. It shouldn't take us too long, should it?

No, this one. It should be pretty quick. In the first qualifying session is Rueda, looking pretty good, because he was the fastest of the guys who didn't make it in. So he just missed out, which I thought was interesting, because I believe they said that Rueda underwent arm pump surgery. Oh, okay.

I hadn't heard that. I think they said that during the Sunday broadcast, not 100%, because it went by really fast, and I didn't back it up to try to recapture that moment. But I believe that might have been part of the problem, why he's had problems, is having arm pump. That's not good at all. Ortolo was there, Arbolino there, Valdis, Roberts, Huertas, and Alonso.

Again, shoulder injury from Alonso, so that makes why he's there. Basically, Lunetta, Ortolo, Rueda, and Alonso all got out of that first session. And yeah, he did come from arm pump surgery. It's here in my notes, saying that Rueda did have arm pump surgery. So that's something to think about.

Not unusual for guys that come up. No, definitely not. No, definitely not. In qualifying session, Holgardo had one of the most almost amazing saves that you could possibly have. I think it was in that turn 10.

It was like the bike was down, then totally turned, and then it flicked him up, and he was on top of it, and then sort of rode it and somehow got it all back together again and rode off, and you're just going, that was impressive. So it's like, okay, it was a save. That might be something like save of the year, perhaps, because Simon Patterson had this on threads, I think, early on in the weekend when everybody was crashing at turn, what is it, 12? And he was saying how all the bikes were making it all the way to the fence, and all the riders were making it all the way to that air fence. And when he said that, I just had this feeling of dread that kind of came over me.

It was as if Simon had foreshadowed what was going to go on this weekend with an early prediction about all these crashes and bikes all going to the wall. It's possibly worth just picking up on the fact, did you see Martin's crash on the Friday that he had there? Yes, he went very fast into the air fence, didn't he? Or am I on the wrong crash? Because Martin's had enough of them, so I...

Yeah, I think it was, I think it might have been the second crash of the day that he had. It was definitely in turn 12. Okay. Now, the camera didn't actually fully catch it. Just, you saw him lose the front, and then you saw the bike hit the air fence, and then you saw Martin going in as well, but you didn't see what Martin hit.

It looked as if he hit the bike. Oh, okay. I did not see that crash. Which is why he had a concussion, because he was kind of looking like a guy who'd just polished off 20 pints of Guinness when he was walking back through the gravel. I mean, he was all over the place.

So there was a lot of chatter on social media coming from the usual sources about the fact that Martin was out riding again. It might have been in the morning, actually, and then he was back out riding in the afternoon. I think actually that's what happened. And of course, that is the corner just a little further around where Louis Salon had exactly that same incident and was killed. What?

Five or six years ago, went in, hit the bike, which, and of course, the bike kind of tends to bounce out in some of these cases as well. And it did go to highlight with Barcelona, as well as Turn 2, where, again, there were a lot of bikes going down because of the cold left-hand side of the tyre. Bikes hitting the barrier, which didn't have an air fence, I don't think, and the bikes bouncing back out as the rider was arriving on the scene of the accident. So, again, questions remained about the suitability of Barcelona as a venue. And like you said, you might not have seen...

I don't know if you've seen this, but Alessio Spargo was on the grid on the Sunday, so I'm jumping around a little bit. Oh, that's fine. But just whilst it's in my mind, so TNT caught a quick interview with him, and he, although he was not allowed to give any details about the Honda 850 that he's been testing, but he basically said it's not going to be any slower. Right. I think we know that.

Despite the absence of some of the aero, despite the absence of ride height devices and stuff, I mean, that will obviously have a slight effect, but he said the Pirellis are much, much grippier. They are going to make up the lap time. So, it doesn't automatically make... The relevance of this point, me making it and belaboring the point, is that if we have trouble with corners this year, they are unlikely to be less troublesome next year. It will keep us focused on some of these corners, and there are some tracks, as we know, that they can't really do anything about these corners because there's nowhere to extend them to, or not easily anyway.

Yeah. To belabor your point, I remember Denis Noyes talking years ago, and I think it might have been... I may have this wrong, so please, everyone, cut me some slack or write me an email politely, and tell me that I'm wrong. I think it might have been the end of the 990 era, and he said that there was only one track on the calendar that was suitable for MotoGP bikes, and that was Qatar, because the first turn has something in the order of, again, I might be wrong, but like two acres of gravel? It's big.

Yeah, it's big. It's huge. It is this huge expanse of gravel to slow an almost 200 mile an hour MotoGP bike down as if it goes into that gravel. Given everything else that's happened this weekend, we'll come back to that point, because I have some thoughts about tracks and walls and everything else, but we'll do that then. Sorry, back to MotoGP.

No, this is why people listen. They want these kind of things that come up as we go through these types of things. Anyway, we go on to the second qualifying session. Vietti was basically just the man. Hello, Valentino Rossi shows up.

Oh, and Vietti shows up as a rider who is supposedly in talks to be on a MotoGP bike for Valentino. Maybe, but it was just weird because he can't make anything happen. But again, he was on the Bosca Cora bike, and the Bosca Cora doesn't seem to be as good, but it does seem as though the Bosca Cora always seems to work if the track is slick or does not have a lot of grip. Yeah. So it's sort of kind of made up for it, but basically, Vier gave it his absolute best shot at trying to dethrone Vietti off of pole position, and he had it for a little bit, but it was...

It was... It was... It was... It was... It was never good enough.

There were yellow flags that were in sector four when the checkers came out. Some people had some stuff taken away by track limits. Gonzalez did. He had a pole taken away because of track limits, but it finished out with Vietti on pole. Vier would be second, although Vier has a long lap to serve in the race.

Then Gonzalez got that third. Ortola, Lopez, Kanit, Slach, Holgardo down in eighth. Rueda ninth. That was the best qualifying we've seen out of Rueda. Since he's been in Moto2, and I think we all thought that was going to be where he was going to be because he was a bit of a stocky lad when he was winning his world title in Moto3.

We thought, yeah, this kid's going to adapt to a Moto2 bike really easily, but he's had the incident in Malaysia, and to come back and be able just to race again is fantastic, and then to have arm pump surgery now, apparently, hopefully, that appears to have been super successful. Linetta had a good qualifying because he was 10th. Then Guevara, Aegis with a bad qualifying session to be 12th. We've talked about how Aegis, if he wants to be considered a title contender, Aegis had to bounce back here. Not a good weekend for Aegis.

Then he was luckily ahead of Alonso, then Sasaki, Munoz, Anshu, Fernandez, and Screech. Okay, there's your grid, so we'll move to the race and quickly go through it. Again, Vier has the long lap penalty that he must take. Vier, Holgardo, and Alonso all went with a soft front, but everybody else went with a, I'll call it a medium front. Pirelli, and then they had sort of the, everybody went with the SC1 tire, which I think is like the medium soft tire.

It's not as soft as the S0, so everybody was taking that tire to go for the distance. This one is pretty simple. Vietti basically just gets the whole shot. They have Gonzalez, Artola, Lopez, Guevara, and Kanett, and Vier just fell off the 16th. It was as if the bike wasn't working properly in some way or form.

Guevara went from 11th to 4th on the long run. Down to the first turn. But by lap four, Vietti was pulling away. Alonso got by Lopez, but Vietti was gone. The battle then comes down to, well, hey, who's going to be in the next group?

And there is a pretty good fight that happens between Aegis and Pire as they're going back and forth, and it's a really good fight with those guys there in that 6, 7, 8, 9. They had a great fight back and forth, but basically, Holgardo winds up losing pace in all of this. And Roberts retires off of his bike. Then Lopez got ahead of Aegis. Vier then crashed out at turn 8 with 5 to go.

But towards the end, this is where things get interesting, is that with 5 to go, Vietti suddenly was being caught by Gonzalez. And you're like, wow, this guy had been gone the whole weekend. He was untouchable. What's going on here? It was all grip.

You could see there was no rear grip left in Vietti's bike whatsoever. So Gonzalez actually runs him down. With only a couple laps to go, he actually got by Vietti with two laps to go, and he wins the race over Vietti. Guevara tried, but couldn't get there in time. Then Ortola, Holgardo, Alonso, Salach, Lopez, Lunetta, Aegis, Munoz, Rueda, Baltus, Kennett, and Sasaki.

That's how it all turns out. From the beginning until the last five laps, that race is a snooze fest, Rich. It was time to go get breakfast or whatever and be ready for the MotoGP race for me. But it's good. It's good to see Gonzalez actually sort of, I'll call it bounce back or get back to winning ways.

He's definitely taking his attack of this championship in a much different direction because he's learning that consistency wins and you don't have to be fast all the time. You take what you can get, and if somebody gives you the opportunity, then pounce, which is kind of what he's done. It's really weird with him because, I mean, he was leading the championship going into this round, and obviously he's extended his lead, but he's just not a guy that we're talking about very much. I mean, I've been quite critical. Well, maybe not critical of him, but just pointing out that for various reasons, he's just not the guy that anybody's talking about, which is very unfair, really, when you consider what a consistent season he's had.

And you could certainly see what it meant to him on the slowdown lap. And once he, again, arrived in part firmer, because he appeared to be in quite a lot of emotional turmoil over having won the race in a positive sense, I mean, but obviously a lot of emotions came out as a result of that. And I would imagine it's just a lot of frustration coming out because, of course, he lost the championship last year for reasons. That were not all of his doing. We know he had the issue with the hold radiator in Austria.

He was excluded from a race for a technical infringement somewhere else, which I can't recall where. But so he lost a lot of points, which were not really his fault. Marrera got the call up to MotoGP. He missed out, and he's just not in the conversation again this year, despite the fact that he's winning races and leading the championship. And so it does feel a bit unjust, I suppose.

And he's clearly showing it and feeling that pressure and that frustration. Hence his reaction on Sunday. But it was a great ride, wasn't it? I mean, again, I don't know if it's obviously, as you've pointed out, Jim, Vietti was on the Bosch Iscura, González was on the, what was it, the Kallax frame. So basically they are different packages.

González just kept his rear tyre alive, and a lot of other people were having major problems with the fronts as well. I mean, Agius by the end could hardly get the front to turn because he had serious banding on the front tyre. So and we know Barcelona is a high abrasion track. That's kind of what makes it famous and a bit tricky. So González just managed it really, really, really well.

And as you say, Vietti looked as if he was going to walk off into the distance with this one and then suddenly had no grip with five to go and was just easy prey in the end. So but other than that, nothing really happened. No, nothing does happen. To me, it's interesting how fast things can change. It's like, yeah, Vietti's gone.

Okay, well, you don't turn the TV off. There may not be much action going on there, but they went to action that was in the back of the pack. But then when they realised the grip was gone, everybody went back to the front and hey, you know what? When you realised how bad Vietti's grip was, and you saw what González did, you knew this was over. And so you knew what the outcome was going to be.

The question was really whether Guevara was going to be able to sneak a second off of Vietti. But it didn't work. As you said, Rich, González has increased his points lead. He is now 18 and a half points ahead of Guevara, Vietti, again, we're not talking about it, but he's third in the World Championship on 73 points. Now that is 31 and a half points behind.

He's the guy leading the championship. But it is unfair that González isn't being talked about as a champion. It seems as though the Wunderkind are all being talked about. People want to talk about Guevara and they want to talk about Aegis and Alonso and Ortola and Horgardo. Those are the people everybody wants to talk about.

And poor González just sort of stuck there and hey, I'm here. Look at me. I'm leading a championship. Hey, somebody. Hey, I would like a MotoGP ride.

Yeah. I'm saying that his passport's against him, but I mean, there's plenty of the other people in the conversation that are Spanish that are likely to go up. Oh, good grief. I just think that González is perhaps a bit too old and I'm pretty sure there's a bit of sniffiness around his past in the sense that he came up through World Supersport as well. I think there's still that sort of sniffy, snobby attitude in the MotoGP paddock about people that come that route.

Yeah. MotoGP is the aristocracy. And hopefully I got this right, Rich. World Superbike is sort of like the bourgeoisie, right? No, the bourgeoisie, that's wrong.

Well, certainly the lower class. The middle class, let's call it, not the upper class. Let's put it in those sorts of terms. And I think that still is a sort of a pervasive kind of attitude that exists there, whether we like to think of it being there or not. Yeah.

For various different reasons, I think González is just going to get the dirty end of the stick on this one again. Yeah. I think he'll be world champion and won't have a ride anywhere. Yeah. I'm fearing that.

I mean, in the MotoGP paddock. I think he's going to win this championship and people are going to be like, where are you going to go? Yeah. Well, at that point, I would imagine that perhaps World Superbikes would be a place for him to go, that he might want to go and to escape to. Yes.

And they would welcome him. With open arms. Welcome him back with open arms. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Because obviously he had a successful career there before he made the switch. And fair play to him. There are not that many people that make the switch across from World Supersport to Moto2 and make a go of it. And he's done exceptionally well on those terms, but it's just taken too much time. Yeah.

There's a constant tidal wave of much younger talent coming through and it's clearly the factors are going to be going in that direction. And that talent has come up through a Red Bull Rookies Cup that Spanish dominated and you didn't. Through the junior GPs. Yeah. That whole kind of talent progression formula that exists to come into MotoGP.

I hate that passport thing because if you look at the Moto2 championship, seven of the top 10 riders are all Spanish. Then there's one Italian. One Australian. And one Colombian. Yeah.

I really just don't get that point. I do understand there's something to having more than one of a nationality rider in a class. Especially the premier class. Because the US went from one race at Laguna to two races, Laguna Indy, then Laguna Indy Kota. They were three tracks.

But at the time you had Hayden, you had Colin Edwards and... Spees. Spees were all there. So there is something to be said about the passport, but if anything, he's holding the correct passport in all honesty. But he is just not the person that is loved.

And that's sad because I think he's talented. But yeah, he just is being overlooked for some weird reason. I'll tell you a switch I would love to see happen next year, Jim. Okay. This is pure wisdom from me.

And this will go down well. Wisdom, okay. I'll just make that word up. It kind of works. I think in terms of the American racing team, Salah actually is doing pretty well.

But Jordan is doing pretty well. Yeah. He's doing pretty well. But Joe's just not having a good year again. I agree.

I know you had some sort of a technical problem that caused him to retire to the pits in Barcelona, but I'd really love to see Kayla Jakob, is it? Yes. Get a shot in the American racing team in Moto2. She's young, she's fast. She's in that kind of mid-weight category over in Moto America, isn't she?

Yes. Did exceptionally well at Daytona. If you want a story to promote, and it's not about her being a female, although it is partly about that. Because you've got Anna Carrasco, I think is running in Moto2 this year, I think. Or is she in World Supersport?

World Supersport. I think she's in World Supersport, actually. So I mean, we could do with a bit of variety there as well. But fundamentally, Kayla is extremely quick. She's American, and there is an American racing team.

And one of the riders in that team is not really kind of performing very well for whatever the reason might be. And I'm not making judgments about that. It's just you can see it in the results sheet. So it'd be great if we could see somebody like Kayla come across and see what she can do. Because the bike is good.

I mean, so much has proven that the package is good. And Joe's had some great rides in the past. But they are becoming, obviously, fewer and fewer and farther between. So I think that would be a change that I think would be very positive. I don't know what you think of what the American listeners in particular think.

I am highly supportive of that. I think that is a great, great idea. Because where is the next American talent? We have Joe, and he's sort of the lone American that is in the series. There's not an American in the top class.

And that's okay. You don't have to. You can still be a fan. Just as there's not a British rider at the top. And you're still a fan.

So that works. But again, you are so right. If you want a story, if you want to promote something, why not make it so? And nudge, nudge, put Kayla on that bike and have a story. Hey, here's this grassroots racer from the US who's made it to the world stage, who is now in MotoGP.

Hey, guys, look. And that's back. The fact that she's an American. She's also a woman and she's mixing it up with the boys and she's doing great at it. How many little girls who maybe because my daughter did this with me when she was brilliant.

She would sit with me and watch racing and wouldn't it have been wild to actually have her see someone like Kayla racing and she may have said, Well, Dad, can we go see her? Because my daughter was really she actually has her book. There was a motocrosser in America. And I can't remember. I can't remember her name.

And I apologize. I know everybody was going to yell it at their podcast device, but she was deaf and she was like on like the late show with like not Johnny Carson, but I've been with Leno or something. And so her dad would sign for her everywhere, but she never gave up. She raced motocross that way and she won a couple of women's amateur championships and whatnot. It's a great story.

It was a story of overcoming her thing wasn't I'm not handicapped because I'm a woman handicapped because I'm deaf, so I can't change my line. I got to commit to a line because I can't hear if somebody's going to come up the inside or whatnot. But the idea of that, that's a story. That's a great story. That's a great marketing tool.

Again, Kayla is the perfect person to put into that team and to make a story out of it, a subset story. What I think is missing, sorry to be ranting here, but what's missing is there's not a personal connection that you have to any of these riders. And I realize Liberty is trying to make them do more public appearances, but it's not that. It's where is the back bio story on Mark and his brother and how they grew up and all that. The show that the brothers did was great, but why can't you do a little three minute or a four minute little series every week about one of the guys that's racing MotoGP.

So you get to know more about that person. Wouldn't you love to know something about Aya Gura that you don't know? You know, he came from Japan, you know, he might've been a Japanese formula champion or, you know, Hey, he was part of a Asian team talent cup or whatever it is. I'd love to know. Why not?

You have some of that. Why isn't there just a five minute sit down that you could put on social media where you ask five rapid fire questions. What was your first motorcycle? When was the first race that you had? What places did you finish in your first race?

What's the greatest race you've actually rode? From all of these guys. I think that's cool, interesting little factoids that are quick, catchy, that people are going to latch onto that's going to drive people to like, wow, this person has a personality or this person was that too. Or, Hey, you were, I'm making this up, but you were a high school track champion when you were 16. Yeah.

And now you're a professional racer on the world level. Yeah. That's a weird story. It's, it's just fun. Yeah.

My point about raising Kayla is not, let's say it's not specifically because she's a female. No, it's because she's good. It's because she's fast and she can certainly mix it with the guys that she's racing against stateside and it would be interesting for everybody to see how she would manage in the world championship. I'm sure she would love to have that opportunity herself. It's not about creating a scenario where people are sort of staring at her cause she's got, cause I hate all this diversity crap, but you know, I'm not interested in that.

She's fast. Therefore she deserves a place, I think. And let's be honest, Joe's a lovely guy. He really is a lovely guy. I interviewed him in Qatar a few years back and he's a super guy, but you know, he's probably his best years in Moto2, I think are probably behind him now.

And therefore it seems a bit of a shame that that seat is going begging when there are other people who could create a lot of interest and a lot of column inches or social media reels, sort of centimeters, whatever you want to phrase it, which would certainly help Liberty and will definitely help Liberty in promoting sport in America. Cause I think there are some countries and I would include England in this or Great Britain, UK, where the absence of a home rider is a problem in terms of drawing a crowd to the event. We know that America generally, I don't want to be sort of, sort of stereotypical, but I always think of Americans being very patriotic people. And therefore, if you have a rider to cheer on. I think that's going to help in other countries.

It's not so much of an issue perhaps, but I think in some countries it certainly would help. And if Liberty want to break America and we know that they do, albeit we don't want them to go to Miami and places like that, but we'll come to that again in a little while. I expect that they are going to need some genuine front-running American talent to shout about. I believe. I've labelled on with that one too long.

Yeah. No, it's the good stuff. Right. All right. Let's just get the MotoGP here real quick.

So let's set the deal. Qualifying in one. It was Bastianini, Bagnaia, Iagura, Martin, Adegar and Vinales were in that one. Vinales is back racing again, but basically halfway through Bastianini, it was Morbidelli. Those were the two guys that we're going to get through.

Then you had Martin was down, Morbidelli went to the top, but was it a legal lap? And then they looked at it. He goes, nope, there's a millimeter off. And so that got canceled. So falling off actually helped Jorge Martin because he was able to get through his time stood.

And so he goes to the second qualifying. Second qualifying session, Acosta gets out there, just throws down a 138.1 right off the bat. Just boom. All right. I'm the man now.

This is my weekend. My home turf. This is going to happen. Bez would fall off at turn two. So the Aprilias were just crashing everywhere.

Honestly, if you had an Aprilia, you were just going to crash. It just seemed like that was the thing. We've been through that. So we'll continue onward. But when Bez went down, he had a big barrel roll.

He just kept that tumbling going. It's really big. It came down to the fact that Acosta. And then Morbidelli, who just pulled a lap out. Again, Valentino shows up and, you know, hey, we got a seat left.

It's going to be an Italian. It's going to be either Morbidelli or it's going to be Vietti or it's going to be Buliga or it's going to be who is the fourth one? I should have wrote it down. Who did you say it could be? Vietti?

I said Vietti, Morbidelli, Buliga, and then I think it might have been Digia. But Digia seems to be going elsewhere. He's going KTM. Yeah. Anyway, it's just interesting that he pulls that one out to be there.

Now Alex was in third, so that's your front row. Then Fernandez, Zarco, and Digia get your second row. The third row is Quattroraro, which on this long straight at Barcelona, I was surprised that he did that well. He was directly in the key one. I think the handling of that bike is coming along to where he can push it.

They just need to find some top end power, which how much are they going to spend really working on that thousand when they've got an 850 they got to deal with? Well, they've got an engine upgrade coming. I'm tempted to say at Misano, I think, but they do have a new engine coming, which will deliver a bit more power. Right. We would hope so.

So after Quattroraro, Bender, then Martine would start ninth, Mir, Miller, and Bizzacchi. That's everybody there for the first four rows. So we go to the sprint. Sprint starts, Acosta gets out front, followed by Alex, followed by Zarco, followed by Morbidelli, and Fernandez. Now Digia eclipsed Bender at the beginning of this.

And causes Bender to go down at turn one. I didn't notice that at first. It took replays well into the sprint to show us that Digia did just kind of get it just slightly wrong. It did hit Bender. Bender loses it, goes down, and bumps into everybody else and sort of car-walls into that first turn.

Hang on, Jim. Who's the one inevitable person that got caught up in that accident through no fault of his own whatsoever? That would be one Mr. Wanmir. Yeah.

Of course. So, you know, it's like, oh man, this is just terrible that all of these guys are actually down. Digia digs in and gets going. Digia, it's Martín, Fernandez. There's a great battle there because, you know, Digia has that little mistake.

So that puts him back in the pack. So there's this great battle between Digia, Martín, and Fernandez. They are going back and forth at it or whatever. Alex then tries to get Acosta at one. Acosta then goes back in front.

They sort of trade places as they go through turns one, turn two. It's actually a pretty good race. But what's looking like is that the tires are starting to go on Acosta, right? He doesn't really have the grip. He can't really hang on to this.

You think, okay, Alex is going to get bought to which Alex finally does make that move and pulls it off. Where was it that he actually passed him? He tried to get at one and he couldn't get there. And then they had the crash for Martín. He was down at turn 10.

So there's his fourth crash of the weekend by the time we get to the sprint. But Acosta is then finally passed by Alex. I don't have where he actually passed him. Turn one. Did he do it on the brakes in turn one?

Okay. I thought he did it like at three in a weird place. But the thing was. He was getting the drive off the corner and the top speed of the KTM was enough to hold off the Ducati. But then as soon as Alex got by, he got zapped with a track limits warning.

He's like, Ooh, this is going to wind up being interesting here. But did you winds up sliding his way into fourth? He got by Zarco Acosta is then passed by Fernandez. So it's like, oh, it's Alex. It's Fernandez.

That Aprilia looks to be the only one that seems to be good though this weekend doesn't fall off. Then it's Acosta. There's a little bit of a law and this is a four rider battle as did you then join the front guys? So it's like, oh, wow. We've got four to go here and Acosta is on Fernandez's rear wheel.

Like Acosta's tire has either cooled or he's managed it a little bit better there and there to get to where he's now looking good again. Then Acosta got by Fernandez at 10. Can Acosta then go get Alex with three to go? It's really getting close. Did you gets by Fernandez at turn one Fernandez is sort of losing grip.

He's not there, but Acosta is now all over Alex on like the last lap. And it's like, Ooh, this is getting to be interesting. And he actually tries really hard through the last couple of turns, but Alex played it smart. He sort of parked the bike at the apex of 14. Just ever so slightly.

And if you watch Acosta wasn't really ready for it and it caused him to sort of sit the bike up just a little bit, which ruined his drive to it. But Alex wins over Acosta by what was it like four thousandths of a second or something? Yeah, very little. It was the closest finish in sprint history. And then did you.

He claimed third. We didn't get to see it, but he got third off of Fernandez, then Zarco and Ben Yaya came home with a sixth. Then seventh was Morbidelli. Ayagura was eighth. And again, Ayagura had pace late.

So that sort of was like, Ooh, that'll bode well for the MotoGP race tomorrow. And Bez wound up in ninth with that. It was actually a pretty decent sprint because there was Alex and Acosta are trying and you do have, did you trying to come to the front after his little mishap and there was some good battling there. And then, you know, there was a really good. Yeah.

It was a really good last lap, but we've come to see that stuff sort of before, but a post Mark Marquez not being there and Aprilia is not being at the front. You've got a pretty good race. Yeah. Surprisingly. And into turn one, as we would find on Sunday as well, Pedro is just awesome.

Demon. On the brakes. Oh, demon there. So let's go to Sunday's happenings. Okay.

So we'll just try to quickly set this and then we will discuss everything in detail. So again, Pedro gets out in front. It's sort of a replay. It's a little sprint. He's there with Fernandez and Alex and Zarco.

He basically is trying his best. Now Martine gets by for third in this one. Alex then gets by Zarco Fernandez got by Acosta. So Acosta is sort of kind of going backwards a little bit, but then he sort of battles back to it. And so we're getting towards the 12th lap.

You've got Acosta is leading. Alex is right behind him. Digia. Then Fernandez. We're on lap 12.

We're heading out of nine and we're heading to 10. And then this is where things go haywire. Now before this, let me add one small detail. Bastionini's KTM was broke and sitting at turn one. So and yeah.

Okay. Yes. And then, and vendors bike failed with some problem approaching the grid to which he had something that was wrong. He then basically wrote it through the wall and then it stopped or whatever. And then they.

He, he started from pit lane. Yeah. But with that said, we get out of nine Acosta bike fails him. Alex has nowhere to go clips Acosta as a cost has got his hand up trying to warn everybody that basically ripped the bike apart. And as Alex said, something was wrong with the bike right then.

Cause as soon as I hit the grass, I couldn't even turn it. He bails off basically where that bridge is in the grass. He tumbles the bike starts flipping at that point. The camera kind of zooms out in the feed. I've got the tree of the riders on the left-hand side.

I thought Alex and his head smashed into that concrete wall with what I feared was an unalive moment for a second. Now debris of Alex's bike is just going absolutely everywhere. There's a wheel. The front wheel by itself is bouncing along. We see Raul Fernandez get hit by his, I think on his right elbow.

There. Digia is the unluckiest of them all as the front tire bounces down. The track smacks into the side of his bike and causes him to crash. Thus hurting his right hand at his right. That's correct.

Isn't it rich? His right hand. I think it was whether it was the crash or debris that hit his hand. I'm not entirely sure because everything happened so quickly and then they weren't showing too much replay for obvious reasons, a little hard to unpick that all of that carnage. Yes.

Yeah. Cause it was like an air crash kind of scenario at this point. Essentially carnage has happened. We have a motionless Alex on the side of the track. We have problems with Fernandez problems with Digia.

And as a result of the impact, Acosta's bike has a flat tire and it's off the rim. Now props to Jack Miller and top rack. They pushed Acosta back into the pits. But the problem here is this massive crash. I get that.

It's on a straight. I don't really expect accidents to happen on a straight, but one of the things about this that bugs me is the fact that you know, that coming out of that right-handed turn of nine and heading to the left, you're going to want to run down that straight in a diagonal. You're not going to stay on the one side yet. You put a bridge abutment that juts into and makes that distance to the track much shorter. And that is exactly where that accident happens.

Now that's a freak thing for it to happen. Yeah. I will say this is the first time that we get a miracle because as it turns out, Alex only has a broken collarbone to which later that evening he was operated on for, and they plated it. And he has a cracked vertebrae in his neck. I'm not sure what number one it is.

C seven. Oh, C seven. Okay. And to me, that is the most amazing outcome that possibly could have happened out of this insane carnage. Cause Alex's motorcycle didn't even look like a motorcycle.

It just looked like a pile of junk. Well, it was a pile of junk. True. But it's like an airplane crashes. You always can identify something that looks like an airplane.

Oh, it is a jet engine. There is a seats or there's some bit of a wing or something. It's like, there's like nothing that resembles a motorcycle sitting there, except maybe the chain would have tipped you off that it was a motorcycle per se. It was absolutely horrifying. It was scary.

It was nauseating. I became sick because I had this whole, either Wayne Rainey paralyzed in the gravel trap Mazzano thing, or it was a flashback of some paying in a death with Cimicelli. Yeah. What are your thoughts on all of those stretches? It happens.

Well, I think people might've expected us to be kind of really ranting about the weekend. Cause there were a lot of crashes over the weekend, particularly in MotoGP. I mean, bearing in mind. Yeah. Bearing in mind what we'll go on to talk about, I think at this point, we're just happy that everybody escaped the weekend alive or not unalive to use your phrase.

Yes. Cause it could have been, you were talking kind of millimeters from a different outcome with some of this, particularly with Alex Marquez's crash. Now I think it's, it has to be said, and in fairness to Barcelona track, despite the fact that we're highlighting some serious issues with that track, which have been known about for years and are not getting addressed. And this is again, I suppose, plays into this issue around how much power. Or solidarity to the riders actually have when it comes to forcing issues around safety.

But anyway, it must be said that this particular incident could happen at any track is when a bike cuts out as the cost has did in fair play to Costa. He put his hand up immediately, but the closing speed was such that as his hand went up, I mean, Alex did take avoiding action amazingly. It's a split second thing. And he, as you said, Jimmy kind of clipped him on the side. It was enough of an impact to smash the sort of the rear tire into deflation.

And you can see that Alex at that sort of, what was he doing now? 150, 150. 160 miles an hour, I suppose, with a bike that's now damaged with arrow on it. That's kind of pulling and doing goodness knows what he's kind of trying to keep that bike away from the wall. Then hits that gap in the grass.

Some people were saying it's gravel. I don't believe it's gravel. I think it's like you said, concrete. There's grass. And then there is a smidge of gravel, right?

Okay. It wasn't very easy to see from the photos, but that causes the bike to start its inevitable March towards disintegration. And by the grace of whatever. Alex gets thrown off. And doesn't hit the wall head on because I mean, had he done that, we'd be having a different discussion right now.

And he sort of grazes the wall as he tumbles sort of rag doll like down that piece of grass and was knocked out fairly quickly. So or instantly, I suppose. So that kind of always makes what the riders do and look worse because they're just kind of legs and arms are going all over the place and he lost his visor in the crash as well. So it kind of looked terrible and it was terrible, but it could have been massively worse and he was kind of lucky. That he didn't go over the wall or fully into the wall.

I mean, a cameraman hanging over the wall as well. I mean, thank goodness. The bike went in the direction that the bike went in terms of as it started to barrel roll and disintegrate. Cause if that had gone over the wall, then you would have had cameraman and other sort of support stuff. I don't think there's any spectators in that area, but there were quite a few people doing their jobs there and they would have been in the foreign line.

So that was a lucky escape. And then of course you've got the bike tearing itself to pieces. Some of the still photos, if you look at them, there's wires and tubes and fluid going over. There's these bloody ride height devices with all different lines and stuff, just tearing themselves to pieces. And the front wheel that hit Didger's bike still had the forks attached in various states of undress as well.

So had that hit somebody, again, you'd have been talking about multiple casualties at that point or multiple serious casualties. So it was just one of these kind of miraculous escapes really, as bad as it was for Alex. But I'm not underplaying the fact that he's got a fractured C7 vertebrae in his neck or collarbone, which is one that they sort of. Generally break regularly, but I mean, those are minor injuries when you consider the severity of that accident. Fernandez got clouted in the chest as well, I think by flying debris, but did you was the one that sort of came off the worst, I think in all of this, because he had clearly had a very serious hand problem, which will lead onto the one of the later miracles.

So that's kind of my view of it. It's not a track thing. It's just a bike breaking in front of another bike at those speeds. And you can't really do anything about that. We also can't forget that Zarco.

Had debris that hit his left foot because he had his boot off in the pits and he was icing that before the race would restart. Now here is where I am going to rant a little bit about this one, rich oddly, it's about the websites that ran the picture of Alex laying there motionless on the grassy part there between the track and the wall. It was obviously a click bait situation and you people are a bunch of pieces of crap who do that. That was not necessary. Okay.

I am fine that you put maybe perhaps that picture in the article, but not the picture. That's the link to get to that article. There was so much of that. And then of course the social media people just glam on to this. And then that photo just goes around where this is going on.

And at that time it, I realized that time had passed and that you knew that Alex was con at least conscious. But still, I think there's a line. Okay. It is. It is.

It is. You know what? It is a beautiful picture. It's a picture of Alex. And, you know, it was in the picture is a picture of a great guy.

And he's yelling, whatever, but there's no reason to say that it's not the picture that was in the picture. I'm just, I'm just. I can't even express how much more my emotion was at the time when I saw that. And I realized that there was nothing to be said about it. And it was just so, just, so petites.

No, no, no. Again, I don't have a problem with that picture if it's buried inside of the article that I'm going to read about him. Cause it could have been, he was knocked out, then the photo appears and he will quickly regained his consciousness. is being tossed around all the time in social media because occasionally you'll see this pop up again you'll see simicelli's wreck again from the live footage that okay it's live footage that happened during a race and they happen to be covering that corner and that camera was on that's the luck of the game i think we all understand that yeah but the problem was is that it just gets repeated over and over again do you think simicelli's family wants to see that pop up on social media all the time i don't think so do you think alex's family wants that to pop up there what about mark mark wasn't there he couldn't know what was going on to his brother he probably witnessed the same thing that we had and you want to pull this stuff i just think it's petty i think it's clickbait i think it's terrible i think it's just i don't know what i don't have any other words to describe it distasteful it was just i thought it was the poorest of taste i'm confident jim whilst endorsing everything you've just said i'm confident that none of the people that listen to this show are the sort of people that put that sort of content on social no i don't think they did say i'm not suggesting that anyone does no i know you're not but i'm just making the point that the people that kind of go down that clickbait stuff and half of it's probably ai generated anyway nowadays probably in a sort of a nefarious troublemaking way some of it as well none of the people that are true fans of the sport have any interest in that kind of stuff now the mainstream media started to post some of the pictures because they were already out there they're putting context on it to say look this stuff's out there because somebody made a very good point that because somebody was having a go at say golden goose who are the one of the famous photographer companies who have people okay trackside saying well why are they taking these photos and people say well that's their job they see something in front of them and they take multiple photos of it because that is what they're there to do and they do that all race long no matter what's going on and a lot of these photos now just immediately get posted to the cloud so if you have a way to access those things you can get a hold of some of these images you know without permission so i mean this is why stuff like this starts to appear i think and you can't blame the photographers in most cases the photographers would not release those images to the general public until it was known that say alex was actually out of danger and was going to be fine and etc etc so i don't know how this stuff actually gets out some of the time but it's not as simple as a photographer suddenly hawking the photos five minutes after the event that's not what happens at all they would be immediately barred from any sort of accreditation to attend these events if they did that sort of thing yes so and as i say none of the people that listen to this show are interested in seeing pictures of stricken riders i'm sure yep so as it turns out here you basically have a bunch of people that are really into racing and you've got a bunch of people that are passionate about something that is completely different and they have very limited knowledge about racing and things like that and so i think that's such an important topic but let me give you some brief history one thing i wanted to do here that's i just want to start with something that i really really really wanted to talk about and that's the car my car is about to be sold so i will give you a short story about where the car is located and where the car is owned this is the car that's in the car park that you're thinking about now and the car is the material that's in the car and the car is in the front of the car so it's a car that's at the back of a car and it's an walls on a motorcycle this is why you can't this is a purposefully designed racetrack that was built at the time in 92 sufficient runoff areas for the speed of the vehicles at the time and now we've outgrown this racetrack in a safety form because the walls are too close because the bikes and stuff are too fast you cannot go to street courses you shouldn't even be thinking about an idea about going to miami and running around in the parking lot there and then casually slide in the line but we realized we'd have to modify the track in some way to obtain safety oh no no every so often jim i'm not gonna say you need a crash like that but a crash which doesn't resolve in people losing their lives is helpful in reminding people that are making these sorts of crazy plans just how destructive and catastrophic those sorts of crashes which are extremely difficult to prevent exactly but when they happen you know if that had happened you know if that had happened you know if that had happened you know if that had happened you know if that had happened you know if that had happened you know if that had happened on a street circuit it would have been worse because you'd have had walls that rebound stuff inwards or worst case stuff goes over catch fencing and stuff into areas where spectators might be and then you're into a whole different ballpark of trouble again so and the other point i think which is worth mentioning here whilst moto gp because it was a great race up until this point wasn't it it was actually a very entertaining very entertaining very good race very feisty i mean zarko martin fernandez they were kind of going seven bells at each other at points and i think alex marquez as well was getting knocked about a little bit and it was you know it was entertaining but it was just kind of this freak thing of the bike cutting out in the way that it did and there's nothing you can do to ever prevent that from happening again but you don't want to make that sort of a situation worse by having walls in close proximity and potentially more people in close proximity as well and sorry the point i was going to make was this is one area where modern moto gp being so close is a problem because you have lots of bikes in close proximity because bear in mind this was not a lap one incident this was on lap 12 yes there was a still plenty of bikes close enough that they got caught up in this unfolding incident and so whilst it's good that motor gp is close and the machinery is all very sort of inverted commas relatively equal to create this sort of pack racing that comes with a risk and we saw it on sunday with riders getting peppered by bits of bike and stuff so yeah that is a problem yeah i easily larger pieces of carbon fiber could have easily got underneath the rider's neck or something like that yeah you've been saying that for years yeah right i realize that aerodynamics have been reduced but there's still going to be a wing of some form on the bikes i'm anti that just because there's potential to get underneath the rider's neck and i don't mean just break his neck i mean you could cut a jugular are you going to be able to stop the bike in time find someone to try to stay the bleeding or is that person going to bleed out it's a scary thought again this is that we don't need to go to street circuits they need to go to start even the circuits that we've outgrown we need to really think about going someplace else to other tracks or other places and we need to go to places where it's got better safety and i'm starting to doubt the validity of like coda you know mark went over 10 slid and went to the gravel that used to be gravel right to the edge of the track they paved it because the formula one cars want pavement there so that their precious little wings and cars can ride off and not hurt the car and bring it back in because the show is better if all the cars are running this is not a show i'm sorry this type of a crash in moto gp is not a show it is not anything it was a freak accident that we were lucky that we got away with everybody being okay yeah the horror scenario jim if you think about a street track is if a bike veers off to the side and hits a wall and then the bike comes back into the track is when you have another bike then hits that bike and then you're talking about going skywards and those are where things get like seriously bad you remember a coach a few years ago and the costa actually hit was it mean yeah his bike or somebody else i can't remember and i mean he was launched for probably 120 feet oh yeah i remember watching a costa sail through the air i'm like oh my god what happened yeah so that's the horror scenario of bikes deflecting back into a live track that's the purpose of runoff isn't it is to get the bike and the rider away from the track and from the other bikes and riders and give the rider in my opinion a moment or two to assess what's going on okay i need to let go of this in a more controlled fashion and roll myself into the gravel trap the human mind can't do that so i'm going to give the rider a moment or two to assess what's going on okay i need to let go of this in a more controlled fashion and roll myself into the gravel trap the human mind can't do that so i'm going to give the rider a moment or two to assess because suddenly wham we are in a air fence or whatever to which the question then is is like i surely they'll probably have like some sort of air fence or something on that area of the track next year just to guard against this potential happening again but now i'm really getting to think like with all these bikes going to the air fence first the air fence deflates now here comes a rider with no air fence our air fence is the really the smart thing to have around these riders i'm not so sure anymore i i don't know how to solve that issue what i am wondering because i'm putting it out there there's a mandate in the rider's suits that the airbag must be able to deploy collapse and redeploy one more time so they have two shots if you will can we make an airbag that way so hey the bike has gone into it does it automatically try to redeploy itself to then if the rider was coming after that i don't know could you put some sort of a foam there as opposed to an airbag that would sort of absorb more as opposed to take the energy away i think what i'm trying to figure out is how do you take the energy created by the mass of that motorcycle moving at the speed that it was as it's going through the gravel and it goes to the point where there's a stationary object how do you decelerate that mass to keep it so it stays inside the track so that that thing doesn't flip out into the grandstand and hurt someone i mean i've been i have seen motorcycles leave the chat i've watched them flip and go out remember acosta's bike at balaton park last year yeah cameraman up on a tower yeah see that's another track that rises we're not happy about most cheapy going there and yet and still happened and i'll be back there again keeps going yeah we need to sort of continue but sorry well just i mean we do need to move on obviously but because there's more to talk about but on the airbag thing is i think it was again it was simon p on the race pointed out they are really a sticking plaster to a problem that's more fundamental which is that the thing that the airbag is protecting which is normally a wall of some description is too close sure you know and the bikes are going so fast that they're reaching that thing and airbags it's still the whole kind of for every action there's a equal and opposite reaction and the bike is still going to want to come out as is the rider potentially and we've seen that situations where a bike goes in first lifts the airbag up and then the rider hits a wall although they are tethered now but it's problematical all of this stuff and not easily solved but definitely made multiple times worse by going to street circuits correct if anybody is seriously considering that and i'm still struggling to think that anybody seriously thinks they could get away with doing it at that point i think the riders would have to go on strike and say look we're not going it's as simple as that 100 i completely agree with you okay so so we're gonna restart well yeah we're getting ready to go back to a restart now what's interesting is there is a query of ktm and say hey you guys got something wrong with these bikes because we have the bender problem we have the bastionini problem and now we have an acosta problem they were all different issues the random of chance that on that one is astronaut well but it's like wow it's obviously not for us to comment is it but it was obviously the case that danny aldridge who's one of the uh two guys he's technical delegate yeah he was down there having a close chat and probably a close look at some data to satisfy himself that this shouldn't happen again in the restart but it seemed very odd that three bikes stopped in that way but we obviously take it as read that we've been told the truth there that they were similar but unrelated problems yep so this is the one that i've been talking about for a long time and i've been struggling with acosta's bike was obviously far too damaged for him to be able to take the restart but he's allowed to use his other bike yeah no i was having the same thought i was watching it back earlier on and i'm thinking how is that allowed in the rules i mean obviously it is right i don't know the rules inside out obviously but yeah it seems a bit like wait a minute hold on you're in a crash that bike's destroyed why do you get to use your other bike because that seems unfair to everyone else in some way yeah like that bike's only supposed to be there because if it rains you can use that bike or you can take the other bike if your bike fails to start you don't get out of the pit lane at the proper time somebody please write in or hit us up on social media because i want to know the rule that says that that's possible because i was going wait a minute how is acosta even remotely allowed to be here let alone the fact again i'm not angry about this okay i think it was longer than five minutes for digi to get his bike back oh yeah because he ended up riding it back didn't he sort of cross the grass and stuff but he was off for quite a while so he was off it for a while and then he rode it across the grass which means he's short and cutted it which if you read the rules from le mans you can't really do that to get into the pit lane the way that he did so i'm like hey i'm not trying to get down on the rules and how this happened i just want an understanding because i don't understand these rules and how this happened if you want to look at me and say hey jim wayne we're just turning a blind eye on this one okay i'm fine with that hey this is a really weird situation let's just kind of go we'll suspend the real rules here and then we'll say everybody gets to come back again because my thought is and again this is purely speculative on my part again i've not read the rule book i could i just don't know what to do with it i don't know what to do with it i don't know what to do with it i just haven't had time yet i have a job and my question is that is liberty looking at this is like oh crap we need to get bikes back out there because we've lost four of them so now my grid is 20 or you know plus the other two that's left so my grid has now been reduced to a very small grid because again if you look at the camera footage no one has a shot of the grid beyond say the first three rows which were all full i don't know the answer i'm thinking that that may play a part in some of it yeah like you i'm a little unsure about this one so an interesting caption came up you would have seen it too because it was on the world feed which was after the red flag and after they had sort of semi cleared up the aftermath both in terms of alex marquez and his ex motor gp bike i think flashed up to said bastionini and alex marquez not eligible to restart the race now bastionini that was understandable because he had broken down a couple of laps prior a lap or two yeah well i think it would have been two laps but that lap never got completed so that laps null and void from the red flag so he was only one lap removed and obviously alex marquez didn't get back to the pits within the that then makes so that makes him ineligible but like you i'm still struggling a little bit with the whole it's halfway through race it's not as if it was a complete restart the first race never happened so we're just starting the whole thing again so i'm curious about like you how a costa i mean i'm delighted that he was able to restart because me too a motor gp with a costa in it is better than one generally speaking without him in it i would argue but it did seem like a lot of people were able to restart the race and i don't want to use the word unfair but just curious yes with a destroyed bike and a restarted race he's allowed to take the spare bike which is not allowed to be used under pretty much any other circumstance as far as i'm aware and i might be wrong so perhaps somebody with a deeper knowledge of the technical rules can point out why we're confused about this one right because you can't change your bike unless a white flag is displayed yeah so i mean again curiosity is getting to me on this one so i'd like to know the answer to it so they go to the quick restart procedure and say hey look we red flagged the race and we're going to restart the race and the race at lap 12 two-thirds distance has not been completed so we will continue and race the final 13 laps of this race we basically get a sprint race because the sprint was 12 laps yet on saturday well this might be really interesting here right i'm up for a restart on this one okay i was okay with getting a restart here simply because we had a weird accident we took our time we cleaned everything up everything's good to go we've been told that the ktms had problems but it's an isolated issue we're feel confident that costas bike is not going to suffer a problem like or the other ktms that are on the grid aren't going to have these problems so let's get back to racing again cool i understand it we kind of did the same thing in austria in 2020 when we had that near disaster where valentino rossi was almost unalived and it's like okay we have we're racers this is kind of what we do so let's go back and let's race again so we start we go to the first turn zarco fluffs the braking zone bangs into the back of ben yaya him and uh who else marini and marini all go tumbling into the gravel trap at turn one and it is the most horrifying looking of accidents as zarco's leg is trapped between the rear wheel and i think the back seat or the rear subframe if you will of ben yaya's bike and he gets he being zarco is just whipped around like a rag doll going through that gravel trap i thought again i thought zarco was unalived because i got nauseous on this one really bad i really didn't want to watch and see an outcome here or i feared because of the way it looked zarco being whipped around i was absolutely scared to death that his back had been broken and his spinal cord had been severed or his neck was broken in and you were going to find out that zarco was a paraplegic or you know or confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life it was just like i cannot believe that we just witnessed a miracle where no one suffered a grave injury we take off and do this again and as if the gods are like no you shall not race at barcelona you obviously didn't understand the first time we're going to show you how bad it could be this time and they quickly had said that zarco was conscious and the most heartbreaking part of it all is looking at him and he's like i can't believe that i'm not at benyaya looking at zarco tangled up in his bike and not knowing how to help him there was real emotion being poured out there by benyaya because he didn't know what to do i don't know if him and zarco are friends or not i don't know but it was another human being it was another racer looking at a racer that was tangled up and didn't know what to do to help the poor guy and marini is there too and they're both like what do we do yeah and it's like they quickly came told us okay everybody's conscious well that's good but how bad is zarco hurt well they didn't air vacuum anywhere okay and the ambulance didn't exactly it just calmly drove back to the medical center so i was hopeful that perhaps maybe only zarco's leg has been broken you know maybe his femur has been broken two or three times because then that was as they went longer with zarco there in the gravel trap my fear was that perhaps maybe his femur had been broken and again you can break a femur and push that puppy out through your skin and you take an artery out there and you can break a femur and that's a big trouble because you may not know that it's bleeding because you're inside of a leather suit oh yeah i will stop talking here rich i will allow you to comment on this and then i will regather myself and talk about the other bits that i'm mad about with this one you do kind of get to a stage like after that one when you think perhaps we ought to call this a day now because yeah it started to feel a bit imola 1994 ish to me that's exactly what i thought like are we done here yet people yeah things are just keeping on going and i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to do that yeah perhaps it's time to stop i know it's a really tricky one this because again like we were saying last time out people are paid to be there yes they want to see a race and most of the riders well all of the riders want to have a good hard race as well and it's true but i mean in terms of without wishing to get into a sick crash top trump's game here the zarco crash i think was actually quite a bit worse than the marquez one in many respects just by the visual having him his leg caught up like that and as you say the bike with so much energy just flipping him around because i suppose that created a little bit of a cushioning effect compared to being on a pure asphalt or tarmac as we would say here so it was just yeah just a really really nasty crash i think marini was suggesting that was like i might have had a bike issue or he just missed his braking we don't quite know which but again he has inverted commas more serious injuries than alex marquez i think provided there are no other complications that creep in latterly but he's got a fairly minor fracture of the fib i think which is not a problem for bike racer but by all accounts severe ligament damage to that knee now that is obviously from the bike rider's point of view that that's horrible a long recovery and might be more serious than that in terms of his ability to sort of come back yeah you know as he was before the crash so i mean that's a bad outcome for zarco and it's a real shame because he's been having a kick-ass season on that honda yep lcr had released the press release and zarco had his own social media and saying you know we're going to go see the doctors figure out what we're going to do with my leg but right now we can't do anything about it so i think that's a really bad thing to do we can't do anything we got to let the swelling go down i mean that thing's got to be the size of a couple grapefruit or something i would guess but again simon patterson and myself don't see eye to eye on everything but on this one i see it they then decide that we're going to restart this race again and simon patterson has the best meme you could possibly find to put there it's russell crowe and gladiator screaming are you not entertained yeah i'm like okay i think that the controversy here jim man is around turn one of barcelona off the start line because super fast they're going very very fast at the top point where they hit the brakes there it's lots of bikes close together obviously in the first turn of lap one of a race and we've seen a lot of bad crashes there before uh g bernal's bike when they touched brakes brake lever got compressed examples that's just the first one that comes to my mind that was a bad one yeah so this one felt more avoidable than the alex marquez one because you can't mitigate a bike breaking down in front of you but if you know there's a turn which is likely to result in these kinds of accidents you can't mitigate a bike breaking down in front of you accidents i mean what they do about it is a different question but to do nothing about it we're not even having a discussion about what are the options to try and make that corner a bit safer yep is a bit unforgivable i think so yeah um that's my view i don't know about it because at the end of the day zarko is alive and that's the most important thing we should be thankful for that so here's my question man yeah i never got his bike back to the pits within five minutes and yet he got to restart in the same way that costa did is there extraneous circumstances because you're trying to extricate zarko from the bike okay fine i'm good with that right i can yeah i can see you've been the rule there but it becomes weird and it's like it just had the feeling of being a bloodthirst and it's like okay at that point my am like call it hey folks we're sorry that this happened due to the extra time to be sure that everyone was okay and to get the best most efficient medical care to the injured riders that are required we're unfortunately going to have to call the race complete however you could decide it by starting order of that grid whatever and say this is the championship this is how it is we're sorry and everyone goes home i'd have been fine with that if i was sitting in the stands even though i paid hard money to sit there if something like that would have happened to kota i'd be like yep i'm good let's go back to the camper and drink yeah because at this point got riders that have witnessed two problems really horrible really bad and i'm not going to get into a long debate about this one because there are some journalists who make a more noise about this and i personally do but nevertheless the riders have gone through this occasion twice now they're sitting in the pits they're sitting in the pits they're sitting in the pits they're sitting in the i've seen these replays and there comes a point when you must as a rider i'm sure just become drained enough that you just kind of get to the point where you probably don't want to go out and do it again because you just had enough of this day you just want to get in your motorhome go home get on the plane go home whatever and then get ready for the next race and hopefully things will be better and i think there's a big debate now raging around whether the third restart should have happened i'm kind of on the fence with it i think i feel for the riders because i mean the start line or a start of a race is a stressful time anyway and i think that's a big debate anyway add in the fact that you know your fellow riders some of whom will be friends i'm sure have been badly injured and you've been seeing replays of it all and etc etc this must just become a bit intolerable i would have thought even for these guys it was super focused manage themselves incredibly well very fit etc all those things that we always say but i defy anybody not to be affected by that yeah so i will tell you at running club if there was a bad accident we had a radio to listen to the corner workers and stuff first thing we'd look i'd look at you know my mom or my dad turn that radio off i don't want to hear i don't want to know and i would kind of find a dark space in the van and just not think about what was going on out there so it's a it's a very mental draining game and you can kind of pick yourself up once picking yourself up twice especially at that level is going to be super hard so i understand that part of it again is this the liberty influence where it's like oh yeah we just keep restarting f1 races you know well look yeah that's just cars with a survival cell that's designed to be more safe than a human being's being on top of a motorcycle can we just go home i don't think it's a liberty thing jim i mean this is a goes back it's a dorna thing it's in this way it's the dr costa legacy send them out yeah and there is a callousness to that which i think is problematical and i'm not at all a touchy-feely wrap them up in cotton wool kind of a person but i'm just trying to think of it from a rider's point of view and you've sort of gone through that twice already and do you really want to do it again because there is a momentum to these things and i think it's a really important thing which is why i referenced stimula 94 i mean that built up over the friday saturday sunday it's true but there is just that feeling that stuff was just bad it was a bad weekend it would be better just to get out of there and come back in a couple of weeks and have another go very much so again it was that whole idea that we've seen two really horrific accidents no one has died do we really want to push our luck and go for a third restart and potentially have the same thing happen again but the odds say you've got less motorcycles so maybe it's not going to happen either way we get shit show of a weekend had already had enough it's like no we're going to restart great fantastic it's now a 12 lap race i'm like couldn't you just cut it down to nine is what i was thinking but you don't you stay at 12 oh gosh i don't feel like going through what happens in this race it's a decent race that happens because you're rooting for acosta because he's got the bike and you think he's going to get it this time but he doesn't he's not able to mirror is having a great race because between him he's like starting second row or something like that he's having a great race too in bez and quateraro having a good race i mean despite what has happened these people are out racing they're being it is a good race at the front i just don't want to belabor that point but you had five laps to go digio was by mirror at turn 10 now somewhere in here martin falls again and he's helped by on the first lap oh the first lap he's helped by fernandez and then you get the fact that he ruffles off to the garage to which he's aggravated and my assumption he's aggravated that he's taken out by another aprilia and he kind of looks at his team and sort of pushes him around like hey why didn't you stop this from happening because this isn't fair is what i think was going on but then here it is again the bad boy who doesn't want to be in that team who they want to get rid of but contractually he's there and could potentially win a world championship goes off the deep end again and then he's like oh my god i'm not going to be in that team and then he has to apologize again okay we know what martin is more than likely headed to yamaha is that correct that's what we believe what's what we think right and quattro is headed to hrc if i'm yamaha do i want martin at all now well i mean i know we have i don't want to belabor the point it was more rhetorical but i'm thinking you didn't do yourself any good now interestingly jim there's a bit of controversy around that crash so it was uh turn five correct on the first lap so fernandez goes underneath martin now interestingly fernandez didn't receive a penalty so it instantly came up as being investigated because of course fernandez lost the front went into martin which sent martin down and fernandez actually did carry on albeit heavily delayed it's true and there was no penalty given for that now fernandez argued very strongly post-race that martin had sort of tried to shut him down and that's what caused him to lose the front and then the accident ensued after that and i can only assume that simon craver on his team looked at this very very carefully and that's why they concluded that there was no penalty to be issued to fernandez because it to me it looked as if he had caused another rider to crash yeah martin clearly saw it that way i didn't actually see the garage shoving thing was that did he retire back to the pits during the race or was it after the race because i didn't actually catch that footage i am unclear as to when that event happens because i only saw it from social media right so i'm not sure when that happened because honestly i got through here's what happened in the race and i immediately turned it off and i needed to go away yeah i had other things to do or whatever so we have this little kerfuffle we have with aprilia and martin but at the end of this the race is actually really pretty good digi is trying to get past acosta at turn one they go back and forth but everybody is queuing up behind acosta the rest of the pack is catching them digia goes to try at 10. he just can't do it he does i'm sorry he does actually pull off that move and acosta can't get back by digi with two to go but the question is he has absolutely no grip and is how far is acosta going to fall down in this race how far is he going to go digi is gone because he's got like seven tenths like almost immediately off of acosta well mere tries on the last lap to get by acosta for second then aldegar gets by acosta two three because he's got no grip so they finish the race with digia with mere in second aldegar third agura who again comes on late ben yaya and then bez and then acosta was down at the last lap because of contact with agura because agura just shoved it up the inside of a guy with no grip and i really can't blame him for doing it and yeah i was at high speed yeah but there's a sufficient amount of runoff there that acosta simply slides across the gravel pops up and gets done and i'm like okay cool this is great we're done with this horrific weekend oh let me just go on and then it's like oh no no no no we can't just let it be here what do we got to have our old friend the tire pressure rule gets involved and what six riders got tire pressure penalties so your actual race finishes as digia first then aldegar gets promoted to second because mere is under pressure ben yaya gets moved to third and bezeki goes to fourth i don't know who all six guys because i agura gets bumped because he had tire pressure issue correct rich oh no he got a penalty for taking a costa right oh his penalty was for a costume so it's like a penalty for taking a costa like your podium is digia aldegar and ben yaya so it's an all ducati podium then bez is in fourth then quattro finishes fifth marini sixth bender seventh iagura's eighth at his penalty marrero was ninth and morbidelli vinales fernandez mere rins and miller rounding out for all the points for all that again you know wow we just have to have tire pressure rules which you're trying to guess at what the race is going to happen as that you can have the right amount of pressure in it i hope pirelli at least gives us a wider working window so we don't have it because they're going to continue this tire pressure rule again we could rant on about that until the cows come home but we have been quite long on this show but given the quick start procedure jim that happens with restarts and the fact that by the second restart they're kind of out of tires at this point so they're probably juggling rubber that they've already run elsewhere or else when during the weekend i mean why the hell the tire pressure rule applies in this scenario i mean i'm guessing it's probably because nobody's envisaged this problem happening and i hope that they would amend this rule because the tire pressure rule is going to stay in place with pirelli as you say let's hope there's a bit of a wider band that it applies because i you know i really felt sorry for jan mia great ride i mean i heard after the event that you know he doesn't care about the penalty because as far as he's concerned he did finish second i agree with him and that was a great performance that he put in on the day on a bike that actually worked for him on day and so he's pleased about that i'm sure honda as well and the the tire pressure thing is just ridiculous banyan comes third with concussion he slipped back during the race because he basically couldn't see the tire pressure and he couldn't see the straight and was feeling nauseous and head spinning and again you know everything happened so quickly but where are the protocols here i mean again we saw it with martine on the friday i mean clearly concussed and should have been benched really and went on to have many more crashes during the weekend not saying because of that but high probability could be the funniest thing was and quite ironic was massaro rivola going down and having a go at david abrivio yeah in the pits after fernandez had taken martin out on the third restart so well it's hardly david abrivio's fault was it and by the way rivola who i admire greatly i have to say but by the way you've been the greatest advocate of raul fernandez and arguably he'd have been at a motor gp a couple of years ago probably out of this paddock a couple of years ago if it wasn't for rivola insisting that he was part of the future for aprilia and he probably will stay there next year now that aguirre is going but it seemed a bit rich for him to go down and do the old finger wagon i just think everybody was so heightened at this stage and sort of like yeah cats on hot tin roofs because of what was going on i'm also kind of now that you've kind of talked us through what happened and reminded me of some of this stuff i'm almost inclined to give martin a sort of a little bit of leeway given the frustration and what he'd gone through on the day along with all the other riders but to come in and sort of shove it was actually paolo bonora that he shoved he's nah almost certainly one of the nicest men in the paddock if not the world why martin decided he had to take his frustrations out on him is quite unfathomable to me because i'm sort of going back to i don't like oh hey martin anymore because he's apt to do this sort of thing as alicia spargro was apt to do this sort of thing so i don't know why aprilia keep these people but almost thinking that if i was paolo bonora i'd be on the phone to alpine stars and saying for the next race you know the little bum patch that they have on the leathers uh perhaps it should say the the wankinator next time this is retribution not the martinator so i agree not supposed to swear on this one but so that was that was poor and martin should feel thoroughly ashamed of himself for that behavior even though there are some extenuating circumstances but anyway i suppose we should talk about the championship and then get the hell out of it yeah i agree so this shakes up a lot of things bez gets a break and he gets to 142 points which puts him 15 ahead of martin did you jumps up because he wins the race with that 25 he's only 26 behind bezeki acosta's fourth now because did you jumps over him i agree is fifth in this championship from there the drop off in points is pretty significant cost is a full 50 behind i agree and fifth is 65 behind then it's fernandez marquez as an alex benyaya then mark and then aldiger so with this championship i will say this one thing because i saw it i thought it was rather interesting that if mark sits out the next round which is uh where are we going magello if he sits out magello and then he comes back after magello if he is anything like his 25 self which there's a good possibility that it could be because we have seen that lap at lamont's right and so if his shoulder isn't punching that nerve or whatever and that's all fixed the question is is he going to be able to win the world championship okay well he would have to outscore by like 11 points a race weekend or whatever to be able to do it and it was some statistic about the fact that he actually could do it because bez doesn't carry it enough to where he gets point gap is like five so it's possible mathematically that bez could continue the season that he has and mark could actually win the world championship it's entirely possible highly unlikely my interest is to suggest it is possible which i thought was sort of interesting so on that kind of little positive high note i have nothing else to say about this weekend except for thank goodness it's over yeah just to clarify the title so the miracles were that alex marquez uh jones arco and fabio digi antonio who were obviously the ones that were most sort of critically in the way of these nasty accidents they all survived and then the fourth miracle is that as you've just explained did you went on and actually won the race with a hand that was clearly in all sorts of trouble because he refused to take his glove off even on the podium at the end yeah so goodness only knows what was going on underneath that glove but i suspect a rather nasty puncture wound and some broken bones interestingly he sat out the test on the monday unsurprisingly and martin had another crash crash six he's concussed yeah i've long said that i would be very happy if we never went back to barcelona for a moto gp race and i wish we didn't go back there for a variety of reasons and we were damn lucky to escape this weekend with everybody in the sense that everybody was made it out alive yeah thankfully so on that happy note and it is a happy note i suppose despite all the stuff we've been talking about we can uh sign off yes with all this please everyone just ride safe because you can see what can happen yeah we'll see you hopefully it'll be an action packed weekend but not one in that sense uh so we'll hope for better things in italy and enjoy it carl because obviously carl hun oh yes he is going to be there so we will look forward to hearing and seeing how it was lucky chat enjoy it cheers everyone see you so so so so so so so so so so so so