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Michelin is the Pirelli of MotoGP in a bad sense. They are destroying the show. The first 18 to 20 laps is just to burn fuel. Race happens only in the last 6 or 7 laps. It's getting worse every year now. This crazy need for baby sitting the tyres is taking away the joy of seeing riders going full throttle.
I wouldn't put the blame fully on Michelin tbh. Loading of the tires, especially front, grew massively due to gains in aero downforce. And when Michelin introduces new construction tires then most of the teams and riders complain that they are too hard, or have no feeling or this or that.
Michelin is the Pirelli of MotoGP in a bad sense. They are destroying the show. The first 18 to 20 laps is just to burn fuel. Race happens only in the last 6 or 7 laps. It's getting worse every year now. This crazy need for baby sitting the tyres is taking away the joy of seeing riders going full throttle.
I wouldn't put the blame fully on Michelin tbh. Loading of the tires, especially front, grew massively due to gains in aero downforce. And when Michelin introduces new construction tires then most of the teams and riders complain that they are too hard, or have no feeling or this or that.
moto gp gets there ideas from f1 .its f1 who started with these garbage degrading tires and standard ecu and moto gp copied them
Some tyre reporting from Australia
re Rins:
"The first Australian Grand Prix since 2019 was the first real tyre-management race since the start of the following year, when Michelin introduced its longer-lasting rear slick. So it was no coincidence that Suzuki’s GSX-RR, which is so good at saving its tyres, came out on top on Sunday
...Rins made move after audacious move into the Turn 2 left-hander, each set up by abusing his rear tyre out of the Turn 1 right, because wear on the right side of the tyres isn’t a concern at anti-clockwise PI.
Bagnaia led into the final lap, Rins gassing it up the outside of the Ducati exiting Turn 1 to attack on the inside into Turn 2, which pushed his Italian rival slightly wide, allowing Márquez to nip through on the inside to take second.
“Before the race we made a plan. We put a cross on the corners where I had to take care of the tyres. Here you don’t need to take a lot of care with the right side of the tyres, so I was using good corner speed through Turn 1 and asking a bit more of the rear tyre than the others, exiting with some spin. This was the key. It gained me a lot of positions.”
re Bagnaia:
Bagnaia struggled with front grip, partly because he had overused his front tyre, both to save the rear and to get the Ducati to turn.
“By the last six laps I had destroyed the front tyre” he added. “It’s true that our bike is fast on the straight, but it’s also true that it’s very difficult to make it turn like the other bikes.”
re Marquez, M:
Márquez was as canny as always. He was the only rider on the grid to choose the soft rear slick, a wild choice according to all his rivals. But he had done his homework. One of the Honda’s RC213V’s biggest problems at the moment is rear grip, especially while attacking corners, so the six-time MotoGP king knew a soft rear would help him.
But how could he make the soft last for 27 laps of abuse around Phillip Island, which murders the left side of the tyres? Because he had predicted the race pace would be [relatively] slow, with riders looking after their tyres, so he believed he could get away with the soft, so long as he nursed it and never forced the pace. Which is why he never led a lap.
moto gp gets there ideas from f1 .its f1 who started with these garbage degrading tires and standard ecu and moto gp copied them
If only that was true...
Both ideas, standard tires and ECU for everyone is a great great idea. Standard ECU means no one can use electronic trickery as any change to standard components is forbidden. And with tires everyone is in a same boat, not being hindered by having worse tires than your opponent and pumping in truckloads of money into solving that problem that shouldn't be.
And if anyone doesn't have degrading tires it is MotoGP. It is just that since last year fronts are having to cope with much higher forces than before due to aero taking off (no pun intended). Last year if memory serves me Michelin brought in different (more durable) construction for rear tire and were criticized that they had less grip.
From an interview with KTM’s MotoGP project leader Sebastian Risse:
Next year MotoGP will for the first time enforce the 1.9 bar minimum pressure limit for the front tyre. We know some teams currently run below the minimum to get more grip, so what kind of a challenge will this be?
It’s going to be a big challenge at some tracks. It’s going to be the same for everybody, so it’s a technical challenge that each factory will face, so let’s see how good we are at it. We already have a clear idea of how we want to manage it.
Of course it will be a limiting factor and the problem is that it also comes into an area where, whichever direction you take [lower or higher pressure], it’s a safety issue. Michelin says we cannot go lower because of safety concerns, but higher is very dangerous for the riders. We made some statistics about our riders – how often they crashed and at what pressure – and it couldn’t be clearer that there’s a certain threshold of high pressure, which if you go over it you will barely survive race distance.
Sorry but saying a higher pressure is not safe is utter BS. If that was the case, then racing on the wet should be banned, as a wet track reduce grip much further than a minimum pressure of 1.9bar on a dry track
It´s the same for everyone, same as a wet track. Cope with it the best you can, as always in any racing category
35 - 2:05.710
63
73
On slicks on a damp drying variable track
There was some very surprising discussion by Crafar and others about tyre pressures.
Where Fabio Q had difficulties, it was said that several riders had too high pressures as a result of Michelin And team head engineers making a mistake!
in the order of half to one Bar!
7 PSI to 15 PSI !!!
Nooooo
In my day (a sure sign my hair is grey) at every meeting we calibrated our gauges with the Michelin men. And pressures were paramount and we worked in one PSI increments and sometimes half.
Sundry points:
Crafar and et als reckon the only good thing about the Hondas is that they are reliable ( and my take on that is reliable to injure riders).
The two people who look most like they would rather be somewhere else for most of this season: Lin Jarvis and Alberto Puig.
Jack Miller falls from what was suggested to be a cold side (not cold tyres) after much running in hot Sepang on the left hander with assymetrics....whereas a 15 read that FIFTEEN PSI too high a pressure was just a problem....somewhere there is high grade bulk bos taurus scat
Again awesome qualifying session. Too many crashes and Marc on front row without any reference
I think honda is performing quite well. I don't have turning speed comparation and straight line time gain of ducati but it is for sure ducati is gaining there too much. So maybe Honda (nearly) only loose time there against them.
At Q1 MM was much slower compared to 63 when MM was chasing him for tow. Maybe being alone worked better.
I saw FQ's crash and his fingers. I don't know how this kind of things said in english. I felt some strange ... and I couldn't look it.
Again awesome qualifying session. Too many crashes and Marc on front row without any reference
I think honda is performing quite well. I don't have turning speed comparation and straight line time gain of ducati but it is for sure ducati is gaining there too much. So maybe Honda (nearly) only loose time there against them.
At Q1 MM was much slower compared to 63 when MM was chasing him for tow. Maybe being alone worked better.
I saw FQ's crash and his fingers. I don't know how this kind of things said in english. I felt some strange ... and I couldn't look it.
| Tech Talk with Simon Crafar