Winners
The House of Habsburg
The once most prominent house in Europe eventually floundered almost out of existence in the early 19th century. This was thanks in no small part to the heavily cross contaminated gene pool which at the time was thought to be a great idea to keep Christmas present costs down. Since then the prominent jawline of European aristocracy has been more or less none existent.
That is until known Habsburg descendant Fabio Quartararararo turned up.
Fabio is annoyingly brilliant. He’s also incredibly difficult to dislike – and we’ve tried very hard on many occasions to do so.
Currently he’s in a class of his own in MotoGP. Riding a bike that’s visibly weaker than his rivals’ machines the Frenchman still pulls off results that leaves his teammates crying in their motorhome.
His win in Spain was a perfect example of his annoying brilliance. Took the lead on the opening lap and then set a string of ultra-consistent laptimes that no other rider had a chance of matching.
Primark Ducati
The Primark team has long been Ducati’s second team – a place where the factory will quarantine potential decent riders to see if they’ll be good enough to replace Jack Miller or not. Primark Ducati always found themselves on the very latest machinery and at the top of the list of new part handouts. This made them the best-of-the-rest Ducati teams.
Until lately. This season the top none-factory team, based on results, has been those pesky upstarts at Gresini. Crash or win noob Enea Bastianini has been Primark’s main thorn winning more races so far this season than any other rider. We’ve all been stepping over Primark to marvel at Gresini’s splendid team.
Primark needed to fight fire with fire so decided to take a leaf out of Gresini’s book and add a load of purple to their bike. It looked great…and subconsciously made us want to buy Euro-brand yoghurts.
With that sorted all that was needed was for Johan Zarco to step up and Jorge Martin to stay on.
Thanks in part to Espargaro’s maths failure the purple proved to be the perfect answer and Martin and Zarco raced to the podium in what was probably Primark Ducati’s best result (probably = I can’t be bothered looking it up).
Losers
Us
The Catalunya GP was a race centred around tyre wear. Any single race where tyre management is the most crucial aspect suddenly isn’t really a ‘race’ anymore. And it’s usually very dull (see Jenson Button’s F1 career for further details)
It was a poor race by MotoGP standards.
Takaaki Nakagami
Last week Alex Rins had a mega beef with Nakagami claiming the oriental rider was dangerous after the paring clashed resulting in the curly Spaniard falling off again. Some questioned if Rins was deflecting somewhat blaming others for his blunders.
The other riders were on the fence regarding Taka’s danger level. But he immediately kicked them all off the fence at Catalunya by attempting to pass ten riders into the first corner, falling off doing so and collecting Bagnaia and Rins in the process – both riders who at the time were still pretending to be title contenders.
The crash was pretty horrific. Rins was sent cartwheeling through the air breaking his wrist in the process. Meanwhile Nakagami used the friction from his face on Pecco’s back wheel to fell the Italian and in doing so smoothed off yet more of the already smooth facial features of the Japanese rider.
Thankfully Takaaki was relatively uninjured but did spend the night in the local hospital’s ICU – mainly to stop Rins from finding him.
Freddy Spencer
It wasn’t just Bagnaia and Rins who had strong words regarding Nakagami’s actions – most of the grid united in their condemnation of the Japanese rider. This was helped in no small part by the fact Taka was away in hospital so they could all be extra brave.
However the main finger pointing was done at the chairman of the FIM MotoGP Stewards Panel Freddie Spencer. The American ex-racer seems keen to allow these kinds of digressions to go unpunished…especially if the rider is riding for his favourite Honda team. The riders believe that by not punishing Nakagami these kinds of incidents will become more frequent…by which time Takaaki’s face will be a smooth as a billiard ball and made up entirely of scar tissue.
MotoGPNews
At Le Mans we dared to state that Jack Miller was Ducati’s only choice to partner Pecco Bagnaia. We pointed out that the Australian’s strong results and undeniable popularity should allow him to remain in the factory team despite his oars not touching the water.
Miller repaid our faith by being rubbish last week at Mugello and again at Catalunya. Thanks Jack.
Aleix Espargaro
Estoril 2006: American gastropod Kenny Roberts Junior was leading an epic three-way battle between Valentino Rossi and Toni Elias. He crossed the line on the final lap in the lead thinking he’d won the race and thus earning his grilled meat bonus. Only he hadn’t. Poor Kenny, confused by also recalling his favourite Chinese Takeaway meal numbers, had mixed up the lap count and finished one lap early. By the time he’d realised it was already too late.
In the end the portly American finished third. We all laughed and thought “with all the technology in the world we’ll never see that happen again…”
We were wrong.
Thanks to a mix up where Aleix couldn’t see his pit board so instead used the circuit’s temperature display to calculate laps remaining the try-hard Spaniard ended the race one lap early. He seemed pleased with his second place – and so he should have as he’d seen off the pesky Primark pairing and cemented himself as the second rider in the two-horse title race.
Only it wasn’t over. We watched in horror as we knew what was happening whilst Espargaro didn’t. When would he click? When would he suss that the riders don’t usually have their shoulders down on the cool-down lap?
When he did he was already in 6th place having lost four places. Once the lightbulb turned on Aleix was able to regain one possibly crucial spot finishing him in 5th place.
The poor Spaniard couldn’t hold back the tears after the race in what was the most painful to watch MotoGP scene since footage of Uccio at the breakfast buffet was leaked to YouTube.
Stefan Bradl
German schnitzel chewer Stefan Bradl is evil Honda’s chief test rider. What Bradl doesn’t know about the RC213V you could write on the back of a used Panzer III user manual. But, along with his mundane testing duties and accordion lessons, the latzhose clad rider is also required to fill in when Marc Marquez is off injured – which means he’s competed in about 95% of the races since 2020.
Stefan is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty rubbish. Never one to trouble the top ten his main objective is to trundle around near the back collecting valuable data whilst humming Das Deutschlandlied. Once the race is over the engineers simply multiply his results by 1.5 to predict how a real racer would have performed.
So quite an easy job then? Clearly not for Stefan. The German rider fell off on the opening lap possibly distracted by trying to recollect his Großmutter’s secret currywurst recipe that she hid in the Führerbunker.
The already miserable HRC engineers had faces like smashed crabs. One even commented “we’ve had Marc in our team for many years now – we do not need any more data regarding on how well our bike crashes.”