Late-Braking MotoGP

© Bruce Allen

Oliveira cruises to Pyrrhic victory 

Sunday’s Moto2 season finale was just one of those races. Polesitter Luca Marini got tangled up with two MotoGP promotees, Pecco Bagnaia and Joan Mir, and just like that three of the day’s strongest favorites were scootering back to their garages, their day and bike trashed but their futures as bright as ever.  

Trouble in Turn 2, Lap 1

With those three out of the way, Miguel Oliveira caressed his KTM to an easy win, having already lost the War of 2018 to Bagnaia. The weather sucked. The 97,000 fans saw a lot of crashes all day and got soaked for their trouble. If they arrived in time to watch the earlier Moto3 race they saw history being made—more on that later. Otherwise, it was a high-side festival in the wet with 29 seconds between first and fourth positions. A demolition parade, if you will. Very un-Moto2-ish.

Alex Marquez, the struggling Estella Galicia rider, younger brother of The King, won the Moto3 championship in 2014 and looked to be, as rumored, at least as fast as Marc. He has since spent the last four seasons underperforming in Moto2. He has made a career, at this point, of crashing out of contention, and is the main reason his team went winless in 2018 for the first time since The Armistice.

Marquez led much of the day, at home, looking the way he was always supposed to look. Having gone through on Oliveira into the lead on Lap 6, he found himself under constant pressure from the KTM #44. He again demonstrated how rain magnifies errors, turning them from twitchy little momentary heart-stoppers to crash and burn road rash, with river rocks in your nether regions. Our firm expectation that he would crash was met on Lap 14 in Turn 14, a slide-off which allowed him to re-mount and ultimately finish third, so great had been his lead at the time. Iker Lecuona accompanied Oliveira through and captured second place. (Having rarely seen Lecuona’s name written, I always heard the Brit announcers saying “Ikaleukawana” which, as you might expect, reminded me of the old Hawaiian rider Kamanawannalaya.)

So the last race of the Honda era of Moto2 was a bummer for pretty much everyone but Oliveira and KTM. The records have been set, the memories burned in, and a new era begins next week as the Triumph 765cc three-cylinder monsters take their place, a whole new ball game commencing in 2019. The four graduates into MotoGP—Bagnaia (Pramac Ducati), Oliveira (Tech 3 KTM), Mir (Suzuki Ecstar) and Quartararo (Petronas Yamaha) will move on up the food chain, leaving as Moto2 favorites guys with names like Brad Binder, Lorenzo Baldassarri, Luca Marini and Xavi Vierge to slug it out for the championship. They will be joined by Moto3 fast movers Jorge Martin and Marco Bezzecchi, presumably keeping Moto2 (and the Red Bull Rookies Cup) healthy and thriving. The racing is, on occasion, astonishing.

We will keep you posted on happenings in Moto2 during testing and the off-season. It’s about time.

Tags: Alex Marquez, Honda, iker Lucuona, KTM, miguel oliveira, Moto2, Racing

This entry was posted on November 19, 2018 at 8:33 am and is filed under Grand Prix Motorcycle Racing, Honda, Joan Mir, Moto, Moto2, Moto3, MotoGP, Motogp testing, MotoGP Valencia, Motorcycle Racing, Racing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.