The opinions expressed by Mr. Allen do not reflect the views of the editorial staff here at Motorcycle.com. In fact, we would be surprised if they reflect the views of anyone remotely familiar with the sport.
Grand prix motorcycle racing – MotoGP to aficionados – is a Eurocentric parlor game for the rich and not-so-famous. It involves undersized riders holding on for dear life to 1000cc bikes with astonishing power-to-weight ratios on road courses at venues on four continents, several of which are in countries one is not anxious to visit. It is almost impossible to find on American television. Riders receive trophies for finishing third. It is the little brother of F1. It is NASCAR’s mentally challenged foreign cousin.
However, for the few of you still reading, at its best, MotoGP is the best racing on the planet, a series of hair-raising encounters between riders and machines traveling at well over 100 mph in unbanked turns, separated by inches, with the difference between winning and not winning often measured in a few thousandths of a second. (By comparison, the autonomic blink of an eye takes around 100 milliseconds.)
These guys are fast. Ridiculously fast. Incomprehensibly fast. The engines on the big bikes retail for around a million dollars per, rotate at, like, 17,000 rpm, and are built to tolerances that defy description, at least with the few words in my vocabulary. The noise they make is equally difficult to describe, resembling, in my mind, the sound a nuclear-powered pencil sharpener might make.
Round One of 2023 lifts off this weekend in Portimao, Portugal. Let the games begin.
A Look Back at 2022
2022 was the year Italy completed a hostile takeover of the premier class. Italian manufacturer Ducati Corse won its first world championship since 2007. An Italian rider, Francesco (Pecco) Bagnaia, won it all for the first time since the legendary Valentino Rossi in 2009. Ducati won the constructor’s title for the third consecutive year, in part because they had more bikes on the grid – eight out of 24 – than any other builder, placing five of them in the top nine. Bagnaia, left for dead in mid-season, trailing defending champion Fabio Quartararo by 91 points, mounted the largest comeback in history for the title, sealed at the season finale in Valencia. It was the most competitive, most compelling season in recent memory.
Moto2 is, in layman’s terms, the junior varsity in MotoGP. All the bikes are powered by 765cc Triumph Triples, with teams providing the rest of the components from various manufacturers. Spaniard Augusto Fernandez took the 2022 championship in Austrian monolith KTM colors, ahead of Japanese rider Ai Ogura (Idemitsu Honda Asia team) and Spaniard Aron Canet (Flexbox HP40 team). Fernandez was exceptionally strong in mid-season, at one point winning four races out of six. Ogura, his main challenger during the final two months, choked at season’s end, scoring five (5) points over the final three rounds. Fernandez was the only Moto2 rider rewarded with a promotion to MotoGP for 2023. He will ride for the #2 KTM (GasGas) team, ensuring a second division finish.
I forgot to mention Pedro Acosta, the young Spanish fast mover who will, according to my forthcoming prediction, take the Moto2 title in 2023 and graduate to MotoGP in 2024 where he will soon become A Force to be Reckoned With.
Torturing the analogy, Moto3 is, like, the MotoGP freshman team, although the 250cc bikes are fast and loud. Lap times are a few seconds slower than Moto2, which are, in turn, a few seconds slower than the premier class MotoGP bikes. Moto3 is annually populated by a cadre of upwardly mobile teenagers and a roughly equal number of grizzled veterans who have embraced The Peter Principle and who will never see the saddle of a MotoGP machine. The 2022 title was won by Spanish teenager and rising KTM star Izan Guevara, who will turn 19 this coming June. The Next Great Spanish Rider soundly beat teenaged teammate and countryman Sergio Garcia and Italian Dennis Foggia (Honda) for the title. All three were promoted to Moto2 at season’s end.
2022 Moto3 rookies who had notable seasons include Daniel Holgado, who turns 18 in April, and my personal favorite, David Muñoz, who will turn 17 this year and may be the Next Next Great Spanish Rider.
Premier Class Teams and Riders
For 2023, moto-social Darwinism and economic constraints reduced the number of teams from 12 to 11 and, accordingly, the number of riders from 24 to 22. The riders and teams play musical chairs every year in MotoGP. A few get promoted from the underclasses, others change teams, seeking greener pastures, and the dregs get consigned to the rubbish heap. This year, mixing metaphors, the deck was re-shuffled more than usual due to the demise of the factory Suzuki team. And while only one rider, Augusto Fernandez, had his ticket punched from Moto2 into MotoGP, a larger number than usual headed for the other side of the hill, as follows:
- Yamaha shut down their hopeless satellite team and Aprilia added a hopeful one. Yamahan Darryn Binder was shown the door, while Andrea Dovizioso retired. Aprilia recruited former KTM pilots Raul Fernandez and Miguel Oliveira, to rep their new #2 team. The two riders’ prospects appear to have improved with the switch. Aprilia, having recovered from the loss of Gigi Dall’Igna to Ducati ten years ago, is an ascendant program of late.