MotoGP is broken. It must be, if Dorna is making idiotic knee-jerk “improvements” like adding sprint races to save the series. In this article, we explore the best ways to fix MotoGP.
More Races
Next year, MotoGP is likely to have 42 races. That’s 2 races per meeting over probably 21 meetings. This would make it ze most racingest road race series een ze vorld!!! Compare that to World Superbike, which has 3 races per meeting over a mere dozen meetings, resulting in a 36 race championship.
But half-measures suck, whether you’re talking about bourbon or world championships. Why stop at 42 races? Hell, WSBK could equal that if they sneaked up to 14 meetings per year!
No, MotoGP should turn it up to 11 and take a page out of Speedway’s book.
With their 4-lap heats and 6-lap finals, there are something like 20 races in a Speedway event (or whatever, I haven’t actually looked it up but it’s tons. Let’s call it 20.) So if MotoGP had 21 meetings and 20 events per meeting, they would have 420 races per year!!! Awesome, dude!
Revamp Qualifying
In the old days, MotoGP qualifying could be a lot of fun. There were about a million riders on track at the same time and nobody knew what was going on. When they hilariously held each other up on track, their family members would hilariously assault each other in the paddock.
Modern MotoGP qualifying sucks. There are far fewer bikes on track, and nobody bothers to grab each other by the throat afterwards.
It’s time to shake things up.
The whole riders on track thing is over. It’s probably how they did qualifying for chariot races at the colosseum.
From now on, MotoGP grid positions should be decided by a fancy dress competition judged by the MotoGP grid girls.
The person with the most outrageous outfit should start from pole position, and the least impressive costume should be rewarded with a back row start.
Let Ducati write the rule book
The process for writing MotoGP technical rules is obsolete and inefficient.
What happens is that the authorities spend years painstakingly writing the rules, then Ducati just do whatever the hell they want. Then the authorities pretend that Ducati are entitled to do so.
Some people say that Ducati are cleverly finding loopholes in the rulebook, but that’s a pile of horse manure. For instance, the rules clearly say that electronically controlled suspension is illegal. They don’t specifically say that hydraulically controlled suspension lowering devices are illegal.
This is because it’s assumed that everyone in the room is a person of taste, decency and honour who respects the spirit of the rules and wouldn’t dream of cheating to get around them. There’s nothing clever about using a hydraulic “brain” instead of an electronic one. Cars have had automatic slushbox transmissions with hydraulic brains for over 70 years.
The reason why the rules don’t specifically ban hydraulic “pole squat” devices is the same reason why 3 star restaurants don’t have a sign that specifically bans crapping on the desert trolley.
If a crowd of thuggish oafs walked into that posh restaurant, pulled down their undercrackers and started curling out a “chocolate log” next to the lemon sorbet, they could claim that they were acting perfectly within the rules.
The maitre d’ would be powerless, not just because there isn’t a sign banning it, but also because the thugs are sitting at a table for 8 (more than a third of the seats in the main dining room), all eating the lobster and drinking Dom Perignon, and he’s terrified that they’ll walk out and never come back. So he just stands there wringing his hands and blubbing like a little girl.
And what if the golden boy of that thuggish crew drunkenly hurled a handful of viciously sharp, deadly steak knives across the room at head height, narrowly avoiding killing any of the Mallorcans at the next table thanks to sheer dumb luck?
He could just drunkenly say it was a mistake and nobody would do a damn thing. The rest of his oafish group wouldn’t even acknowledge that he had done anything wrong at all.
Compare this to World Superbike.
Last year, Kawasaki cleverly read the rule book and brought out a homologation special version of their ZX-10RR that would let their WSBK team run another 500rpm, giving them a chunk more power.
When the WSBK authorities heard about this, they simply told Kawasaki that they refused to recognize this new bike, so they couldn’t have their extra 500 revs.
When Kawasaki furiously pointed out that the letter of the rules blatantly allowed them more revs, the response of the WSBK authorities was essentially, “Shut your hole before we shut it for you!”
If MotoGP is that posh restaurant, then WSBK is a strip club where any patron who thinks he’s found a clever loophole in the “no touching” rule is likely to wake up in a dumpster with his wallet and Rolex missing.
Again, MotoGP is using half measures.
Since WSBK is going all the way towards the “Shut up and do what you’re told before the bouncers break your face” direction, MotoGP should go in completely the opposite direction. Just let Ducati write the rules and be done with it. F1-inspired, fun-crushing aerodynamics? Suspension-lowering devices that prevent close racing and make the races suck? Yes! Go for it!