The High Sider
Racing from the sidelines.
It wasn’t my intention to write another column filled with MotoGP antics – there’s more to racing than the gilded cage’s crazy soap opera. And it all started out so promisingly: a perfectly formed British Superbike season opener at a wet and windy Donington Park generated plenty of positive armchair punditry. A rearrangement of the race-day schedule to compensate for dismal weather meant the full programme of racing went ahead, showcasing the quick-thinking organisers’ brains (even if they won’t grant yours truly a lastminute press pass; don’t they know who I’m not?). Say what you like about the stage-management of BSB’s phoney, season-concluding Showdown system, even a curmudgeonly cynic cannot deny British Superbike’s professionalism and sheer spectacle.
And there’s no denying the sheer spectacles of 20-year-old Bradley Ray. The myopic mop-head of Kent scored his first and second BSB wins on his Bouillabaisse Suzuki GSX-R1000 (the commentators keep pronouncing it ‘Buildbase’ – c’mon lads, où est votre Franglais?). Indeed, the lad took to the damp track like a fish to water, looking comfortable and a level above his illustrious BSB rivals. It’s a bit previous to get excited about the future, but imagine how fast he’ll be when he gets contact lenses.
Yet barely had the headline plaudits for expert organisation and the remarkable calm of a young man under pressure faded at home when, far away in Argentina, the world’s premier motorcycle racing class and it’s most exciting protagonist were about to enjoy a meltdown of epic proportions live, on TV. It was a crazy, compelling car-crash of a weekend.
In a weekend rammed with ramming, there was enough to keep a columnist pontificating for years.
The brouhaha began when 18-year-old Spaniard Arón Canet, incensed at having a practice lap baulked by unsuspecting Kazakhstani rider Makar Yurchenko, regrouped, caught Yurchenko up again, and blatantly torpedoed him, causing both riders to crash.
It was hard to imagine a more obvious misdemeanour worthy of a race ban. It looked nailedon to everyone watching – everyone except race director Mike Webb. In a bizarre judgement, he ruled it a ‘racing incident’. When Webb was called upon to explain his reasoning, barely had the faux logic left his mouth when it evaporated on contact with air, leaving only an unintelligible echo of what we thought he might have meant emanating from the TV.
Come race day and, after a typically dramatic Moto3 race and an atypically interesting Moto2 race, MotoGP trumped them both with pure farce. After the sighting lap, improving conditions saw every team and rider switch from wets to slicks. That’s every team and rider
The only suitable response for a crazy Argentine MotoGP race (with apologies to Scotchman footballist Sir Alex McTaggart).
bar one; Jack Miller, who’d put his Pramac Ducati on pole with a banzai wet lap on slicks, literally sat alone at the head of the grid while everyone else dived into the pits. The rule book appeared to adopt a flexible approach, so while the morally correct thing to do would’ve been to start the race with the rest of the field tripping over each other to get out of the pit-lane, the organisers chose instead to delay the start to allow everyone back on the grid and effectively penalising Miller for making the right choice in the first place.
But barely had that drama been settled when, after the warm-up lap, Repsol Honda’s Marc Marquez stalled on the grid, push-started his bike, then rode it the wrong way on the grid to re-take his place.
One of the worst racetrack transgressions is to ride the wrong way up one. In just about any club race in the world you’d be black-flagged and thrown out of the race. You just don’t do it. Marquez shouldn’t have started; instead, he got a ride-through penalty, which he took immediately, then proceeded to lap seconds faster than everyone else, charging through the field like a bowling ball, barging past other riders with an arrogance born of supernatural talent and a seriously self-entitled dedication only the most obsessed and traumatised humans can muster. By the time he’d skittled Valentino Rossi into the grass, Marquez was on his third penalty.
Post race, a red-faced Marquez (anger or embarrassment; hard to tell) was frog-marched to Rossi’s pit by humourless Honda robots Alberto Puig and Emilio Alzamora, but Valentino’s BFF Uccio shooed them away like a trio of autograph hunters. And after all that – with name-calling and the like – there was a virtual punch-up online when Avintia rider Xavier Siméon and Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro got in a Twit-fight over who has the whitest teeth.
What this all means is MotoGP went, in the space of a few hours, from being a shambolic disgrace unbefitting of an international race series to something more akin to an unmissable Who Shot JR? episode of Dallas. Which, funnily enough, isn’t a million miles from where Rossi, Marquez and co pick it up next, at COTA in Austin, Texas.
Oh, and by the way – at the time of writing, Cal Crutchlow, winner in Argentina, leads the world championship standings for the first time, and for the first time for a Brit since David Essex in 1979. Nearly forget that stat, in all the excitement.