The start of the Asia-Pacific MotoGP tour is supposed to throw up surprises. When MotoGP arrives at tracks that the teams and factories don’t know as well, the field should be leveled. The established order should be shaken up, and outsiders get a look in.
At the end of the first day of the Indonesian Grand Prix at the Mandalika International Circuit, the first of MotoGP’s so-called flyaways (though that depends on where you depart from), the fastest four bikes are the four Ducati Desmosedici GP24s, the dominant machine of the 2024 season. A Ducati GP23 is in fifth, with two more GP23s in the top ten. Only Alex Márquez, who crashed trying to set a fast lap, languishes outside the top ten.
Normal order very much restored, then. Enea Bastianini just edged out Jorge Martin by four hundredths of a second, after Martin became the first rider to smash the lap record. Franco Morbidelli took a solid third on the second Pramac Ducati, while Bastianini’s Ducati Lenovo teammate Pecco Bagnaia fired in a last desperate fast lap to take fourth.
Does this mean we are on course for a Ducati whitewash? That’s open to question. Based on race pace in timed practice, Jorge Martin is the quickest of the bunch, with a slight edge over Enea Bastianini. But behind the two men who made Misano 2 such a spectacle, the picture is very fuzzy indeed. In part due to the fact that the rest of the grid were switching between the soft and medium rears, meaning they didn’t spend the same time on the medium as Bastianini and Martin.
There is a downside to using the medium rear, though. “It’s not easy because the medium rear needs two or three laps before being ready,” Bastianini explained. “Before this you have to bring some risk to be fast.” The medium is likely the race tire for Sunday, so patience in those early laps will be key.
Both Bastianini and Martin were happy with their pace and their one-lap speed. Martin said there were two corners where he felt he could improve, but overall, he was fast. Bastianini, however, was losing in the second sector, the fast section of rights from Turn 5 to the entrance of Turn 10. “I’m losing usually 0.1, 0.15,” the Ducati Lenovo rider said. “For tomorrow I will work on this situation. For the rest, it will be important to do the perfect lap tomorrow because many riders are so fast, we’re very close together.”
Riders certainly are close over a single lap. Bastianini, Martin, and Morbidelli are all within eight hundredths of a second, and the margin over the Q2 qualifiers is under four tenths of a second. The top 15 are within seven tenths. The smallest mistake is likely to cost a row on the grid, or maybe two.
But at least you stand a chance of passing now. The track is cleaner than it has been in past years, as it is getting used more. “It’s improved a lot,” Luca Marini told reporters. “I heard that they were using a lot the track, also with the Asian competition with motorbikes with different championships, so this you can feel that the track is quite clean. At least on the racing line. So they are doing a great job, all the people who work on the track, so for us it’s fantastic.”
If Enea Bastianini and Jorge Martin were fast on Friday, Pecco Bagnaia had a very rough time in practice. His pace on the medium rear tire was well off that of his two main title rivals. It all felt worryingly familiar. “I was reliving the nightmare again from last year! I think my team too. We were a bit under pressure,” Bagnaia said.
They lost time in the morning trying to use the same electronics strategy as 2023, because of the low grip. But that left him unable to get any acceleration out of the bike. Bagnaia’s team made changes for the afternoon, but that left him with problems in right corners, of which there are a lot around Mandalika.
“I don’t know why, but in the right corners I was struggling a lot,” Bagnaia told reporters. He was a long way off the leaders, he said. “The two with the same tires as me were Martin and Enea. They were doing 1’30.6s. I was doing 1’31.6, 1’31.5s. I was struggling a bit. Everything we tried was not working.”
The solution turned out to be simple. “As soon as we changed the rear tire and put the new soft, everything was fine and working again.” If the bike hadn’t worked with the soft, Bagnaia said, things would have been much worse. Knowing that he could use the soft and was through to Q2 helped soothe his fears.
Bagnaia has a day to sort out his issues with the medium. Saturday will be a day for using the soft rear, in the morning with a used tire to test how long the tire will last, and then for the sprint race. Then hope that he can get the medium to work on Sunday. “For the long race I saw Enea and Martin were doing fantastic laps, also Frankie this morning. So I think we are more like them than what happened today to me. I don’t want to think too much about what happened today.” Sometimes, denial and the hope of a change of fortunes is the best policy.
Bagnaia isn’t the only title candidate to be struggling. Marc Márquez finished the day in seventh, and with some concerns over his pace. While we all wondered at the incredible save he made in the afternoon – notable especially because it was the first time he had done that on the Ducati and on the right side, and the arm he wrecked at Jerez in 2020 that nearly ended his career – Márquez was a good deal less sanguine.
“With Ducati the best one. The best one, and the only one at the moment,” was how the Gresini Ducati rider assessed the save. “Sometimes I’ve had a small save, but those big ones were a long time ago.” Making that save was great, Márquez said, but it pointed to underlying problems. “As I said in the past, a save is good for the show but that means that something is… I don’t feel comfortable and we need to keep improving.”
Part of the reason Márquez is able to make a save like this at Mandalika is because the grip is lower, and the tire lets go more gradually. And normally, low grip tracks are Márquez’ natural hunting ground. But that is not true of Mandalika. “Yesterday I hoped to feel good from the beginning, but I had a question mark because in this track I always struggled a lot,” Márquez said. “And in fact, I struggled a lot in FP1. Then in PR I did the improvement in myself, but also on the bike.” He still needed to improve in Sector 2, where he is struggling, Márquez said.
Márquez, like many other riders, is struggling with the Michelin rear pushing the front. Even though Michelin have brought a special tire to Mandalika, similar to the one in Austria with a heat-resistant casing, it still has a lot of grip. The front tires are harder too, to handle the heat – track temperatures of between 55° and 60°C on Friday – the hard front having a special construction as well.
The hard front has more support, but takes some getting used to. “The shape of the hard, I don’t like it so much, because it feels more difficult to turn in,” Luca Marini said. The soft front works for qualifying, but the hard front is really needed for the race. The trouble in the sprint race is the hard front has less grip, and so the soft rear pushes it even more. Getting the balance right is hard, and that was causing crashes, especially for the KTMs.
“A difficult morning but this afternoon everything felt a bit better, just unfortunate with every time I go to put in some more effort we tend to lose the front,” Brad Binder told reporters. “So, yeah, I need to find out what is going on. Every time I push I keep closing and I can never complete good laps and end up in Q1 each time.”
Pedro Acosta was the only rider on a KTM to make it straight through to Q2, the GASGAS Tech3 rider finishing in eighth. He was happy round half the track, but still had work to do in the other half. “At the moment I feel quite strong in T1 and T3, losing a lot in T2 and T4,” Acosta said. “For this we need to have a look at this and see how I can improve tomorrow myself and also the bike.”
One surprise is that the Aprilias are not as fast here as last year. Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Viñales were first and second after the first day at Mandalika in 2023. This year, only Viñales is through to Q2, with an aesthetically delightful time of exactly one and a half minutes, 1’30.000. Espargaro is down in fifteenth, nearly seven tenths behind Bastianini.
“Difficult day. Like the other races, we are not competitive,” Espargaro said. “We are struggling. I tried my best today but I crashed twice and I was not able really to put a good lap.” The issue for the Spanish veteran was that he couldn’t find a front tire that would work for him.
He still chose to stick up for Michelin, however. “For one time, I would like to defend Michelin,” Espargaro said. “It’s not easy for them to bring a tire that works super good at 60° temperature, so I will not blame Michelin. The conditions here are quite extreme. And even though it’s Friday, we dropped half a second from the record of the track. So I will not say the tires are not working, but it’s just very tricky conditions.”
Viñales was a little more upbeat. “I’m quite happy and optimistic,” the Spaniard said. He had got stuck in traffic on a fast lap, and felt there was more to come. He felt he could be consistent, the improvement in braking from Misano working at Mandalika as well.
But the Aprilia RS-GP still has a very specific weakness, Viñales acknowledged. “It’s so hard to be precise, especially for the time attack,” he told reporters. “Being tight to the inside kerbs, as soon as you start to miss a little bit the lines then the lap time doesn’t come. Precision is very important for them for the future because it will mean a big step.”
Finally, to some optimism. Fabio Quartararo is once again the best non-Ducati, finishing sixth behind Marco Bezzecchi. “Really happy,” the Monster Energy Yamaha rider said. “We have made some good steps, but everybody was super close. I’m not sure if it was for the tire or not but we are closer to the top than the bottom so this is really positive.”
Yamaha have cut power to the M1 engine to improve the handling of the bike, but more than power, where the M1 is lacking is in drive out of corners, Quartararo said. “We went back to make steps forwards and now we have better handling of the bike. Still missing I think, but now we have to find the power keeping the same agility. This is the hard job that Yamaha have to do. Number one is the grip, then power, then electronics.”
There is similar optimism at Honda, despite no one on an RC213V making it through to Q2. At least they were within grasping distance of skipping Q1, both Johann Zarco and Luca Marini less than a tenth behind Maverick Viñales. There is a feeling that HRC has righted the ship and is starting to get it turned around.
The improvements came from the aero package and new swingarm tried at the Misano test. “Turning with the fairing,” is where Marini believed the biggest improvement had come. “Entry phase, we can enter faster now. But we had also a new swingarm that helps us, especially with the entry feeling, the entry feeling is improved a lot. The floating feeling that Honda historically had is a little bit less. So for me, in this phase, the bike has improved so much.” A lot of small improvements from different parts added up to a sizable step forward, he said.
The biggest problem Marini had was still rear grip, or getting drive out of corners. That is the one area that Honda still need to fix. His Repsol Honda teammate had bigger fish to fry, however. “I’m a bit worried about this thing of the vibration, because I’m probably the only one who has it or feels it,” Joan Mir said.
If they could fix the vibration, that would give him a lot of room to drop his lap time, Mir said. “But we have to solve it because it’s disturbing me a lot. Especially I lose four tenths in two corners for this thing. We should understand but the good thing is that the other Honda riders don’t have it. They have a lot less. So it means there is a lot of margin there.”
The good news for the Japanese factories is that they are making progress. But the utter dominance of Ducati, and especially the way the GP24 can extract all of the extra potential of Michelin’s new rear tire, means they have a long way to go before they can think about beating them.
That certainly won’t happen on Saturday. The sprint race looks like being a hard-fought battle between Enea Bastianini, Jorge Martin, and Pecco Bagnaia, with Franco Morbidelli the wildcard. Sunday may be a different kettle of fish, once the riders have to make the medium rear work. Bagnaia has another day to try to address that issue. If he doesn’t, he could find himself slipping even further back.
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