What we learned from the Phillip Island test
The second winter test ahead of the 2017 MotoGP World Championship concluded last week at Phillip Island after three more days of intense running.
The picturesque 2.7-mile Australian venue is a totally different beast to the Sepang International Circuit and, as a result, many riders and teams found new issues to overcome while also continuing the development of their 2017 machines.
Yamaha’s Maverick Vinales continues to improve his odds at the bookmakers as title-favourite after topping the time sheets for the third successive test. The Spaniard was quick over a single lap and stunning over a race run, with his only threat at present being Honda’s Marc Marquez.
Marquez and HRC made big improvements with their ‘big-bang-style’ engine this test, and the Spanish rider was able to ease the nerves of anxious Honda fans around the world with his long run pace.
Elsewhere, Aprilia and Suzuki became the latest to unveil their ‘winglet’ fairings, whilst Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo struggled for pace on their respective machines.
Like we did following the Sepang test, it’s time to ponder what we learned from the Phillip Island test.
Hope for Honda
Following the Sepang test last month, it appeared that Honda were still stuck in a rut with their engine. The updated motor brought to Malaysia wasn’t working well with the electronics, and the acceleration issues of the past two years seemed to persist.
However, Marquez was still able to go a cut above the rest on long run pace. Fast-forward to Phillip Island, and still the Spaniard complained of problems; yet he was still outclassing almost everyone. This caused some to question whether there really was anything wrong with the Honda and if Marquez was just playing mind games.
Marquez retorted by stating the fact that, if all was well, would he really have spent 107 laps on circuit on the Thursday trying various electronics settings? Even he expressed surprise at the fact he was able to continually put in fast laps despite suffering from, what he described as, a poor ‘connection’ with the engine when he opened the throttle.
Friday saw Honda begin to head in the right direction, though the triple MotoGP champion did admit that the engine still isn’t quite doing what he wants it to. With Marquez second, Dani Pedrosa third and LCR’s Cal Crutchlow fifth, the Japanese manufacturer looks in good shape.
However, Honda were quick at the Phillip Island test last year, and have won at the circuit for the past two years. There aren’t too many low-gear acceleration zones, so this may well be hiding some of the RC213V’s woes.
It is worth mentioning that Marc VDS’s Jack Miller did say, coming out of the Turn 10 hairpin, the engine was much ‘smoother’ than it was last year. Next month’s Qatar test will show where Honda truly sit, but their situation is certainly brighter than it was at this stage 12 months ago.
A storm brewing?
A problematic engine may not be all of HRC’s troubles this year. While on a race run, Marquez latched onto the back of Yamaha’s Vinales to keep an eye on the M1’s performance. This irked the number 25, and he expressed his discontent to the press at the end of the day.
“I really didn’t understand it, because you are doing your job, your long run, and then being unable to push… I’m not going to carry him,” said Vinales, who had to abort the run he was on as a result.
“It’s hard to keep on pushing when you have him behind and you know he can study what you do. So I had to abort the long run, which was a shame because I was doing mid-1m29s all the time.”
Marquez admitted that he’d checked out some of the other bikes during the day, not just the Yamaha, and was in fact rather complimentary of the M1 and its new rider.
“Today was one run that I went out and saw that he (Vinales) passed and then was some laps. Immediately I was able to recover the gap and then I followed him two laps and it was interesting.
“Also I saw some Ducatis and some bikes you feel are strong. Also Suzuki was interesting to follow because it looks really good.
“Yamaha, like last year, they have a really competitive bike, all package is really good. It will be tough to beat them.”
Both were incredibly close on race run pace, though Vinales’ time attack laps were something a bit special. It may only be disgruntled comments at the moment, but these two look destined to clash when hostilities resume at the end of March.
What’s wrong with Rossi?
While Maverick Vinales’ pace on the YZR-M1 is about as surprising as seeing the sun rise every morning, his team-mate wasn’t quite as sharp.
The nine-times world champion, who turned 38 during the test, spent much of his time testing the new chassis and focusing on improving tyre life towards the end of a race. But a slew of problems kept appearing, and the Italian seemed to be hitting a brick wall with set-up.
On the final day the team ran a radical setting change to try and improve things, but this proved futile. Rossi ended the test a disappointing 12th fastest on a 1m29.470s, while his team-mate set the timing screens ablaze with a succession of 1m28s laps on Thursday and Friday.
So, does Vinales already have Rossi beat?
Things may not look peachy at the moment for the Italian, but this isn’t of any concern to his Yamaha team. Massimo Meregalli, Yamaha team director, explained following the test that Rossi was simply worn out and wasn’t pushing to his full potential on the final day.
Indeed, Rossi never even bothered completing a race simulation, and his lap count dropped from 70+ on the first two days to just over 50 on Friday. Having been on a pretty gruelling schedule thus far, between testing and sponsor commitments, it is perhaps no surprise that by the final day Rossi had had enough.
This may sound like just another excuse, but you have to remember that he is nearly 40 years old and one of the world’s biggest sports stars. Yamaha milk his time for all its worth when they can, and with markets forever growing outside of Europe the travel mounts up.
But once the season starts, Rossi will be on the schedule he if familiar with, he is used to and enjoys. The hunger is still there, so don’t count out the Doctor just yet.
Flight of Icarus
In Malaysia we got our first glimpse of how the manufacturers will be getting around the ‘winglet’ ban when Yamaha unveiled a radical new fairing with concealed wings.
As expected, we saw a couple more teams give their designs a trial in Phillip Island. Suzuki and Aprilia showed theirs off to the world on the second day of the test, both marques going with different interpretations.
Suzuki followed in Yamaha’s footsteps by concealing ‘winglets’ in the fairing, though their design is placed much higher up and housing just one wing on each side.
Both Alex Rins and Andrea Iannone were equally as secretive as Yamaha when it came to their thoughts on it, though the Spanish rookie did say he noticed a difference compared to the conventional fairing and said that he ‘felt less wheelie.’
Aleix Espargaro spoke a little more openly about Aprilia’s design, which bucks the trend set by Yamaha and Suzuki so far. Instead of housing ‘winglets’ within the bodywork, two tunnels have been cut into the front bubble to channel airflow.
“It’s not bad,” Espargaro remarked after his first day on it, also noting that the design showed ‘interesting’ numbers in the wind tunnel which suggested that the fairing would gain downforce without sacrificing top speed.
Aside from some new bodywork, Espargaro tried a few different set-ups with the chassis and made good progress in this area. The Spaniard foundthat he was able to utilise his aggressive braking style, something he hasn’t been able to do since 2015.
He did say that the bike could be a little better in the corners, and didn’t do much with the new engine as it was still showing the same issues it did at Sepang.
Finishing the week 10th and just eight tenths from top spot, Espargaro and Aprilia head to the final test with work to do but in good form.
KTM closing the gap
Austrian manufacturer KTM made some pretty big improvements with the RC16 over the course of the three-day test in Australia.
Evaluating various things, including a new chassis, both Pol Espargaro and Bradley Smith ended the test just 1.4s off of the pace. Albeit still 17th and 19th on the time sheets, as I mentioned in my Sepang round-up, that’s not at all bad going on a grid filled with factory bikes.
There are still some issues to sort out when they head to Qatar next month. The RC16’s engine is still quite aggressive under acceleration, so the electronics have to be adapted quite significantly.
Smith is also finding adapting his riding style to the bike quite difficult. The Briton has spent his entire MotoGP career on the YZR-M1, a bike that performs best when ridden smoothly. The KTM is quite a bit more beastly, and needs to be muscled around to extract the maximum from it.
But this is something he anticipated, and he has praised his crew for constantly taking on board his feedback and continually improving the bike.
Despite CEO Stefan Pierer sparking war with Honda at the team’s launch this week, all seems well at KTM as their full-time debut fast approaches.
Ducati in trouble?
After the Sepang test, things were looking good for Ducati. Casey Stoner and Andrea Dovizioso put in some promising lap times on the Desmosedici GP17, while Jorge Lorenzo steadily adapted to the bike.
However, and perhaps not surprisingly, Phillip Island caught the Italian marque with their pants down. Phillip Island has tended to work against the difficult-to-turn Desmosedici in the past, and sure enough these were the exact complaints from all Ducati riders.
Dovizioso expressed his concern that the Valencia and Sepang versions of the GP17 weren’t really massive improvements on each other, while Lorenzo was left completely baffled as to why he couldn’t ride the bike the way he wanted to.
The Spaniard was able to make some improvements on the final day, posting a 1m29.3s to get to within a tenth of his team-mate in eighth place. However, he still said that Ducati ‘are missing something’, and even looked towards satellite counterpart Alvaro Bautista on the Aspar GP16 for answers.
“We don’t have the bike with the best corner speed but at this moment Bautista in most of the corners is much faster than me and we have to understand what is going on.
“Bautista has adapted very well and he’s much faster than me on some corner and there’s something not working, so we’ll try to investigate everything to find a solution.”
Something is clearly amiss at Ducati. But, if you look at the results of last year’s test the factory riders lagged behind the Avintia duo, while no Ducati rider did anything particularly spectacular during the 2016 race.
So this could well just be a one-off, their problems simply exaggerated by the rather unique Phillip Island circuit; at least, this is what Ducati will be hoping the explanation is.
Pre-season testing concludes in Qatar next month from March 10-12, with the 2017 world championship getting under way just a couple of weeks later under the floodlights of the Losail International Circuit.