MotoGP’s eggand-spoon race
Racing, like all sport, is better when you don’t know who is going to win. My question is this: Is it still better when you literally haven’t got a clue? Or does that reduce it to the level of an eggand-spoon race?
MotoGP, this year more than ever, has become a lottery. Four races and three different winners. And for the first three races, nine different riders on the podium.
Carry on like this, and the same could be true of the championship. Anyone could win it.
Looking back over racing history, the so-called Golden Age was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The heyday of 500cc twostrokes – which those who were there at the time are still prone to call “real grand prix bikes”.
You didn’t know who would win, but it was a safe bet that it would be one of four or five riders: Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey, Kevin Schwantz, Wayne Gardner or (latterly) Mick Doohan. The rest, with a couple of exceptions, just made up the numbers.
That ended in 1994, when the first four were variously absent. For the next five years, you did know who would win. It was Mick Doohan. Followed, after a brief Criville-Roberts interregnum, by Valentino Rossi.
Fast forward to now, leapfrogging six Marc Marquez years, and we arrive at the anythingcould-happen era. Which (we are told by Dorna’s commentators) is the best racing of all time.
They are not only talking through their wallets. Results in 2022 are marvellously unpredictable, thanks to Dorna’s dumb-down policy, with limited fuel and engine numbers, frozen engine development and prescribed four-cylinder/ maximum-bore design, plus a restricted range of control tyres. And most important, control electronics.
Designers trying to find loopholes, notably Ducati’s Gigi Dall’Igna, face having new ideas stomped on… like next year’s ban on front ride-height adjustment.
Ultra-close racing and highly varied results show how well the levelling-up has worked.
Yet still I wonder. Grand prix racing is about excellence not a socialist dream of equality.
‘We don’t have a clue who’ll win the race’