By Mat Oxley
With a brief pause in the race calendar this week, it is easy to assume the hosts are taking things slow. In a sport built around speed, however, topics still move fast, and Mat and Peter have a major story to explore.
Looking back at last week, Sunday’s race was immediately followed by Monday’s testing, a significant step in the season. With Valencia approaching and pre-season testing scheduled for December, the timing is important. A new bike is always exciting, but this year’s transition is especially noteworthy: the 1000cc MotoGP machines are being replaced by the next generation of 850cc bikes. Although the smaller displacement may look like a step back, the move is supported by strong reasons. Bikes have become quicker than is safe, creating dangerous situations and making tracks harder to negotiate. At the same time, the level of speed has not always produced the most exciting racing. In this case, change may be the right answer.
The complication is that the new bikes appear to be unusually fast. While official lap times have not been published, the 850cc machines may be more than a second quicker than the current generation. That is surprising, because the regulation change was intended to reduce performance. The engines were made smaller, yet the overall speed has not fallen as expected.
So what is happening? Is it an unexpected engineering breakthrough, or is something else at work? Mat and Peter believe the latter is likely, but understanding it requires looking beyond raw power. On a MotoGP machine, speed is a package deal involving tyres, aerodynamics, weight, electronics and many other performance-related elements. Each of those areas is affected by new rules, and some may now come from different suppliers, making the final result volatile and hard to predict.
Mat and Peter are ready to unpack that full picture and examine the issue from multiple angles.