The title race is wide open. I can’t help but feel like small unforced errors on the part of Aprilia will cost them a bid at the title. Aleix may continue to surprise me but I think at this point the momentum is behind Pecco and this is his championship to lose.

With a much closer points battle than last year I don’t see Pecco throwing it away again. Fabio’s championship defense has been a true masterpiece. He has pushed his inferior bike well past the limit to chase the Ducatis and unlike everyone else on inline fours he hasn’t paid the price nearly as much for extracting every bit of speed from his Yamaha M1.

Here’s to hoping Aprilia’s Aleix or someone from Ducati can hold off Fabio’s bid for a back to back championship.

Finally watched Thailand today.
2 points at the top & an error by those 2 could swing 3-4 into contention.

Fabio screwed the pooch and went back to throw all my toys outta my crib Fabio (before he hired a sports psychologist). He left the race, didn’t speak to the media, didn’t do his contract required Dorna interviews, etc. Just straight up left. Take the L or the Dub, by being a man kid. Good news is PI is a riders track where HP deficits, etc, don’t matter.

Best race of the season. Phillip Island is one hell of a track, absolutely beautiful location and very conducive to good racing. There were so many changes of position and passes it made for one heck of an unpredictable and exciting race to watch.

*** spoiler alert****

I’m glad to see Alex get a win for Suzuki during what could likely be Suzuki’s last race at Phillip Island. I wasn’t expecting that.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: stickman428,

I was glad NBC carried the race.
The finish was gripping and the top 6 nose to tail, crossing the finish line was awesome.
I hope to see a Ducati World Champion again.

Good on Suzuki taking the win, it was a last second maneuver and MM snuck in the draft.

Wow, maybe the best race for quite a while. I started watching GP again in 2020 & this is probably the best race I've seen so far. So many overtakes & position changes.
Nail-biter for sure. With such a hard fight for the podium places, that was a great show.
​​​​​​​Marquez/Miller, that was pretty crazy as well.

PI is the great leveler. If you have a HP/top speed disadvantage, it doesn’t matter as much, because this is a real motorbike track, flowing, fast. They also don’t use much brakes around the entire circuit. In fact, according to Brembo, it’s the least demanding circuit on the calendar for braking. It does reward tire management as the left hand side of the asymmetric tires get chewed to shit and the right hand side barely used. So the guys at the end steered with the front for half the race and steered with the rear the other half to make it until the end and still have speed.

PI is also a real track, not built using CAD, but by dozer and built into the surrounding landscape. Mugello is the best bike track in the world followed very closely by PI. Both usually produce some of the best racing of the year. Riders tracks where the rider makes more of the difference than the bike they are on.

The riders that suffered at PI had teams using too much traction control. This happened to Aleix. At PI the rider needs to be able to spin the tires up some as the race goes on when the rubber starts to go away.

I was pulling for Pecco, but he’s in the rider’s seat now for the championship. He needs to maintain his cool, ride well, and make podiums the final two races and he and Ducati will have this championship. Fabio has cratered, massively. I think 3 of the last 4 races or something like that, he’s scored 0 points.

Great race. Glad we got to see them race PI once again. Sorry to see Jack get taken out. That looked like it hurt

At first glance, it looked like AM just plowed into him & got his braking wrong.
On slowed replay, he got tangled with another rider [VR46?] & then up the rear of JM.

Jack seemed to take it as a racing incident when it showed them together in the pits.

Definitely need more races like that. Not just the point & squirt tracks.

Just read that Enea also did pretty much the whole race with the suit airbag deployed after a jolt in the last turn on lap 1.
Mathematically, but not realistically, he's still a contender.

MotoGP hasn’t raced at Phillip Island in years because of Covid. The combo of a tight title race and teams lack of past data on the track really made for some amazing racing.

Shame to see Aleix and Mir encounter mechanical issues and to see Miller hit and knocked off the track but all in all I think that was the best race of the season as far as watching actual racing with lots of passes. I don’t think anyone was expecting Rins to pull off a victory.

I doubt it will have any impact on Suzuki’s moronic top brass since they chose to quit while leading the team and riders championship in points but it’s nice to see Suzuki get a win. Too bad a competitive team and amazing bike will be gone after two more races.

Maybe Suzuki will pull a Honda F1 & decide to come back after a year on the bench.
Except in that case [F1], they were still technical advisers on the RedBull Powertrain division.

Suzuki won’t return to racing any time soon. They have already lost their two star riders to Honda and at least one technical wizard who went to Yamaha.

Even if they did attempt a comeback it would realistically be years before they managed to build a competitive bike and team again. Who would want to sign on to that project? Suzuki now has a well established record of quitting. That only makes it even harder to attract talent especially given Suzuki’s failure to honor their multi year commitment to MotoGP racing.

If only Suzuki’s management and sales teams were as good as their racing team….

Everyone at Suzuki is pissed and thinks this whole affair is stupid and shameful. The Japanese are a very honorable people so to many at Suzuki this is dishonorable. Trust me, it came from the very top at Hamamatsu. CEO or the board. Everyone below said stay, we are doing well. Top brass made this decision and from what I’m hearing it’s due to the automobile division. Like everything else probably some EV bullshit. But MotoGP is switching to synthetic fuels so it doesn’t make sense.

Keith Huewen makes an interesting point on a potential missed marketing opportunity that I hadn’t considered.

“On the financial side, the bikes are not going to fundamentally change because the technical rules are locked in place for the rest of the five-year period.

“Yes, MotoGP is expensive, undoubtedly. But there's no big redesign needed and the bike is already a winning package. Rins proved that. It doesn’t need vast amounts of R&D money pumped in.

“It’s just a shame it’s come to this. And the whole thing about dropping MotoGP to move into electric vehicles, we saw in the past that Fiat chose to be title sponsor of the Yamaha MotoGP team to help sell cars.”


Link to full article


The whole thing is infuriating and depressing. Top brass at Suzuki seem to not want to be in the motorcycle business for too much longer. They have let their products languish, failed to introduce updated versions of popular motorcycles and it’s shown in sales.

While Suzuki won’t come out and say it the GSX-R development and marketing was very closely tied to the MotoGP GSX-RR. Now that the GSX-RR is dead the future of the mighty GSX-R doesn’t look too good. The company talking about a new focus on sustainable vehicles makes me think Suzuki is going to be treating motorcycles as even more of an afterthought.

Damnit I thought Bags would nail it. All goes down to Valencia. I hope some idiot doesn’t take him out.

Ducati management isn’t making this easy for Pecco. Making a display of telling The Beast to slow his role and know his place Not a fan of how they are handling this for Bagnaia. Gonna be 1 big asterisk at the end of the season for Ducati

Sepang wasn't the spectacle that PI was, but was a good race.
All down to the wire & looks like it's Bag's race to lose.

Ducati needs to cut the crap. The only order to anyone should be don't do something stupid while passing. Otherwise its not racing, its some kind of team sport which is not MotoGP. Me because of this nonsense I want Yamaha to win the race and Bags to have a mechanical.

2022 Moto GP Champion-*Bagnaia by way of Ducati Team Management orders

Ducati bought themselves a championship. Not sure I can appreciate the tactics used but a win is a win. A step backwards for racing fans as it's turning out to be just like every other series out there.

Congratulations to Pecco 2022 World Champion.