With the exception of the pole position taken by Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia), the Aragon round of the MotoGP championship last weekend was the Marc Marquez (Ducati) show.
At one of the counter-clockwise circuits where Marc is almost unbeatable, he won both the Sprint on Saturday and the full GP on Sunday.
On Saturday, Marc was followed home by his brother Alex Marquez (Ducati) in second place, with Bezzecchi finishing third.
On Sunday, Marc had to work his way past Bezzecchi to take the lead, and eventually the win. Pedro Acosta (KTM) finished second and Bezzecchi third.
Jorge Martin (Aprilia) continues to lead the championship, but saw his lead diminish after mediocre results (for him), which included fifth place finishes on both Saturday and Sunday. The championship continues at Misano in two weeks.
For full results and points for Saturday’s Sprint race, visit the MotoGP site here. For full results and points for Sunday’s MotoGP race, visit the MotoGP site here.
Mick sounds like a right knob. Don’t be like Mick.
Sad but true. It must be quite depressing for Dirck to see the inevitable rant from him. Might explain the meagre traffic on this site now, even though the other moto-journo players have folded. Where are we to get our news of new machines now?
News ? Motorcycles. Not here. Been slow for as long as Anybody could lose interest in publishing, except for the irrelevant racing updates, during the worlds plethora of heart breaking inconvenient crises.
There was a time when racing was fun for most folks, and could be justified as necessary for the technical development of motor bikes.
Now . . . bullshit. Riders, the live ones, are walking away from the insane risks of crotch rockets on the street, and dirt fun has diminished bay a factor of at least 5, as witnessed in the empty California deserts on a weekend. Any weekend.
Hard to believe, but this is not Micks doing. The times have changed forever, kids don’t mow lawns, hang around airports, or subscribe to motorcycle magazines with high hopes.
Racing just is not important to the general money paying population.
For me it stopped with Jim Clark, in an inadequate Race car.
I think that the industry’s problem is of it’s own making. It’s lazy. You have your budget bikes, and you have your over powered, over weight nanny machines. All made by an industry that want to tell you what you want.
I’ve made it quite clear for several decades that they have a huge hole in the lineup. Never once have they attempted to optimize a street bike for use on public roads. Look at the great job they have done making smaller, more compact power units. Have they made a smaller more compact street bike? No! Decades ago I was complaining about the 400 pound floor. That’s too heavy. Now the floor is closer to 500 pounds. That’s way too heavy.
The problem with motorcycle news is that there is nothing new. There is only so many ways to serve vanilla. Decades of significant technological advances have born no fruit. A 90hp street bike hasn’t lost a single pound in forty years. If a 90hp street bike hit the market at under 350 pounds soaking wet that would be news wouldn’t it? You would want to read about how all the advances over the years were employed to make it happen. You would want hear what it was like to ride. Instead, now days, you get here’s this bike. I settled on this mode. I think it hides it’s weigh pretty well. If they take it off road, they will talk about tire choices. NEXT!
I waited two days. Nobody posted. So I complained about a lack of enthusiasm and pointed out why I think that is. Two guys whined about that. Still no posts about the race at all. Not even the standard worship for that Marquez boy.
We were all waiting for you, Mick! Waiting for the boiling water to spill out of the pot and entertain us with your unique take on MotoGP racing and its strange relationship with motocross. All good fun.
Both motocross and GP went four stroke in 2002, the year of infamy. But the manufacturers didn’t pull out of popular series like the AMA to spend all their money on one big spectacle that they wanted everyone to fawn over. Dirt bikes still sell. Sport bikes, that were sales leaders for every manufacturer that built them, don’t.
Some guys here like to blame the kids. Well, the kids still ride dirt bikes. And it is still true that a talented kid from a regular family can become a professional motocross racer. The infrastructure is alive and well. That dream all but died for budding road racers in 2002. Dirt bikes sell. Sport bikes don’t. Racing is advertising. It still works for dirt bikes. It’s been 24 years. That they haven’t changed course in road racing is a mystery to me. They are leaving tons of motorcycle sales off the table. But, obviously, I don’t run the show.
Maybe they just got tied of working so hard to develop the next awesome 600cc sport bike. Remember those? Remember all the articles you read about them? History.
Remembering the “golden years” of sport bikes ignore two important things: they were very short (realistically 10 years), and insurance quickly reacted to their realistic life-spans/claim frequency.
Dirt bikes don’t get insured and kids don’t get mowed down by distracted drivers or their own recklessness (as badly) so dirt bikes are a lot easier.
I usually watch a highlight real when it pops up on YouTube. Not this time. After the demise of Cylcle World I was pretty bummed. If that isn’t enough of a danger sign for the industry, it’s unconscious while on life support.
If you want to sell motorcycles, race them. Don’t dry up a healthy organically grown system and plop all your eggs in one hand basket that goes straight to hades. The series quickly became about everything non-motorcycle. It’s the electronics and aero show as it applies to motorcycles. The strange motorcycles from the Island of Dr. Moreau. Is it any wonder why they call the riders aliens?
Motocross didn’t do that. It got seriously wounded by the four stroke, its expense, and lack of reliability. But they never changed the support format and all the racing is still healthy.
The result? The street bike industry is now selling morbidly obese dirt bikes because the best ad campaigns, racing, feature dirt bikes. People are no longer enthusiastic enough about street bikes as a whole to keep a magazine like Cycle World alive.
Marc Marquez is, like it or not, the face of MotoGP. And I think he’s a creep anyway. Do I want to watch a highlight real of the first MotoGP race after Cycle World’s demise where Marquez wins? No. Never in a million years.
Will they ever wise up and return road racing support to AMA and WSB to former levels? No. Of course not. They’re probably happy not having to build new ground up sport bikes every few years and go toe toe to with the other guys. Building morbidly obese birt bikes is easy. Nobody measures them.