When MotoGP has an attritional race littered with crashes (especially when it happens in dry conditions not wet) you expect to see names from up and down the field listed as DNFs at the end.
But that’s not what happened in the Portuguese Grand Prix, where a large number of the high-profile victims of the Portimao circuit came from the sharp end of the grid.
Last year’s championship runner-up Alex Rins crashed his Suzuki while chasing down eventual winner Fabio Quartararo. Then pre-race points leader Johann Zarco – who inherited second when Rins fell – crashed out himself on the very next lap.
Two dramatic crashes in two laps! 😱@Rins42 and @JohannZarco1 both saw a potential podium slip through their fingers late on! 💢#PortugueseGP 🇵🇹 pic.twitter.com/JSkXK8vbov
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) April 18, 2021
Add in runaway 2020 Portimao race winner and local hero Miguel Oliveira, pre-season title favourite Jack Miller and nine-time grand prix world champion Valentino Rossi. They were all also on the list of those who failed to make it to the chequered flag unscathed – a veritable who’s who of broken bikes and damaged egos.
So what went wrong to leave so many big names in so much trouble?
Track temperatures were higher for the race than they had been all weekend and with slightly different surface conditions on Sunday compared to the two previous days, Rins believes that made a key difference.
“It’s difficult to explain, but it’s true that today in the warm-up, when I watched Moto3, it looked like Qatar!” said Rins on Sunday when asked by The Race to explain the crashes.
“There was a lot of dust on the track. Lap by lap the line got better, but I was talking with Vale afterwards, and he said that he analysed his crash and it was the same as mine, the same as the lap before.
“I’m not saying that the Michelin tyres are going bad, because I had a good pace and was there with Fabio, but maybe the track condition wasn’t there at 100%.”
That’s an assessment that Rossi agreed with, while admitting that he doesn’t think that his own crash out of 11th place was ultimately caused by anything other than rider error.
“The corner is very demanding for the front tyre,” he said, “and when it was very hot the medium suffered a lot.
“I arrived normally, but I lost the front. For sure something happened, but I don’t think it was anything on the track.”
The dust and hotter track was also perhaps part of what caught out Jack Miller, with the Australian Ducati rider crashing from sixth early in the 25-lap race.
He admitted he made a mistake just at the wrong time in terms of track and tyre conditions.
“I was right at the peak point in the [tyre] pressure – you always get like a spike and then it sort of levels off and I was right at that point, and Aleix [Espargaro] braked semi-early – all of the weekend I’ve been one of the later ones there,” said Miller of a crash that occurred very early into the braking phase.
“And I just misread the thing and I had to use a little extra pressure I guess, and tucked it.
“Completely my fault. Just a really silly mistake, a costly mistake.”
The other two big names who failed to complete Sunday’s race intact had more straightforward solutions to their problems, knowing exactly what went wrong for them.
Oliveira was caught out by his weekend-long enemy the Michelin tyre allocation, with the hardest rubber on offer simply not hard enough for his KTM.
“The race got a bit tricky for us and we overheated the front tyre very quickly,” said the local favourite, who rejoined after his fall and finished a lapped 16th.
“We got more movement than expected from it and I ended up crashing at Turn 14.
“The bike was very damaged, but I wanted to finish the race out of respect for my team and my fans.”
In the Pramac Racing camp, it was a minor mechanical problem that actually did in former championship leader Zarco in the end.
Caught out by the wrong gear as he entered a corner, he said that what he thought initially was operator error later turned out to be not entirely his own fault.
“I thought I had made a little mistake on the shift down, but then we analysed the data and I had an issue with the gearbox at that moment,” he explained.
“I didn’t get the right gear at the right time, and in that area of the braking it was critical.
“The front tyre wasn’t too nice either; it was getting not perfect. Maybe it was hard to keep that pace, and I was using a lot of energy.”
Zarco’s failure to score dropped him to fourth in the standings, now 21 points behind new leader Quartararo.
