They’re off again. Not only the riders – also the racing Big Chiefs of the GP Commission, with the latest proposal for the future of Grand Prix racing as we have never known it.
Pit Bull had been heartened by the switch back to 1000cc, scheduled for 2012. The bikes had restricted bore size (and thence rev ceiling), and promised torquier times, with maybe a return to sliding and give-and-take racing. Best of all, a break with the increasingly despised follow-my-leader 800s. Bin them – as soon as!
But the first 2010 meeting replaced the clean break with a messy three-way stretch. The 1000s will still come, but the unloved 800s will be eligible to race on alongside them (or more likely behind them). And they added a third category – something quite new: Claiming Rule Teams.
This sub-division is for the lumpen underclass, running production-based bikes, but discouraged from expensive development thereof by the notorious Claiming Rule. By which a rival team is entitled to snaffle your fast stuff for the payment of a fixed amount of money.
Thus thoroughbred grand prix racing threatens to become a combination of bargain basement and high-flown irrelevance all moulded into one. Three different types of bikes, all with different performance parameters, trying to make a race of it.
Why not add another class, to make it even more varied? I suggest Minis (convertibles, obviously). They also corner on two wheels, but they lean the other way. What fun.
Claiming Rules have a murky history... mainly concentrated on the old days in the USA when it was part of the AMA rule book. Factory teams from BSA/Triumph and Norton (ah, remember when) used to visit the important Daytona 200-Mile race in some trepidation with their race-winning triples etc back in the 1970s, in the fear that some Hicksville Harley dirt-track team would slap down $2,000 and walk off with their bikes. Never actually happened, though.
Most surprising was factory desire to keep the 800s for longer. This change of heart is credited to Suzuki. Their 800 hasn’t been much good against other 800s. How the hell will it do against proper 1000s? In Australia last year a Honda CBR-based Superbike set a faster race lap time than the factory MotoGP bike in qualifying, on the same day. I reckon in a race between the GSV-R 800 and a breathed-on GSX-R 1000 motor in a racing chassis, my money would be on the Gixxer.
The first tests of the Moto2 bikes at Catalunya were rather a worry. Firstly because they were woefully slow... over four seconds a lap off the 250 times. Then came more news.
These guys are still awaiting the one-size-fits-all engine from Honda, so they were very much run what you brung. Which obviously included engines in Supersport trim, in which they produce maybe five more than the 150bhp promised for the Moto2 engine.
But word is that HRC has fallen far short of that target for engines that will have to run at least three races (Supersport engines are rebuilt race by race). The engines will be delivered at the end of February, and teams are glumly expecting something in the region of 125 bhp.
If true, that means the real race bikes will be even slower than the testers. And that is a serious worry.
While lap times don’t really matter if the racing is competitive, they do if the so-called middle class is slower than the junior 125s.
And in testing trim, they were only eight tenths of a second faster.
More Moto2 worries: all the engines use a control slipper clutch supplied by Suter Racing Technologies of Switzerland. By a happy coincidence Suter also supplies the majority of bikes on the grid... which is a major overlap of interest, if not a direct conflict.
Word is that the clutches don’t actually work that well, and the bikes will be hopping and chattering into the corners much like Agostini on the old MV Agusta.
Meantime the big guys have gone out for their own second (of three) round of pre-season gallops at Sepang. And Rossi was fastest out of the box.
At least one absence was as significant. Jorge Lorenzo fractured his wrist in a motocross training prang, and was at home recuperating from yet more orthopaedic surgery. And luckless Nicky Hayden was also slow, himself still recuperating from anti-arm-pump surgery that he really should rather have had done before Christmas rather than after the first test.
The moral of the story? Most medical advice is the same: if you don’t want to get hurt, don’t go motorbike racing.
