Returning to something after five weeks without it is rarely something straightforward. When the thing which is being returned to is racing at the highest level, in MotoGP, the complexity increases, and further still when the weather makes its way up the character list.
On Friday at Silverstone for the 2023 British Grand Prix, it never rained. But it was cold. 16C is not a bad day in Britain, generally speaking, but overcast skies meant the track temperature barely exceeded the ambient. This meant generating tyre temperature, especially on the front, was difficult, and this difficulty was increased further by the kind of strong wind that is typical of an old airfield such as Silverstone. This difficulty conditioned every aspect of Friday.
For Johann Zarco, the difficulty in generating tyre temperature meant he did not run as much as he would have liked in order to save soft Michelin tyres - the only ones which were trustworthy, from a temperature perspective.
“It’s much cooler than last year,” Zarco said. “So, it’s tough to be very quick. You need some confidence, you don’t feel so much the front tyre, and, for me, this takes time - to get the confidence.
“In the afternoon, I did not want to put the medium [compound front tyre] because it was still too cold for me,” Zarco continued. “So, I was a bit limited: I could not do many laps on the old soft tyre from the morning, but I did not want to put too many laps on the second soft tyre,” the reason being to save the life of the second soft for the time attack at the end of Practice.
Fabio Di Giannantonio took a different approach to Zarco, and used medium-compound tyres when he did not want to put more mileage on valuable softs. “It’s scary,” the Italian said when asked how he felt with the tyres in the low temperatures. “Also because in Practice we had to use the medium on the front. Luckily, everything was fine, but it was quite scary to arrive at the fast corners with the front that you don’t know if it’s warm or not.” Because, as Di Giannantonio said, “everything was fine,” the Gresini Ducati rider was able to conclude that the medium front would be an option if the conditions were warmer later in the weekend.
Despite the low temperatures generating high value in soft tyres, Jorge Martin noted that, at least at the rear, the medium-compound will likely be necessary for both Saturday’s Sprint and Sunday’s Grand Prix. “The race? No way,” Martin replied when asked whether the soft rear would last the full 20 laps on Sunday. “And the Sprint,” Martin continued, “is also at the limit, because [after two laps with the soft tyre] already I felt a lack of grip, so maybe the Sprint will be also with the medium.”
Pol Espargaro had additional challenges of his own, as he made his return from the numerous injuries he sustained at the season opener in Portugal. “I think it was one of the most stressful days in my whole career. In this place, where it is a fast track, changing direction at high speed with this bike- my brain was not as fast as everything was coming.”
Espargaro had been out of MotoGP for over four months by the time he swung a leg back over his GasGas-branded KTM RC16 on Friday morning, and the combination of the mental and physical challenge of riding a MotoGP bike was something he needed to get used to again.
“Mentally, I’m destroyed,” Espargaro said. “You are asking a lot of yourself, but you are not able [to do what you’re asking]. And it’s not just about the riding, I need to face certain moments where I feel that I’m going to high-side or something like that. A lot of things go into your mind, and you need to block them, and it’s not easy at all.”
So demanding was this return to riding, Espargaro had to sleep between the practices. “I never sleep in between the sessions, and I needed to take one hour of sleep [after FP1] because I was overloaded.”
“But, apart from that, physically I’m not ready,” Espargaro continued. “There are muscles that look very good in the mirror, for the pictures in the summer, but then you come here and you realise how tough it is, and there are muscles that you train while you are riding, so it is something that needs time.”
There were also additional hurdles for Takaaki Nakagami, to whom Honda had entrusted the testing of a new fairing - relatively speaking a copy of KTM’s top wings, with the lower plane curved sharply downwards at the end - but the weather also made this complicated. “The tyre temperature was really difficult, but Silverstone is always like this,” Nakagami said.
The fairing itself was inconclusive. “As you can see from outside it’s a massive difference,” Nakagami, who finished Friday in 20th, said. “A lot more downforce, as you can see. In some areas it’s quite a positive feeling, we can increase the torque [because the new fairing reduces the wheelie]. But, some areas, some sectors, some corners, still we need to adjust the bike balance, [which] is still really difficult to understand because [there is a] completely different feeling of the bike. It changed a lot even in the straight, in the braking, mid-corner, exit is completely different feeling of the bike balance.” The new fairing is such a radical diversion from what HRC was using until now in 2023 that the rest of the bike does not work with it and must be adapted to it in order to extract the most from it. Honda needs to decide if redesigning the bike to match this fairing is worth the time and the work.
The conditions also caught out Franco Morbidelli. He had an off-throttle high-side on a cold tyre on the way into Luffield in FP1, which was repeated - with exaggeration - by his compatriot Marco Bezzecchi in the afternoon. Unlike Bezzecchi, though, Morbidelli could benefit from the new weekend format after his crash. The lack of consequence in the context of Q1/Q2 seeding that FP1 now holds meant that Morbidelli was able to get back to the factory Yamaha garage and then head back out on medium tyres, and ease back into riding, rather than going immediately into a time attack.
When asked if he felt the new format made a difference, Morbidelli said “Yes, for me yes, because I had a crash this morning, and if it was the usual format I should have gone back to the pit box, go back out, and make directly a time attack.
“Instead, I could go out with the same tyres, medium tyres, and take it more gently, and that was better, I was happy about that.”
While it did not rain on Friday, it seems almost certain for Saturday. Storm Antoni reportedly awaits, and the rain it seems destined to bring to Silverstone should, in theory, favour some riders over others.
However, as Alex Marquez pointed out, it is more complicated than that. “I think rain is always a question mark,” Marquez began, “because you never know how will be the grip, how will be the feeling, and from every track the feeling can change a lot.” The only wet sessions so far in 2023 were in Argentina, where Marquez qualified on pole and finished third, but where the rain was combined with warm temperatures. In Silverstone, the latter fact from Argentina will almost certainly not be true.
