Winners
Us
Although not falling into the lowly slums of an F1 parade MotoGP has lacked real real excitement for quite some while. The battles for the minor places have always been there but the leaders, usually, are in a class of their own. Rarely do we see two potential race winners knock the crap out of each other.
We all remember the classic Rossi vs Stoner battle at Laguna Seca that included the famous Corkscrew pass that Stoner claimed was illegal…but Rossi didn’t…up until when Marc Marquez did the same to him – then it was illegal.
The real issue is that these days crafty Ducati ensure their lesser team’s bikes magically ‘tune down’ during the race should it look like a factory rider will get embarrassed by one of them.
But at Jerez this didn’t happen. Why? Because Marc Marquez (the rider the Bolognaise based team didn’t want to win) is already on the worst Ducati on the grid – to a point it can’t be detuned anymore without being classed as a paddock scooter. And Marquez was going up against the world champion and factory Ducati poster boy Pecco Bagnaia.
Marc was out to prove a point…and Pecco was out to prove his own point was pointier.
The race had all the elements to be utterly boring too:
Sign 1: Jorge Martin, a boring lights-to-flag-win kind of guy, took the lead early on.
Sign 2: Bagnaia inherited the lead on the best bike on the grid
Sign 3: Marquez was dropping off the pace of the leaders.
But then, mid race, some magic chorizo dust was sprinkled onto proceedings and suddenly everything burst into life faster than Vinales when he accidentally double-medicates.
The Spanish Antichrist abruptly found pace and started catching the beard of Bagnaia who was probably daydreaming of which tipple he’d enjoy after the race. When Marc did catch him he wasted no time in attacking Pecco and the battle ensued!
The punch up was very entertaining with the Spaniard attacking and the Italian countering. On more than one occasion it looked like the pair would fall…glorious stuff.
Sadly the fight didn’t quite make it to the very final laps but we were entertained. Yay us!
Losers
Jack Miller
Miller, who is a reason shampoo bottles have instructions, is having a bad season. Falling off more than ever and being utterly destroyed by the 5-year-old Spanish stoat on the same bike.
Luckily, we were informed before the weekend got underway, “Jack goes well at Jerez”.
Failed to make FP2 and had two falls in the two races suggested otherwise.
Franco Morbidelli
This guy again…😀
Franco’s pre-season knock to the head seems to have caused some short-term memory problems for the outgoing Italian. In the main race Morbidelli, who this season has racked up an impressive zero points on the fastest bike on the grid, decided to take his revenge on Jack Miller who he believed did him wrong in the sprint race. Franco, aware that the stewards can rarely be bothered watching incidents so far back in the field, went for an optimistic ram on the Australian sending them both into the gravel faster than the speed their careers are heading to World Superbikes.
After the gravel had settled an irate Miller headed over to Morbidelli keen to inform the Italian, using violence as the universal Australian communication method, what he’d done wrong but was shocked when the Italian told him “that was for what you did yesterday”.
The problem was that Miller, as is the norm, fell off on the opening lap of the sprint race and never actually came in contact with dizzy-head Franky.
Classic Morbidelli!
Jerez Turn 5
Might want to have a look at the drainage situation there.
Jorge Martin
Talk of deserving a factory bike went a bit quiet after Sunday’s race.
Dani Pedrosa
Everyone loves little Dani. How can you not? He small, inoffensive, small, shy, small and small. He’s also a great test rider. Oh and small. But what he’s sadly not is a racer…or one with a killer spirit.
In the sprint Dani summed it up to us all the reason why he probably never won the MotoGP title. After the carnage of turn 5 the microscopic Spaniard found himself in fourth place hunting down Quartararararo in third with a few laps left. Dani was considerably faster than Fabio – which is understandable given the Frenchman was on a Yamaha and utterly confused to why he was in third place.
A podium was what everyone wanted to see. Especially the wrongly-estimated crowd that have loved Pedrosa from when he was only knee-high to a grasshopper – i.e. the beginning of the weekend.
But despite being in Spain, on a faster bike, on a track he knows better than nearly everyone else Pedrosa just didn’t have that final 5% killer instinct to make the move and ended up finishing fourth.
Luckily for Spain and Dani the stewards, encouraged by bags of low-welfare pork cubes, were able to scrutinise Quartararararo’s bike and demote him some places for his beret or something.
But it was a hollow podium.
Luca Marini
Because Aprilia, Honda and KTM all chose to bring test riders to the Jerez the television column graphic showing the rider’s positions was so extended that poor Morris Marini comically fell off the bottom of the screen. Not that it really mattered.
Now it’s one thing to be outpaced by a test rider like Dani Pedrosa on the KTM but it’s a completely different one when it’s Honda’s test strudel Stefan ‘Herman’ Bradl. Stefan, a rider that’s never once looked good enough to compete in MotoGP, was on a Frankenstein parts-bin Honda mashup thrown together by HRC in the hope something worked. Despite this the lowly German rider was able to show a clean pair of lederhosen to an embarrassing Luca throughout the weekend…including in the race.
Obsessed commentators
We all know that Pedro Acosta is a special rider. The Spanish stoat has been sensational so far this season – to the point where he’s already fourth in the championship in his rookie year. He’s also about 12.
We really, really know he’s great. So what we don’t need is for the TV commentators to continuously yell superlatives at Acosta at the expense of actually stating anything of interest.
Luckily for us, but not the stoat, Pedro had a ‘poor’ main race by his lofty standards. The magnificent mustelidae had a bad start in Sunday’s race and never really featured at the front. This left the glum commentators searching for something else to talk about and thus, occasionally, unintentionally informing us of something useful for a change.