~ Auto Buzz ~: MotoGP 2015: Italy Wrap-Up At Mugello, Marc Marquez struggled while Jorge Lorenzo gapped the field.

Jorge Lorenzo and Marc Marquez at Mugello

Okay, I have to eat it big. After Le Mans, I predicted that Marc Marquez might be back to full strength at Mugello. Instead, he had to qualify from Q1 and ended up starting a lowly 13th in the race. He shot up to 4th in one lap and by lap 3 was 2nd behind Jorge Lorenzo. And then? Marc battled back and forth with the very fast Ducatis of Andrea Iannone and Andrea Dovizioso. But by lap 5, Lorenzo was clear by a second—and leaving. On the 18th lap, Marquez lost the front into turn 1 and was out. Lorenzo kept to his rhythm, doing more 1:45s than anyone else in the opening laps and then 48s thereafter. Dovizioso, passing Marquez for 2nd on lap 6, was put out by the progressive break-up of his rear sprocket. On lap 10, Iannone on the second super-fast Ducati (special mid-range engines were used here) took over 2nd place from Marquez and held it to the end. Valentino Rossi, starting 8th, took over 3rd on lap 18, and finishing behind him was Dani Pedrosa, impressing everyone by (1) keeping his Honda on two wheels when Marquez did not and (2) coming back so strongly after arm surgery. In 5th was Bradley Smith on the Tech3 Yamaha. And now it gets murky. At Le Mans, Dovizioso had said he thought Marquez was compensating for a problem with his bike. And Marquez, some may recall, said this: “In Valencia, when we did the test after the (2014) race, I said, ‘If it feels like this, we will have problems next year.’”

He clearly has problems this year. “We are trying to fix the engine,” said Marquez. “That is the most difficult because the engines are closed and it is where we have the problem. Because it is too aggressive on the entry and also on the exit of the corner.” This, however, is in direct contradiction to what his team manager, Shuhei Nakamoto, is saying: “The problem is not the engine.” Let’s think back to 2004. The year before, Ducati burst into MotoGP with thunderous horsepower superiority, with Loris Capirossi putting his Duc on the podium at the first race. Shock and consternation! Troy Bayliss was 3rd on one of the red monsters in Spain, Capi 2nd in Italy. And then Capirossi won at Catalunya! You can be sure Honda management orders were clear: Defeat and destroy these upstarts, these pirates! Meanwhile, Rossi disliked Honda’s attitude, which was as though riders made no difference—it’s the bikes that win races. He moved to Yamaha. To counter the horsepower threat from Ducati, Honda built a bunch more power into their bicycle, thereby destroying its major asset—rideability. Honda stayed with that policy of insisting that horsepower would win races until mid-season 2010, when Pedrosa stopped looking as though he were desperately clinging to a 1980s’ mechanical bull, set on maximum. At that point, a new engineering management paradigm was apparently discovered—the Idea that the rider must be able to actually ride the motorcycle.

In 2011, Casey Stoner won 10 races on the newly rideable Honda, and captured the championship. In between, Yamaha won 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2010, and Ducati won in 2007. That gave Honda one championship in seven long years—Nicky Hayden’s single title in 2006. The rest of the time, their bikes were crippled by too much power and too little grace. The harder the engineers try to make more power, the more “features” an engine’s torque curve develops. Specifically, adding valve overlap widens the window through which the engine can benefit or suffer from exhaust pipe wave action. It benefits when a negative pipe wave pulls exhaust out of the cylinder and starts the intake process early, but it suffers when a positive wave pushes inert exhaust gas back through the cylinder, filling the intake ducts. As the rider tries to accelerate smoothly from maximum lean, he needs micro-adjustable smooth torque. But if his engine has been souped-up with extra overlap, it may be climbing steeply out of a flat spot, toward its torque peak. But doesn’t the throttle-by-wire just fill in the flat spot by opening the throttles, and then moderate the peak by closing them a bit? It tries, but the higher the state of tune, the harder it becomes to smooth it out electronically. It can even get to a point at which so much exhaust gas is back-pumped through the valve overlap that the engine misfires and runs rough, especially on low throttle (when there is little mixture to dilute the wave-pumped exhaust gas). Some riders have said Marquez sometimes holds his engine against the rev limiter rather than upshift. Sometimes this is done simply to save time, but another reason can be to keep the engine in the smoothest part of its power; Mick Doohan did this with the Honda NSR500s on occasion, and Mike Baldwin did it with the Yamaha TZ750.

Marc Marquez sitting in the Mugello paddock

If a rider can’t find a set-up and riding style that balances tire loading, front and rear, one of those tires will be overworked and will fade. Marquez said, “I go into the corner and it (the engine) is locking a lot on the rear. That means I am pushing a lot with the front brake because I can only stop the bike with the front wheel, and this means you are pushing on the front tire for the whole race. Then in the last laps the front starts to move (to lose grip) and you’re pushing 100 percent every lap, every corner. You can save it from time to time, but not all the time.” Honda put large and much-admired effort into achieving last year’s superior braking stability, but now we are seeing that it is a house of cards—sensitively dependent on engine variables and their compensating systems. Yes, the slipper clutch and engine braking systems are supposed to handle this, and the smoother downshifts possible with the seamless gearbox help. But engine-braking control is a system that opens a varying whiff of throttle to keep the back wheel from dragging on the way into corners. During braking, this “tail-wheel” touches the pavement often enough to keep the bike pointed. Small throttle openings are the very condition in which over-tuned engines become rough running. Nakamoto says it’s not an engine problem. But his rider says he can’t brake as he must, and that the tire slides and spins on exit. If those are not engine problems and Nakamoto wants us to believe him, it is up to him to explain. The Hondas had the highest top speeds at Qatar and COTA, but no more. That suggests Honda has “turned down” its engines to some degree electronically (they are by rule forbidden to physically change anything in the sealed engines, and engine development is frozen during the season). The 20-liter fuel rule limits how much electronic adjustment is possible. These rules were backed by Honda.

The Ducatis are coming. With every race, riders and engineers are gaining a clearer understanding of how best to set up what they have built so it can make balanced use of its tires. Iannone, despite a painful hairline fracture of his left elbow (the result of a crash during Ducati’s private test at Mugello), was only 5.5 seconds behind after 23 laps. That is solid progress. Do bear in mind that the more Ducati succeeds, the more of their special allowances will be withdrawn; Ducati still has more fuel and more allowed engines than the factory bikes, and it can test and develop in-season. MotoGP is not a horsepower contest. It is a contest to go the 75-mile distance in the minimum time. Any of the three factories in contention is capable of building much more powerful engines than those they are running. The problem is to make power that can be smoothed enough to get maximum tire performance, and do it on 20 liters of fuel (Honda and Yamaha only). Can Honda retrieve this mistake, and avoid repeating the self-defeating horsepower policy of 2004 to 2010? Corporate culture can be very resistant to change! The Yamahas have gained something in power and certainly in braking ability, and are presently the best-balanced package. Lorenzo said: “I was able to leave them behind more easily than I expected and in some laps by six or seven tenths. So when this happens, you know inside yourself it is your day.” Results: MotoGP of Italy

Pos.	Rider	Num	Nation	Points	Team	Constructor	Time/Gap
1	LORENZO Jorge	99	SPA	25	Movistar Yamaha MotoGP	Yamaha	41'39.173
2	IANNONE Andrea	29	ITA	20	Ducati Team	Ducati	+5.563
3	ROSSI Valentino	46	ITA	16	Movistar Yamaha MotoGP	Yamaha	+6.661
4	PEDROSA Dani	26	SPA	13	Repsol Honda Team	Honda	+9.978
5	SMITH Bradley	38	GBR	11	Monster Yamaha Tech 3	Yamaha	+15.284
6	ESPARGARO Pol	44	SPA	10	Monster Yamaha Tech 3	Yamaha	+15.665
7	VINALES Maverick	25	SPA	9	Team Suzuki Ecstar	Suzuki	+23.805
8	PIRRO Michele	51	ITA	8	Ducati Team	Ducati	+29.152
9	PETRUCCI Danilo	9	ITA	7	Pramac Racing	Ducati	+32.008
10	HERNANDEZ Yonny	68	COL	6	Pramac Racing	Ducati	+34.571
11	REDDING Scott	45	GBR	5	Estrella Galicia 0,0 Marc VDS	Honda	+38.553
12	BAZ Loris	76	FRA	4	Athina Forward Racing	Yamaha Forward	+42.158
13	BARBERA Hector	8	SPA	3	Avintia Racing	Ducati	+44.801
14	BAUTISTA Alvaro	19	SPA	2	Aprilia Racing Team Gresini	Aprilia	+50.435
15	LAVERTY Eugene	50	IRE	1	Aspar MotoGP Team	Honda	+53.060
16	DI MEGLIO Mike	63	FRA	0	Avintia Racing	Ducati	+1'15.265
17	ABRAHAM Karel	17	CZE	0	AB Motoracing	Honda	+1'15.381
18	MELANDRI Marco	33	ITA	0	Aprilia Racing Team Gresini	Aprilia	+1'41.840
19	CRUTCHLOW Cal	35	GBR	0	CWM LCR Honda	Honda	DNF
20	MARQUEZ Marc	93	SPA	0	Repsol Honda Team	Honda	DNF