As usual, Qatar delivered a fascinating MotoGP race. Or at least until Marc Márquez pulled the pin, passed Maverick Viñales, and seized what in retrospect looked like an inevitable victory. But the racing was pretty good for most of the race. So it is a crying shame that much of the post-race coverage is dominated by two stories which have nothing to do with how the racing unfolded.
The first, and most important, was the serious injuries suffered by Jorge Martin after crashing in front of Fabio Di Giannantonio and being struck by the VR46 rider’s front wheel. Martin came away with broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung, and is currently being treated in Hamad General Hospital in Doha, where his recovery is thankfully going well, though it will be a long time before he returns to racing.
The second, not quite as important but having a more direct effect on the result of the race, was the penalty issued to Maverick Viñales for falling under the minimum tire pressure demanded by the rules in MotoGP. Viñales, who crossed the line in second, was handed a 16-second penalty, which demoted him to fourteenth.
Firstly, the penalty takes nothing away from Viñales’ performance at Qatar. The Tech3 KTM rider was superb at the Lusail International Circuit, riding aggressively, using the strength of the KTM (top speed) to attack, and managing the rear better than anyone bar Marc Márquez.
Viñales qualified on the second row, got a solid start, and benefited from the clash between Fabio Di Giannantonio and Alex Márquez to get in behind Marc Márquez and Pecco Bagnaia, who were chasing Franco Morbidelli. He passed Bagnaia, Márquez, and finally Morbidelli to take the lead, until Márquez took control of the race and disappeared on the final laps.
Viñales thought he could even win this, becoming the first rider to ever win a premier class grand prix with four different manufacturers. “At a certain point I saw 0.7. I said, ‘Come on, Maverick, you can do it!’ But then I saw with Marquez, he was a little bit controlling the rear and the front tire. I tried at the maximum,” Viñales told the press conference.
To cross the line in second was a remarkable achievement, the Tech3 KTM rider said. “For me, it’s more than a victory. It’s achieved for what is coming. We need to be very happy. We fight against Ducati and we showed our potential with the KTM. So, that’s great.”
But it was not to be. An hour and a half after first official results had been sent out, the FIM Stewards issued a penalty for “running tire pressures lower than the parameters advised by the Official Supplier”.
It wasn’t a complete surprise. Shortly after the riders crossed the line, and while they were still on the cooldown lap heading back to the pits, the FIM Stewards issued a warning that Viñales was under investigation for tire pressure. The full investigation would take well over an hour and a half. But the investigation would confirm that initial report by the FIM Stewards.
Why did the investigation take such a long time?
If the FIM can flash up a warning on the screens less than 2 minutes after the end of the race, why did the penalty take so long to enforce? Wasn’t it unnecessarily cruel to have Viñales up on the podium, then in the press conference, only to have his podium taken away?
The reason it takes so long is to ensure that the FIM Stewards have got it right, and there isn’t an alternative explanation for the pressure discrepancy.
The process is as follows. Throughout the race, Race Direction can monitor the tire pressures of all the bikes as it happens. Each wheel is fitted with two tire valves, and two tire pressure sensors: the official sensor supplied by Dorna, and the sensor preferred by the team. The values from the Dorna sensor are logged on the official datalogger, and sent to Race Direction via the two-way communications system used for dashboard warnings and timing system.
The official Dorna-mandated tire pressure sensor
If the tire pressure value is below the mandatory minimum – 1.8 bar at the front and 1.68 bar at the rear – for less than the required number of laps (60% for a GP, 30% for a sprint race), then an investigation is started.
To this end, the bike is brought into the technical control area, where Technical Director Danny Aldridge will examine the bike. The sensors and transmission system are first checked to see if they are fully functional.
Then, the tire pressure is taken manually, by using a handheld pressure gauge. The readings given by the sensor are then calibrated against the pressure shown on the manual gauge, and adjusted if necessary.
If the data from those readings show the rider was still below the mandatory minimum, then the Technical Director, together with Michelin, can inspect the wheels and tires physically, to ensure there isn’t an external cause for the pressure being too low. This could be caused by a damaged wheel rim, for example, or a damaged tire causing a slow leak.
Only then do the Stewards issue a penalty, after hearing possible explanations from the team.
All of this takes time, and though the rider knows they are under investigation, they still have to go through the normal post-race processes. In the case of Maverick Viñales, that meant interviews in parc ferme (where he was told he was under investigation), podium celebration, post-race interviews, and press conference.
When asked about a potential penalty in the press conference, Viñales waved it away. He hadn’t been looking at his dashboard for a tire pressure warning, he said. “I was just looking forward. I didn’t look anything else. I didn’t have time. I was so concentrated to just look forward.”
He dismissed any concerns about a penalty. “I don’t care what will happen after,” Viñales told the press conference. “I’m happy with the result. I’m happy with the performance. We are very pleased. This is something we needed. This is achieved for the project. Really happy.”
Viñales was not being entirely truthful. Tech3 team boss Hervé Poncharal told fellow Paddock Pass Podcast host that Viñales had warnings on his dash, but had not been able to do anything about it. When Marc Márquez came past, there was no way for Viñales to do what Márquez had done in Thailand and sit behind Márquez. The Ducati Lenovo rider was simply too fast.
How did Viñales end up with a penalty?
That question was answered in one of Dorna’s excellent behind-the-scenes videos, on the MotoGP website and on YouTube. As Viñales’ team were discussing the possible penalty, crew chief Manuel Cazeaux explained that he had set the tire pressure quite low, because he had expected the Spaniard to be stuck in a group.
But that’s not how the race played out. Viñales got lucky gaining two places thanks to the Fabio Di Giannantonio/Alex Márquez clash, then found himself in a much smaller group. He led the race for 5 laps, then after Marc Márquez passed him, the Ducati Lenovo rider dropped Viñales too quickly, leaving the Tech3 KTM rider with a gap of over a second for four laps. By this time, Pecco Bagnaia was 1.5 seconds behind, so with no help to raise tire temperature and pressure, Viñales ended the race 3 laps short of 13 laps above the minimum pressure he needed.
Is the penalty fair?
That depends on how you look at it. The rules are very clear about riders in all classes riding within the advised parameters, which in MotoGP is above the minimum pressure for more than 60% of the laps. It is therefore an infringement of the technical regulations, in exactly the same way as the minimum weight (157kg minus fuel for MotoGP), maximum engine capacity (1000cc), or maximum fuel allowance.
The difference, of course, is that if a MotoGP bike is found to be running below the minimum 157kg weight, or running a 1001cc engine, or using a fuel tank with a capacity of 22.1 liters, they would be automatically disqualified. A 16-second penalty for missing the tire pressure minimum is much more lenient than other infractions of the technical rule.
There is a difference between being below the minimum tire pressure and running a larger than allowed engine. A 1001cc engine would not accidentally find its way into a MotoGP bike. Using a larger engine, or running below the minimum weight, is a deliberate choice by the team. The tire pressure window is so variable that teams have to make a guess at what pressure to start with to remain inside the limit. If they guess wrong, and the race pans out differently, they are punished. As happened with Maverick Viñales.
Why do they need a minimum tire pressure rule at all?
The reason for that is fairly simple. If you run a tire for too long at low pressure, the carcass of the tire can fail. The tire moves too much, which can break the cords which provide structural support inside the tire. Once those cords break, then the rubber can rupture, causing a blowout. Excessive motion in the rubber can also cause it to let go and delaminate.
In the specific case of the Michelin front tire, as the bikes have changed, and before the minimum tire pressure rules, Michelin started to notice damage to the carcass of some of the front tires they examined. The tires never failed, but they were sufficiently damaged that failure could not be ruled out in the future.
This is particularly bad when it is the front tire which is failing. If the front tire suffers a blowout, the bike becomes uncontrollable immediately. And the point at which a front tire would fail would be in the most dangerous point of maximum load, when the brakes are first slammed on at the end of the straight. If that were to happen, the rider would be thrown from the bike at 300+ km/h, and no way to anticipate or prevent the crash.
Why can’t they start with a minimum pressure on the grid?
In other classes, this is precisely what happens. Minimum pressures exist for Moto2 and Moto3, as well as in WorldSBK. But there, the rule is that the pressure should never at any point be below the specific value (e.g. in WorldSBK, 1.65 bar front and rear.)
But MotoGP differs from the other classes in important ways. Aerodynamics is banned in Moto2 and Moto3, and restricted in WorldSBK to the aero fitted to the production bike a WorldSBK machine is based on. MotoGP machines have aerodynamics everywhere, from the front of the bike to the tail.
This matters in two ways. Firstly, the downforce on the front tire is much greater from MotoGP aero. The horsepower race MotoGP has become is in part due to the increased demands of aero, with more power required to push more aero, and more aero producing more force on the front tire.
Secondly, the greater aero on a MotoGP bike produces a much larger area of turbulent air. It is much harder to get clean on the front tire of a MotoGP bike, because the MotoGP bike in front is punching such a massive hole through the air and creating a huge area of dead and turbulent air behind it. The problem is even worse in a group of multiple bikes. That is no good for getting cool air onto your front tire.
The other, and probably bigger difference between MotoGP and the other classes is that the ride-height devices create much bigger loads on the front tire. The ride-height device allows the bikes to accelerate much quicker out of corners and that means they reach higher top speeds and in a much shorter length of straight. Estimates of how much difference the ride-height device make vary, but it is roughly two or three tenths per straight.
So bikes are heading into the corner much faster, and with the rear much lower. When the ride-height device releases under braking, the way the bike pitches releases a lot more load into the front tire as well.
Overall, the front tire of a MotoGP bike takes a lot more punishment than on a Moto2 or a WorldSBK machine. And a lot more load means a lot more heat and a lot more pressure.
What this means is that how the tire pressure for each rider changes over a race can vary enormously over the duration of a race. If you start in the pack and end up fighting all race with five or six riders, your pressure will rise enormously. If you start on pole, hit Turn 1 in the lead, and never see another bike again, the tire pressure will rise much more slowly and gradually.
That is what makes predicting what tire pressure to start with so very difficult. The team has to take data from practice, look at the qualifying position of their rider, evaluate their pace, and set the tire pressure accordingly. If they get it wrong, they end up with a penalty.
And this is what makes it impossible to just enforce a minimum starting pressure on the grid. If Michelin define a minimum starting pressure that is safe for a rider who leads the entire race out on their own (or is quickly dropped from the back of the field and rides alone), then tire pressure for the riders stuck in the middle of the pack will rise too much, and make their bikes too hard to ride. Once you get above 2.3, 2.4 bar on the front, the tire feels like a balloon, riders say, and you lose grip. It gets harder to brake and turn.
But if you start with a pressure that will work for riders in the middle of the pack, then the rider who leads from pole risks damage to their front tire from running too long below a safe pressure. That race lead could turn into disaster, if they suffer a blowout.
At this point, it is worth pointing out that this is not unique to Michelin. As the bikes go faster, loads on the tires get higher, and temperatures and pressures rise. After the infamous 2015 Phillip Island race, Marc Márquez explained that he’d had to back off for a few laps in the second half of the race to allow his front Bridgestone tire to cool off, as it was starting to overheat. Had Bridgestone stayed, they would have faced similar problems.
Will Michelin’s new front fix this?
Michelin have been working on a new front tire, aimed at solving this problem, for a long time. At the Sepang test in 2020, I interviewed Michelin head of two-wheel motorsport Piero Taramasso. “It’s true we are working on a new front, new construction. For sure it will help to rebalance the bike without touching any settings. But unfortunately, will be ready just for 2021. So we will do all the tests in 2020 to be ready next year,” Taramasso said.
Those plans were scuppered when the Covid-19 outbreak put the world, and by extension, the 2020 MotoGP season on hold. It wasn’t until the second half of 2021 that a normal testing program could be restarted. But by that time, the bikes had changed enormously. In 2019, only Ducati had a rear ride-height device, with the other manufacturers just starting to experiment. By the start of the 2022 season, everyone had ride-height devices and aerodynamics had become a much bigger part of the overall package.
Andrea Dovizioso in 2019
Marc Márquez in 2025
This is something that Piero Taramasso pointed out when I spoke to him about the new front tire at the beginning of 2022. “We realized in the past two seasons, that bikes are changing, they are putting more and more weight on the front, with the winglets, and riders are braking very very hard. So the load is changing, so we had to also change the development to adapt to that.” At that point, Michelin were expecting to be able to introduce the new front in 2024.
More changes and a lack of testing – in part an unwillingness by the manufacturers to test, with tire tests being at the very bottom of their list of priorities, just below their third option for the swingarm bolt washer – meant that 2024 became 2025, and after a test in Misano last year, finally 2026. Despite Michelin losing the contract to be official tire supplier for MotoGP from 2027, most of the development work has already been done, so the new front will probably still be introduced in 2026.
The new Michelin front is a little larger, has a rounder profile, a different construction, and more internal volume. It should be better able to handle additional loads, and less sensitive to temperature and pressure changes. It may not completely eliminate the difficulties the teams face setting tire pressure, but it should give them a much wider window in which to operate. Maverick Viñales would have stood a better chance of keeping his podium at Qatar.
Who is to blame for this fiasco?
While all of the above explains how and why we got here, that doesn’t detract from the fact that the whole situation makes MotoGP look rather stupid. Having to wait for nearly two hours to find out who actually finished on the podium is pretty farcical. It leaves everyone in MotoGP, teams, riders, engineers, fans, feeling incredibly frustrated.
So who got us into this situation in the first place? Part of the blame lies with Michelin. When the French tire maker took over from Bridgestone in 2016, they switched from 16.5-inch to 17-inch tires. The reason they gave was to make the transfer of technology between MotoGP and production much easier. The lessons from tire construction were more directly applicable to road tires.
The disadvantage is that a 17-inch tire has a much smaller internal volume than a 16.5-inch tire. The external diameter of a 16.5- and 17-inch tire are almost identical. The 16.5-inch tire is taller. That requires a stiffer construction, but it also means there is more air in the tire. And more air means more load and heat is required to raise the temperature. (For an experiment you can try at home, fill your kettle half full and time it until it boils, then do the same with the kettle three quarters full.)
While Michelin brought some of this on themselves, most of the blame has to sit squarely on the shoulders of Ducati Corse General Manager Gigi Dall’Igna. The technical direction he has pursued with Ducati has brought us to the point where the bikes are simply overpowering the front tire. And the developments have come so fast that Michelin hasn’t had a chance to catch up.
Perhaps blame is the wrong word here. Gigi Dall’Igna has transformed Ducati from an also ran to an utterly dominant force in MotoGP. He has done so by surrounding himself with incredibly smart people, being open to unconventional ideas, and chasing performance in places where others haven’t. He built an organization which delivers performance.
That performance came from understanding that the introduction of spec electronics would require a different approach to managing acceleration. That started with aerodynamics, then ride-height devices and vehicle dynamics. At the same time, Ducati invested in understanding and modeling tire performance. With the end result that the bikes are nearly 1.5 seconds a lap faster than they were seven or eight years ago.
So instead of saying that Gigi Dall’Igna is to blame for the current situation, perhaps it is better to say that he bears responsibility for it. It was Dall’Igna’s approach and Ducati’s engineering brilliance that ended up outpacing the development that Michelin was capable of. And so we are stuck where we are.
Can’t we just scrap the rule?
It is incredibly popular among large sections of MotoGP – fans, media, engineers – to want to scrap the existing tire pressure rule. That is an option, but the price we would pay is the risk of a front tire blowout and related carnage. The thought of a rider suffering a front tire blowout at the end of the front straight at Mugello, or the end of the back straight in Motegi, should be enough to persuade anyone that this needs to be prevented.
The common response to this is that teams are sensible, and riders do not need to be protected from themselves. To answer the first part of this statement, before the introduction of tire pressure limits in Moto2, teams were running rear pressures as low as 0.8 bar (about half the recommended pressure) in pursuit of performance, and destroying tires in a couple of laps.
As for the second part, I would remind everyone of Marc Márquez doing push ups just hours after having surgery on the right arm he broke at Jerez in 2020, then attempting to race again a few days later. A decision that cost him four years of his career. I have been told that in the past, riders have ridden without the compulsory chest protector, and with only the lights of the compulsory airbag fitted to the suit, without the bulky and uncomfortable airbag part.
The current MotoGP tire pressure rule does just that, the question is, is there a better way? I have heard many solutions offered, but have not found any which don’t open an entirely different can of worms.
Will these problems go away when Pirelli take over?
Changing official tire suppliers may well prove to be effective. Especially as the technical regulations for MotoGP will change so radically at the same time.
From 2027, ride-height devices will be banned, aerodynamics will be limited (though only by relatively minor dimension changes) and engine capacity will be reduced to 850cc. All of these things should greatly reduce the loads placed on tires, and give them less to cope with.
Pirelli will also bring a different approach to tire construction. As of this moment, we don’t know exactly what the Pirelli tires will look like. What we do know is that the Italian tire manufacturer will produce tires specifically tailored for MotoGP, rather than modified versions of their superbike tires. We don’t know whether they will be using 16.5-inch rims rather than 17-inch rims, and we don’t know what the width, profile, or other dimensions will be.
We do know that in WorldSBK, front tire pressures are not an issue. Though again, WorldSBK machines are slower, have less aerodynamic downforce, and no ride-height devices. There is far less stress on a tire in WorldSBK than there is in MotoGP.
While the WorldSBK Pirellis appear to be less sensitive to temperature than the MotoGP Michelins, that doesn’t mean they are without their problems. The World Superbike class still hasn’t held a full distance race at Phillip Island without pit stops, due to fears that tires will blister, or worse. That is a feat that Michelin manage relatively comfortably.
So we can’t really say anything useful about what will happen when Pirelli arrive in MotoGP. No doubt they will build the best tires possible to face the challenges of MotoGP. But MotoGP itself is going to change when they arrive, and new riders will bring new performance challenges. Plus, for any Moto2 rider entering MotoGP in 2027, they will have had experience on the Pirellis in the intermediate class.
The arrival of Pirelli in 2027 comes at the start of a new era for MotoGP. So it is way to early to draw any conclusions. We will find out when we get there, and either be celebrating the change or longing for the Michelins. Or more likely, a bit of both.
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