In one sense, Darryn Binder could pencil the 2022 season into the ‘win’ column from basically the very get-go. Expectations for the Moto3 graduate’s MotoGP promotion were not very high, and he comfortably cleared the worst-case fears immediately – the dreaded 105% rule was not even close to being a consideration, his on-track conduct was entirely uncontroversial (in sharp contrast to his Moto3 tenure) and he got into the top 10 very early into the second race.
Both myself and colleague Simon Patterson were firmly in the ‘distinctly unconvinced’ camp when Binder got the gig, but he did not look out of place. He was also impressive in how he carried himself, with no chip on his shoulder despite many having believed his promotion to be ill-conceived – perhaps because he understood where the scepticism was coming from but most likely because he didn’t particularly care.
So, chapeau on all those accounts. But there’s only so long that a MotoGP rider can be graded on a curve given the circumstances of their promotion. And though there will have been no outcry if Binder were retained by RNF for its switch to Aprilia, it didn’t resonate as a massive injustice that the team decided to take a punt on Raul Fernandez instead. Fernandez’s season was hardly better than Binder’s, but he had a lot of built-up credibility to lean back on.
Some did find Binder’s 2023 snub objectionable. “Darryn’s doing a decent job as a rookie,” said Jack Miller, Binder’s predecessor in going Moto3-to-MotoGP.
“I think he’s done a fantastic job – for him not to have a job next year is kind of s***, but that’s the way it goes, it’s cutthroat these days.”
But not everyone was so enamoured. Yamaha managing director Lin Jarvis’s end-of-season assessment was a fairly blunt one.
“Darryn was always a risk, it was a risk promoted by the team,” he told MotoGP.com. “They wanted to go with him because of their experience with him. It was a tall order, to switch from Moto3 to MotoGP.
“And it didn’t work out. He fell too many times. And he was never really able to do what he wanted to do.”
‘Fell too many times’? Oh yes. You better believe it. Binder’s 27 crashes this year led all three grand prix classes and, though the Yamaha M1 is no longer the compliant and rookie-friendly thing it used to be, you can’t help but note that’s two more falls than all the other Yamaha riders combined accrued this year.
You can absolutely get away with that kind of thing. Marc Marquez recorded 27 falls in 2017 – you will recognise that season as one where he became a four-time champion. But when you’re running for a satellite team the piles of scrap metal can’t help but become a financial concern, and it’s not exactly conducive to the learning process.
And the trendline wasn’t particularly impressive. You’d expect a rookie to get the crashing out of the way early, but 17 of Binder’s 27 falls came in the second half of the season. For comparison, for ‘runner-up’ Marco Bezzecchi it was 10 of 23 falls after the halfway point – also not ideal, but Bezzecchi was shielded from criticism by being incredibly fast.
For Binder, who capped off his season with a pretty dreadful four-crash outing at Valencia, the pace didn’t always come.
“I’ve learned so much, that I think I’ve actually maybe forgotten some of the things I’ve learned by the time we got here,” he joked.
“It’s been a long year, a lot of races. Over the year I started to understand that the electronics played a much bigger role on the bike than what the [mechanical] set-up did, quite a lot of the time. Sometimes you could change things on the set-up and you wouldn’t even feel a difference if the electronics weren’t right. So… I think the biggest thing I’ve learned over the year is to understand whether it is actually the bike, the problem that I’m feeling, or whether it’s the electronics.
“And, you know, sometimes I felt like I hit like a wall, got stuck for a while. But then eventually you’d figure something out and make a little step forward again.
“But nothing happened fast. Everything took a lot of time. And unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of time.”
Darryn Binder’s 2022 factfile
Championship position: 24th
Points: 12
Best finish: 10th
Crash distribution:
Friday – 7
Saturday – 13
Sunday – 7
Average fastest weekend lap deficit to other Yamahas
+1.432s to Quartararo
+0.742s to Dovizioso
+0.757s to Morbidelli
+0.682s to Crutchlow
Average race deficit to other Yamahas
+32.000s to Quartararo
+13.210s to Morbidelli
+11.884s to Dovizioso
+8.445s to Crutchlow
Binder looked to be improving through the season, but the trend relative to Fabio Quartararo, Franco Morbidelli and Andrea Dovizioso – if you take single laptimes – appears to be fairly negligible going by correlation metrics.
As a demonstration, he was an average 1.55s of peak laptime off Quartararo in the first five weekends, and 1.25s off in the final five weekends. An improvement, but it’s also still a chasm in modern MotoGP.
The countering arguments would be that other non-Quartararo Yamaha riders haven’t done a tonne better, leading to the perception that only the Frenchman can reliably get something out of the current M1.
If you were keen on a pro-Binder case, you could also cite his ability to make good things happen in the early laps and the fact that Miller himself endured a pretty chastening first season in MotoGP coming from the lightweight class, before blossoming into a really strong premier-class rider despite that best-forgotten 2015 on the Open-class Honda.
But there was definitely no ironclad case for an immediate continuation of Binder’s MotoGP tenure. And it’s probably something he himself realises.
“There’s definitely no bitterness,” he said at Valencia. “I’m very grateful for the opportunity I was given. I feel like I made the most of it.
“I wish I could’ve done better. There’s some races that I look at and I think, ‘Jeez, I could’ve done better, but I didn’t manage to get it together’. But at the end of the day I know I’ve done my best.
“So at least I can leave telling myself ‘you tried’ and at the end of the day I’ve still got another opportunity now, a new adventure again
“This is the way it is in the paddock. You can’t be bitter. There’s always going to be somebody else taking a ride, you taking somebody else’s ride, it’s just the way things work here.
“I wish I could’ve done a bit better and stayed – or even if I wasn’t staying, I still wish I could’ve done better! But I’m happy with how things went.”
Binder will be 25 in January. His MotoGP story doesn’t have to be over. There’s a strong chance it is – it’s just really hard to make your way back onto that grid – but the Kalex he will ride for the Husqvarna-badged Intact GP team in Moto2 next year should be a pretty solid package.
Make some waves there and the right people will see it. It’s all the same paddock, isn’t it?
