Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1197900
VOLUME 57 ISSUE 1 JANUARY 7, 2020 P117 for Ducati was soon to start a spell of struggles, while Suzuki would slip-slide away by the end of 2012. At the time, Ezpeleta's in- creasingly vociferous fulmina- tions seemed implausible. Thumping his desk and stum- bling over the words, he threat- ened to ban the factories and switch the premier class to cheapo production-based clunk- ers—the notorious CRT (Claiming Rule Team) bikes of 2012. The results of these second- stringers were negligible, although they succeeded in the task of bumping up numbers. Rather surprisingly, their pres- ence also convinced Japan Inc. that Ezpeleta's threats were serious. After just three years, the CRT clunkers were replaced by a complicated two-tier system intended to favor new factories (and cleverly manipulated by Ducati in a successful quest to regain competitive form). More than that, it had brought Suzuki back, and over the next two years Aprilia and KTM, too. Only BMW and Kawasaki stayed away, while now the grids were full with proper prototypes, fielded by six different factories. One consequence has been much closer racing, with some truly memorable skirmishes over the last two or three years—at As- sen, in 2018, the top seven were over the line inside 4.4 seconds, and there was more similar, although not quite as numerous, in 2019. But with one inevitable win- ner, so it seemed. Standardized electronics robbed Honda of their own expensive and effec- tive way of smoothing out their mechanical quirks. But apart from a blip in 2015, Marc Mar- quez had the genius-level talent to ride around problems that left Dani Pedrosa and, last year, even Jorge Lorenzo floundering into retirement. Life, however, presents a pattern of continual change. The pivot-point of a new decade requires one to look forward as well as back. The end of the last one brought a welcome remind- er that nothing lasts forever. As the old challengers vari- ously dwindled, along came Quartararo, hounding Marquez without even requiring a top- grade Yamaha to do it. Marquez remained the GP giant. As the inscription on Ozymandias's broken effigy put it: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." But there is no doubt he can feel the cold wind blowing up around his ankles. Quartararo is com- ing. Believe it or not, however, rac- ing is not just about riding. The biggest change wrought by Dorna, hand in hand with the fake news and instant gratifica- tion of social media, has been to bend what was once sporting enterprise into more of an en- tertainment industry. Grand prix racing is the worse for that only in some selected ways. One is in turning riders from sporting heroes risking their lives into "accessible entertainers" (aka "performing monkeys"), with banal and often plain silly social media questions at press conferences, seriously under- mining their right to respect. Then there is the Instagram/ Twitter axis of moment-by- moment communication, where the most trivial of opinions and statements are within minutes giggling shared world-wide, and as quickly forgotten. Interest in racing and in the people involved is transmuted into a series of fleeting impressions, with any depth left to a handful of "sound- of-my-own-voice" bloggers, expounding on the minutiae of chassis design or tire degrada- tion barely understood by the rid- ers and engineers themselves. To be fair, occasional glimpses of humor or human- ity emerge, especially from the handful of media-savvy rid- ers—Rossi the all-time greatest. (Dovizioso is thoughtful and inter- esting; Jack Miller a fast learner. Asked what he would like to do to improve racing, he replied: "Cut one of Marquez's legs off"). Thankfully, one eternal truth cannot be extinguished. On Sunday, there's still a motorbike race. CN