Michelin “waiting to analyse the data” after “strange” Bagnaia race
“It's not very usual to see a good performance at the beginning, and then a 'hole' [in performance], and then good performance again."
Michelin are ‘waiting to analyse the data’ after Francesco Bagnaia again pointed the finger at tyre issues in Sunday’s Emilia Romagna MotoGP.
For the second time in three race weekends, the reigning champion felt his tyres hadn’t performed normally.
The factory Ducati star won the Saturday Sprint on the soft rear but struggled for pace while leading the early laps of Sunday’s grand prix, when all but Marco Bezzecchi switched to the medium rear.
Title rival Jorge Martin gained 0.65s and then 0.7s per lap immediately after overtaking Bagnaia, who later complained of losing the rear under acceleration.
But once the rear tyre began ‘working’, Bagnaia blasted to a new lap record and began reeling Martin and Enea Bastianini back in.
"The rear tyre started to work after 15 laps, something incredible!” Bagnaia said.
However, Bagnaia was now struggling more with the front tyre and shocked to crash out on lap 21, saying he had braked 18-20m earlier than his best lap and was still upright when the front locked.
“It’s impossible to lose the front [like this] if you are in dry conditions,” Bagnaia said. “Everything was quite strange today, but it happened to us twice in the last three Grand Prix, so maybe it will happen to others in the next one.”
Bagnaia previously blamed his front tyre for a miserable ninth place in the Aragon Sprint.
Michelin highlighted that ‘Pecco was... the only rider to set several laps under 1'31, which is quite remarkable’. However, its MotoGP boss Piero Taramasso agreed that the Italian’s fluctuating performance had been ‘quite strange’.
“It's not very usual to see a good performance at the beginning, and then a 'hole', and then good performance again,” Taramasso said.
“Concerning Pecco's comments, we spoke with him,” Taramasso began. “For the moment, we are waiting to analyse the data to understand what happened. It's quite strange, because he had a very good start, the leader of the race for four laps, so was lapping same as Jorge and Bastia.
“And then for five or six laps, he was two or three tenths slower, and then lap 12 he was able to recover again. His lap time was very fast. Lap 16 he set the best lap time of the race, he was coming back very very strongly, he was attacking to catch up on the two [leaders]
“So now we try to understand what happened. When we have the data, for sure we will know. But it's not very usual to see a good performance at the beginning, and then a 'hole' [in performance], and then good performance again."
