Why MotoGP was better in 2020

The reward was a refreshing and rejuvenating year for the sport, as the big beasts variously bit the dust. Literally rejuvenating, as a tide of youth swept in. Fourteen premier-class races (the fewest since 1999) yielded a nonetheless record-equalling nine different winners. Five were first-timers, one a class rookie, and all but two of them 25 or under. One of them, 23-year-old Spaniard Joan Mir, claimed the championship, in his second year in the category. It was the first for equally rejuvenated Suzuki in almost 20 years.

It was without the potentially stifling presence of the current greatest rider. Six-times champion Marc Marquez’s title defence ended in round one. A typically bravura display led to the big crash that he’s been courting for years. He snapped his right humerus, and he was out all year. That Big Beast gone, field was open for the young pups, and the fight lasted until the penultimate race.

Mir slumped to an early retirement in an undistinguished finale at Portimao. Instead a second win of the year went to another second-year man, Miguel Oliveira, Portugal’s first motorcycle GP star.

On the same weekend, two veterans said goodbye. Or at least au revoir. Andrea Dovizioso, title runner up to Marquez for the past three years, terminated a downbeat last year with Ducati. The atmosphere in the team had soured. Dovi said he planned only a year’s sabbatical – but his undisputed quality notwithstanding, at 35 next march Dovi will be lucky to get a serious job offer for 2022. The second was Cal Crutchlow, Britain’s only GP winner since Barry Sheene in the mid-1970s. Aged 35, troubled by persistent injuries and with his factory Honda contract all run out, Cal decided he’d had enough; and that a test-rider with Yamaha (his previous team) was preferable to signing on with underdog Aprilia. And the biggest beast of all, Valentino Rossi, 42 next February, also said goodbye. Not to racing, but to the factory Yamaha team. Rossi has been with a full factory team throughout his long career. He will prolong his racing life with Yamaha’s satellite team – the Malaysian-backed Petronas SRT squad – next year.

It wasn’t only among riders that the icons were elbowed aside. It happened to the leading factories too. Suzuki’s renaissance was achieved in unspectacular fashion. The smallest of Japan’s big three left the histrionics to the others, relying on careful development to what is, in context, relatively conservative engineering. While Ducati pioneered in-flight ride-height adjusters and flamboyant aerodynamic aids and the others scrambled to keep up, Suzuki by comparison kept it simple. Its most important achievement was to develop an engine that was just powerful enough without being hard to handle, mounted in a chassis that was remarkably easy on tyres. Unspectacular, but effective. Rival riders spoke about “the Suzuki zone”, late in races, when Mir and team-mate Alex Rins were able to pick their way forward while they were struggling to cope with worsening wheelspin and fading rear grip.

Hondas efforts were undermined by the loss of their leading rider, plus injuries to the experienced Crutchlow. Class rookie Álex Marquez, the younger brother, made a good fist of improving, but was just a beginner; while second satellite-team rider Taka Nakagami improved hugely, but was starting from a modest base.

Yamaha were somehow architects of their own downfall, quite apart from an apparently inadvertent breach of the rules (to do with replacing faulty valves in sealed engines) that cost them points. Their 2020 bike was fast but puzzlingly inconsistent, and suffered terribly from rear grip at low-adhesion circuits. Oddly Yamahas occupied more podiums and winners circles than any other make, but it was with different riders almost every time; while Rossi had a dire year with only one podium. He was furthermore the only COVID-19 victim in the top echelon, missing two races. The top Yamaha rider was junior satellite teamster Franco Morbidelli, who was second in the championship. And he was riding last year’s bike.

Ducati’s fall-out with Dovizioso was costly. Trouble adapting to a grippier new rear Michelin was his biggest beef. It was only bad luck that dented Australian satellite-team rider Jack Miller’s chances – of four no-scores only one was his mistake, and the oddest of all was when another rider’s visor tear-off got sucked into his airbox. Miller, at 25, is another of the young pups.

Marquez should be back next year, and we will see what the new guys have learned while he was away.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.