After two years of hugely restricted technical development thanks to the emergency measures introduced when the COVID pandemic began, MotoGP teams have finally had chance to throw everything they want (and can afford) to at their bikes ahead of the 2022 season.
We had an early hint of what that meant for the competitive picture in the Jerez test that rounded off 2021 running, but this weekend at Sepang is when we’ll really see the revised state of play as 2022 testing begins at the Malaysian Grand Prix following the ‘shakedown’ running earlier this week.
Here are seven key questions that should at least begin to be answered in the days ahead.
HAS HONDA FINALLY MADE UP FOR ITS WINTER 2020 ERRORS?
Marc Marquez has already described Honda’s 2022 MotoGP bike as a different concept, and it needed to be.
The once-dominant team’s tumble down the championship across the last two seasons was of course largely due to Marquez’s injury, but that took some focus away from the competitiveness of its bike.
On what proved to be the final day of running before COVID paused everything for five months in 2020, Honda was frantically swapping bodywork packages around in Qatar pre-season testing because its aerodynamic set-up simply wasn’t working.
It finally made a breakthrough at the last moment by putting its 2019 wing package back on the 2020 bike.
And then the rule freeze meant it was stuck with an aero package cobbled together on the final test of 2020 winter testing, running an unrefined adaptation of its 2019 wings ever since.
So it’s no surprise that the rather Yamaha-style aero package seen at Jerez last year is very different.
A more powerful engine is also expected. But will its power delivery be manageable?
The focus over the two tests ought to be less on what Marquez is saying and more on the comments from his team-mate Pol Espargaro. After a poor first season at Honda, Espargaro had a big shopping list of changes for the winter.
While Honda can always rely on Marquez to wrestle pretty much any bike to the front when fit, happier noises from Espargaro would show it’s finally managed to create a design that doesn’t need a once-in-a-generation superstar to make it work.
HAS YAMAHA LISTENED TO QUARTARARO?
Champion Fabio Quartararo made clear post-season that Yamaha’s rivals needn’t be shy about approaching him for 2023, and was disgruntled with his first impressions of the 2022 package at Jerez.
His key demand is more power. Understandable given how spooked he and others were by Ducati’s stunning form in the second half of 2021, but a difficult demand to accommodate – you can’t just plug more power into a MotoGP bike without knock-on consequences for the rest of the design concept.
Yamaha’s 2020 valve problems ironically showed how good its wider engine reliability situation was given that healthy engines (especially Franco Morbidelli’s) had to complete twice their intended mileage as a result. It has reliability to spare, so in theory could push the limits more on power.
But it’s not that long since Valentino Rossi and Maverick Vinales were complaining about Yamaha’s power delivery being too peaky and having to do urgent electronics work when the team did go for a straightline speed boost. It ultimately hurt more than it helped.
Yamaha riders complaining about not having enough power but then still qualifying near the front and controlling a race from lights to flag has been a MotoGP trend for well over a decade.
We’ll see in testing whether the team has found a way to give its young champion what he wants, or whether it’s been busy convincing him that what he’s got is what wins titles for Yamaha.
DID KTM JUST NEED A CHANGE OF PEOPLE?
There’ll be plenty of development at KTM going into 2022 after a season in which it won races but had bafflingly poor form outside its highs.
But it’s the atmosphere in the squad that might be more important, as it became clear over the winter that so many problems weren’t to do with KTM’s bike, but how it was operating and a consequent failure to get the best out of what it had, particularly in human terms.
The arrival of former Pramac boss Francesco Guidotti to replace Mike Leitner is designed to solve that.
With KTM determined to convince superstar rookie signing Raul Fernandez to resist Yamaha’s interest and stay in its fold, and also seemingly keen to hang on to the out-of-contract Miguel Oliveira beyond 2022, there will probably also be early evidence of its efforts to prove satellite team Tech3 is just as attractive a destination as the works line-up (where Brad Binder is already tied down long-term).
Tech3 has more factory engineers on hand this year and KTM’s stance is that the latest parts go to the fastest riders, regardless of which garage they’re in.
HAS MARQUEZ TAKEN THE LAST FITNESS STEP?
Last autumn’s head injury and consequent repeat of Marquez’s 2011 vision problems interrupted the trajectory of his already long and arduous recovery from his July 2020 Jerez crash.
He comes to testing with full medical clearance on the vision front, though, and having had three more months to work on his arm.
Given that even in his heyday Marquez’s winters were often disrupted by injuries (the long-term shoulder problem and even a pre-season broken leg, for instance), it would be an unusual experience to see him tackle testing fully fit.
Even as he won at Austin and Misano last year there were still plenty of question marks about whether he was really back to his ultimate best and where his physical condition factored in. Two of his 2021 victories came at tracks where he was always near-unbeatable, and the other was inherited.
Marquez doesn’t go into any MotoGP season without aiming for the title, though. He’s in from the start this time, Honda has a massively revised bike, and on paper the medical signs are good. Does he go straight back in as a likely title favourite alongside Quartararo and Pecco Bagnaia?
HAS SUZUKI CAUGHT UP?
The 2020 titles were a bit of a glorious anomaly for a team with fewer resources than its main factory rivals and which was particularly badly hit by COVID as the way its operations are set up across Europe and Japan was painfully stymied by travel restrictions.
Given that, it’s a little miraculous that Joan Mir not only managed to be 2020 champion but perhaps even more impressively took third in the points last year.
His desperation for more development progress was very clear in 2021, though, and he has to be a target for other teams heading towards 2023.
The expectation is that Suzuki is too small an operation to really give him what he wants.
But conversely, after Mir was very vocal about Suzuki’s lack of performance relative to Ducati in last year’s final races, he was more encouraged when he tried its new package at Jerez.
Suzuki was out testing with its 2022 engine very, very early last year, highly experienced test rider Sylvain Guintoli (who has a usefully similar riding style to Mir) has completed enormous mileage and what Suzuki lacks in resources it sometimes makes up for in boldness and how effectively it maximises its package.
On the other hand, it’s still only going to be on version two of the ride-height device concept, when rivals have long since stormed on with perfecting and automating theirs. It will take a lot of resources for Suzuki even to catch up, let alone get ahead.
IS TOP ROOKIE WHO EVERYONE EXPECTS?
The answer to the question above is: yes, probably.
Fernandez is the man getting all the headlines given his startling form in his sole Moto2 season and all the signs from Jerez and the shakedown test are that the Tech3 KTM rider is going to be every bit as impressive as expected in MotoGP. Seeing him properly up against the full field will be fascinating.
His team-mate Remy Gardner is still a little compromised by the fractured wrist he sustained in training.
At the other manufacturer running two rookies – Ducati – VR46’s graduate Marco Bezzecchi looked more at home in the shakedown after a shaky start at Jerez. But Gresini’s Fabio DiGiannantonio, who’d exceeded expectations at Jerez, lost a lot of running to illness in the shakedown this week.
Perhaps the most impressive rookie at the shakedown, though, was the man with least expectation on him. RNF Yamaha’s controversial straight-from-Moto3 signing Darryn Binder did well considering what he’s up against.
He has a theory that his size is going to be better suited to the MotoGP bike and his long and only moderately successful Moto3 career was not an accurate gauge of what he can do.
The shakedown was an early hint Binder might be right. He’s super-honest, thoughtful and careful in his debriefs, so we’ll be able to get a more accurate read on his progress than some of the other rookies might offer.
HAS DUCATI GOT ANY MORE SURPRISE TRICKS?
Aerodynamic wings, the ride-height adjusting device – Ducati has been MotoGP’s big innovator of recent years and it would be little surprise if it pulled something else unexpected out of the box in 2022 testing.
Given the form it reached in late-2021, though, it now has less need to.
There’s a degree to which all those Ducati innovations were ultimately technical workarounds necessary to cope with a fundamental bike flaw. The Desmosedici is low, fast and powerful, but every other element has been a compromise – and ultimately (if you discount Marquez-based heroics) modern MotoGP championships are won by the best balanced bike. All Gigi Dall’Igna’s strokes of technical genius have been ways to help manage the power from that monster engine.
Dall’Igna will have enjoyed dropping hints that Ducati’s found even more power ahead of 2022, though. That will certainly have been playing on Quartararo’s mind on his flight to Malaysia.
