The opening day of the track action in Indonesia’s new Grand Prix venue has been met with tentative approval from the MotoGP grid.
Emergency resurfacing repairs, implemented after last month’s test, have gone a long way in addressing riders’ concerns – but very many remain a temporary measure ahead of a planned full resurfacing.
Problems with the asphalt on the Mandalika Bay track became very clear on the opening day of the February three-day test, as stones began to come off the surface, turning the circuit into a real shooting range as 300-horse MotoGP bikes pulled them back. and the machines behind them.
This left a number of riders having impressive bruises after the test – and with far more need to follow other bikes in a race than during the test, the feedback from the riders was that an urgent solution was needed to address the problem.
The fix was a quick resurfacing of a third of the space – all that was possible was the time constraints and available equipment and staff – with a full resurfacing of the year-old track due as soon as the race weekend was over.
And while the worst of the problem with the stones can now be solved after the most affected 1.6 km of the circuit has been rebuilt, it is not completely fixed, something that says from the comments of the riders after their first experience of the repairs.
“I prefer the old asphalt, as in the test,” admitted LCR Honda driver Alex Marquez, “because everything was the same back then. It changes quite a lot, there are some new bumps, and it’s something very strange .
“There’s something for everyone, but there are still some stones, too. They are smaller stones compared to the test, but they are still there.
The stones are something that VR46 Ducati rider Luca Marini discovered first-hand, too, with his morning action delayed due to a technical problem caused directly from the surface – and one that may be more familiar to road racers in places like the North West 200 and Ulster Grand Prix as in a MotoGP race.
“It was not a happy day,” he explains. “This morning I spent half the practice in the garage because a stone hit my radiator and broke it.
“I lost a lot of time because we did not understand what happened to the bicycle, and then the mechanics found the problem.
“There’s something going on in a track like this that gets dirty every time.”
Although the patchwork repair job would have prevented the worst of the problems, it created a different theme for the pilots: much of the work that was tested last month was largely useless, sending them back to the square with their setups. , especially when combined with Michelin’s reversal on an older (and harder) specification of the rear tire carcass to cope with the expected extreme stretching temperatures.
“Everything has changed a lot,” said Suzuki’s Joan Mir. “The heat is more, even the new asphalt compared to the old asphalt has less grip.
“The track was more grippy but heavier. This time it was flatter, more passable and you could follow other riders, which was impossible in the test.
And even if one problem is partially solved, or at least corrected enough to safely advance the race, it remains another: how dirty the track is as the construction work around the area continues in a race for not only the Circuit to complete facilities but key infrastructure projects before Sunday’s race.
This leaves a circuit that is at least for the moment only a single bike wide and is potentially tuned to produce fairly deep races, unless it improves significantly.
It also did not allow the riders to try out their starts – a situation that provided an additional exceptional training session for each class tomorrow.
The decision, which has not yet been officially announced by the series leaders, was nevertheless confirmed by Gresini Ducati rider Fabio Di Giannantonio, one of the few riders who, after the safety commission meeting on Friday, where the plan was agreed among the riders. was, spoke to the media.
“We talked about the launch because this is now the topic of the moment,” he said. “It’s pretty dangerous to practice the start with 300 horses on the dust.
“Tomorrow we will try to start a practice on the grid, all classes, to try to clean the area, and then we will do another meeting to try to understand how it works. We will try it just after FP3. We will stop in the box , and then the pit goes up for just a minute. “
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