Winners
Enea Bastianini
Enea is nicknamed “La Bastard” due to him being a lazy bastard that traditionally only turns up for the weekend halfway through the race on Sunday. But when he does finally turn up he is usually the fastest rider on the grid. “Oh why didn’t you do that all weekend?” we find ourselves yelling at the screen as he ‘almost’ wins another race.
Experts tell us that Bastianini is the champion at preserving tyres – which is very believable given his lack of work ethic. But at Silverstone he did turn up. Even in qualifying.
The result was a stunning double weekend win. Horrah for tyre managed races!
La Bastard now sits just 49 points behind the championship leader. If he finds enough Pro-Plus to get his arse out of bed on a morning could he now be a championship challenger? No. But it’s good to try to imagine these things happening.
Desmosedici GP24
What no fan wanted at the end of the 2023 season was for the Ducati to make another huge step ahead of their withering competition. Luckily that didn’t happen. Sadly instead of making a ‘huge step’ the cheeky Italians chose to make a ‘gigantic step’.
It seems the Desmosedici GP24 is the only bike able to capitalise on Michelin’s new ‘20% less beret’ tyres.
Ducati have now had seven continuous podium lock-outs – mostly with their GP24 bike. It’s a new record – and one that none of us are particularly thrilled with.
Fabio Di Giannantonio
At the end of last season it looked like Fabio’s MotoGP career was all but finished – a bit like Jack Miller’s at moment. He didn’t have a ride and the only one available was at the VR46 team. However because Di Giannantonio wasn’t attractive enough to be invited to the Rossi Neverland Ranch for a suspicious sleepover he wasn’t wanted by the team.
Thankfully Dorna waded in and, thanks to some under-the-table threats, VR46 Racing reluctantly took Fabio on for the 2024 season.
And the Italian’s been pretty decent. Crucially he’s achieved almost double the points of his once-rated teammate (and VR46 poster boy) Marco Bezzecchi. Such pace hasn’t gone unnoticed and from being almost cast-out of the sport Fabio is set to receive the latest spec Ducati in 2025.
Losers
KTM
The Austrian bunch really can’t get the new Michelin rear tyre to work. Super stoat Pedro Acosta was once again KTM’s best rider at Silverstone but even he struggled to break into the top ten.
Franco Morbidelli
After a successful spell of ‘not terrible’ races by the luckiest man in MotoGP it’s good to have such a familiar face back in the ‘losers’ section.
The Ducati GP24 was an absolutely unstoppable force at Silverstone piling through the competition like local rioters through a police station. If you had Ducati’s latest bike then you were guaranteed to be in for a shout of a win…to the point that even Bradley Smith texted in (he’s not on WhatsApp yet – baby steps) believing he could have landed a top ten finish. Unless you were Franco Morbidelli.
Despite a huge, somewhat unfair advantage, poor Franco was able to squander it in his typical style.
Problems started in qualifying when, despite being on one of the only four bikes with the aforementioned insane advantage, the Italian seat-hogger failed to make Q2 and ended up qualifying in 13th.
From this mid-field position Morbidelli started the sprint race keen to make up positions – and did this by cunningly choosing not to slow down into the first corner whilst everyone was braking. Predictably the foolhardy plan backfired as the Italian smashed into the sulking Marco Bezzecchi who was minding his own business and reminiscing about the time people thought he was a championship winning rider. Both VR46 riders were instantly out of the race.
Somehow, amusingly, Franco found a reason to blame Maverick Vinales for braking correctly which caused him to swerve to avoid him and crash into Bez.
However the stewards were having none of such nonsense and for ‘being fundamentally terrible’ Morbidelli was given a double long lap penalty for the main race which, along with his speed, basically ruled him out of finishing anywhere respectable.
Racing
Aero has essentially broken MotoGP. Oh how we used to laugh at F1. These days MotoGP riders know they have to preserve their tyres and the best way, it appears, to do this is to ride 20 metres behind the next rider to avoid overheating issues.
Silverstone was another great demonstration of boredom as for the first two thirds of the parade all racing was kept at a minimum in an attempt to save tyre life. And when we were finally blessed with the end section of the race the riders that had preserved their tyres the best overtook those that hadn’t.
Ducati’s shitty retro livery
Come Sunday and everyone seemed to be bumming the 75th anniversary liveries but where they actually that good? Or were they just different? The best paint jobs were back in the days when smoking was awesome, men couldn’t get pregnant, and the bikes were just a huge cigarette packet advert.
Sadly all that changed when the spoil-sport governments decided to make smoking bad for us which forced motorsport sponsorship to go lame.
For the 75th anniversary all the teams were told by Dorna to use a retro livery. Some were good, most were just different but factory Ducati…
Ducati didn’t really take this idea seriously and delivered the dullest ‘special’ known to mankind. With endless possibilities the Bolognese based designers thought a ‘red with a bit of white’ livery would remind us of every single other boring paint job Ducati have used through the years.
Finally a shout out to VR46 racing who, using all their bestestestest imagination, decided their one-off livery would honour the guy that owns the chuffing team. Oh how we never saw that coming.
Trackhouse MAGA Aprilia
A super specially 75th livery was unveiled by Trackhouse on Sunday with the faces of the bygone American greats of GP racing.
Sadly that all lasted for about two-shakes of a lamb’s tail when one of their riders fell off and collided into the other one. No prizes for guessing who the unlucky innocent party was.
Seeing Wayne Rainey and chums go skirting off through the gravel was not something particularly pleasant.
Luca Marini
The usually terrible Marini was actually slightly not-as-terrible as usual at Silverstone and managed to score a point in the main race.
However, there was a problem. Given that Marini is typically last his engineers, like always, set up his tyre pressures believing he’d be following the pack. But at Silverstone Rossi’s half-decent half-brother somehow managed to find himself ahead of fellow Honda struggler Token Nakagami.
This unforeseen occurrence screwed up Luca’s tyre pressures that ultimately led to him receiving a tyre pressure infringement and another for having ‘weirdly thin’ arms. The penalty successfully dropped Marini back out of the points and promoted Token instead.
Universal order was restored.