Late-Braking MotoGP

Nothing but spoilers here

Moto3 was a four-man cage match. Deniz Oncu, my boy Jaume Masia, and teenagers David Munoz and David Alonso spent the second half of the race in a small, select group going very fast in close quarters. During the last two laps it looked as if any of the four could win. At the flag, Masia trailed Alonso by 4/100ths of a second in the best race of the weekend.

Moto2 was another master class by The Next Great Spanish Rider as Pedro Acosta led from wire to wire, followed at the end by Celestino Vietti and Alonzo Lopez. A parade, despite the breathless efforts of Matt Birt and Louis Suddeby to make it interesting. The only remaining question is where Acosta will end up next season in MotoGP, or rather whose seat he will take. KTM may have to break a heart or two or a few contracts to hold onto this guy, who has Alien written all over him.

MotoGP was interesting for a while this weekend, at least until the end of Q2, when Jorge Martin, Marco Bezzecchi and Pecco Bagnaia assumed the positions they would occupy in both the Sprint and Sunday’s main event. Grizzled veteran Dani Pedrosa made the most of his second wild card round of the year with P4 finishes in both races. During the last third of Sunday’s race, it looked like he could snatch the final podium spot from Bagnaia, but the Italian, seriously wounded in last week’s race in Barcelona, dug deep enough to hold onto his 16 points. Martin now trails Bagnaia by 36 points in the 2023 title chase.

Once again, all-time track records fell like bowling pins this weekend, the last European round until the season finale in Valencia. In two weeks, it starts to get real, as the flying circus enters the autoclave, eight races in ten weekends, most of them in equatorial heat. In two weeks the combatants will be in India, with daytime high temps well into the 90’s, foreshadowing what most of the next two months will look like. Thus far, 2023 has been, relatively speaking, all fun and games. The provisional calendar for 2024 includes 22 rounds, with Kazakhstan added to the calendar and Aragon making a comeback.

MotoGP is approaching critical mass, a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ecosystem which will test the limits of machines, men and the laws of physics. Stay tuned.

Tags: Dani Pedrosa, Ducati, jorge martin, KTM, marco bezzecchi, Misano, pecco bagnaia

This entry was posted on September 10, 2023 at 9:34 am and is filed under Dani Pedrosa, Grand Prix Motorcycle Racing, Marc Marquez, Moto, Moto2, Moto3, MotoGP, MotoGP Misano, MotoGP Results. 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.