The end of the year is approaching and it is time to take stock of the MotoGP season, which we did on the evening of Valencia with Hervé Poncharal, in his role as president of IRTA, the teams association.
We reviewed with him most of the new features that marked 2023, with the introduction of Sprint races, the unbalanced calendar, tire pressure control, the introduction of India and many others topics again. The team representative shared with us his measured insights built over more than four decades spent in the paddock…
Hervé Pourcharal, can we take stock of this season where there have been many changes in the weekend format, starting with the sprint races at each meeting? And then, when we learned that and when we saw the first Sprint, everyone said to themselves “well, there won't be any more drivers before the end of the year”, and then finally, the habit coming from drivers and teams, now it is expected as much as the Grands Prix…
Hervé Poncharal : “Yes, we are already at the first laps of 2024 and all the drivers are there, and there is not one who cannot ride. And for me one thing is clear, which is that as soon as I got wind and was shown the project of organizing a Grand Prix weekend, during 2022, I was always positive and for this format, that is to say with the big modification which is the Sprint.
What can I say ? Looking back, since the curtain has now fallen on the 2023 season, we had in all the races of the season, the best Saturdays we have ever had, in physical presence on the circuits and in the audience behind the screens TV. So it's clear that the Sprint boosted the weekend and it especially boosted interest on Saturday. The sprint, we know that it replaces FP 4 which was for me the most sleepy session and the most sleepy moment of the weekend, which neither the drivers nor the technical teams liked, because it was a huge warm-up. up which was of little use just before qualifying. So on paper, I thought it was great. For me, reality validated that, for the reasons I just gave you, attendance, etc.
At the start, there were quite a few drivers who were a little doubtful, and if today they are not all 100% in favor, because it is true that there is involvement, pressure, tension, and we must always empathize with what our heroes say, but there are many who were not entirely for, and who were even against, who today are finally saying it. format, it works and I enjoy it”. And then we have a joker, the sprint allows us to learn a lot of things to prepare for the Grand Prix on Sunday, and even the technical teams who said that there was a lot of work, yes there is a lot of work , yes there is a lot of tension, but now it's something that has become part of our habits, and I don't think it's going to be called into question by anyone.
We can always evolve. We have made FP1 now no longer counts for the passage to Q1/Q2, so it only starts on Friday afternoon, so it allows us to have work with less pressure. We removed certain post warm up obligations on Sunday morning to give the drivers more time to prepare and everything, we increased the time between the parade in the cart that you love and the end of the warm up. So everyone is open to developments, but I think that the “MotoGP program” product as it is today, yes, it works well. There was a need for that to boost our sport compared to a whole bunch of sports with which we are in competition, and today we know very well that “he who does not advance goes backwards”, I am not going to tell you that. thing…
Why is there a Sprint in each race, while for example, this is not the case in Formula1? And that's the same, I completely subscribe to this thing: every Grand Prix for me must be the same. And why, for example, would there be a Sprint in France and not a Sprint in England? We would say “there is a Grand Prix A, and a Grand Prix B”. So that's 37 points over one weekend, and all weekends have to score 37 points. And then once you get used to a format, you have your routine in quotes of the format and and you know how to manage it. So I think there was never any question of him having Sprints which were not systematically on all the events
After the injuries, do you want to talk about that now? In any case, whether we like it or not, and God knows if we have all worked, I have followed the evolution of the Grands Prix over the last 4 decades and we will say: we will always work and again and again and again on the safety of drivers, whether it be the safety of circuits with increasingly important clearances with gravel traps, and we clearly saw that this was important following the accident of Pol Espargaro in Portimao, with More and more sophisticated airfences, with more and more sophisticated pilot equipment, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact remains that, whatever we can do, motorcycle racing is a dangerous sport, it is a risky sport. So the more you drive, the more likely you are to have a problem. But for me, what means that there are perhaps more accidents in quotes, is the fact that we are extremely close, that we arrive at a level of pilots, out of the 22 pilots who are ours, which are less than a second in talent we will say, and the machines are also less than a second. In Valencia, on Friday afternoon, there were 20 drivers in 0,7 seconds! So everyone is more at the limit, when you when you fight a thousandths to make the difference, yes you are at the limit, and therefore you are more at risk of falling than before. But I'm not sure that it's the fact of having a Sprint that necessarily implies or causes us to have more falls. Although I agree that the most crucial moment for a race, and the moment where there is the most danger, is the start and the first lap, where we know very well that it is hard to overtake because everyone has very similar performances, everyone brakes almost at the same place. SO. The place on the grid is key, and the position at the end of the first lap is key for the race, especially when you are in a Sprint which is a relatively short race. So we come back to the limit reached by the pilots, and the risks that result from it.”
Let's get to the calendar, which was a little bit unbalanced this year. So we don't really know why, the global context, we don't know. But hey, we ended up with Qatar which changed and especially an end of the season including 8 GPs in 10 weeks, very trying for everyone, drivers, team mechanics, and with the Sprints on top of that, it was really limit limit, right?
“It is obvious that for 2024 the calendar includes 22 race weekends if all the Grands Prix are confirmed, because there are still a few which are only provisional, which are not 100% confirmed, notably Kazakhstan. But all the factories, motorcycle manufacturers, and all the Moto3, Moto2 and MotoGP teams have signed an agreement with the promoter where it can go up to 22 events, “up to twenty two”. So we will never go higher. Is 22 the maximum of the maximum? Yes I think so. Is 22 a lot and a limit? Yes I think so, whether for the drivers, for the technical teams, for everyone. The calendar is complicated, it is difficult, even if Dorna tries to manage the calendar by having a certain rationality regarding the level of travel, time differences, costs too since we cannot do an event in the USA, the next events in Asia then return to the USA, et cetera. So we are trying to bring together the Asia-Pacific events at the end of the season. There are a lot of races, it's difficult. So afterwards, we have triplets, but if we ever made a gap between the two, it would be even more tiring or restrictive, because the teams, or they remain but then that means that for 3 events with a gap between each, It’s been 6 weeks away from home. Without that, if we go home between each, it causes major time differences repeatedly. Doncon tries to have the least bad solution. We are discussing for 2025 that perhaps, of the 6 Grands Prix which are at the end of the calendar, there for the moment instead of having 2 triplets we could perhaps have 3 doublets.
In any case, our sport must grow, we must go everywhere, there must be enough events, there must not be holes in the calendar. We know that this year, there was Kazakhstan which did not take place, and there were 5 weeks without anything. We clearly saw that there was a terrible drop in people's following and interest, because there is competition between all the sports, and if nothing happens, people drop out. So 22 races is a lot, but I would say somewhere that it's a problem of the rich. It doesn't mean much a problem of the rich, but when you are a promoter and you have the possibility of doing 22 Grands Prix on 22 stadiums which are at the level to host MotoGP, and which each are financially viable, that means rather say that our sport, which we love, our passion, is economically healthy and interests television and promoters around the world. When you see the interest there is in Indonesia, in Thailand, in India, it's nice, it's really nice. When I was in India for the first time this year, you meet real fans in the paddock who are walking Bibles even though we've never been there, who even know everything about Augusto Fernandez who was rookie and who is not the most charismatic driver to date, they know his entire track record, his crashes, his best performances, et cetera. It’s nice to see that wherever you go on the planet, there are people who are real MotoGP enthusiasts. So anyway, life is a balance, and between too much and not enough, the balance is subtle.
I started the Grands Prix, there were 8 to 10 Grands Prix for the world championship. Afterwards, for a very long time, when there were 12 of us, we were at maximum capacity. What were we dreaming of when we were there? We had almost all the races in Europe, we had one afterwards, from 87 I think, which was in Japan at Suzuka, but we never went and we dreamed of going outside of Europe, but our championship world, it was a European championship in reality. We dreamed of this, now we have achieved it. We must not go too far, but we are stuck at 22 and the promoter knows very well that we will never go to more than 22, so it is up to us to rationalize the calendar, to us to try to make sure that the format is as technically and humanly manageable as possible for the technical teams and drivers. And it's all a balance.
In life, and perhaps more particularly at home, in our beautiful France, there are a lot of “we just have to, we have to”. And here I'm going to completely change the subject, but I'm going to talk to you about tire pressure for example. Recently, this has been one of the number one controversial topics, and I agree that it is not pretty to lose or win a race on the green carpet compared to a tire pressure that is not sufficient . But on the other hand, all the people who sometimes rightly say that it's not good, I say to them “but what is your solution?” Because we know very well that technically speaking the tire, but like anything else, it has an operating zone and that if we are above or below, we enter into an important safety problem that we cannot allow yourself to tolerate. So there must be a policeman. Because we also know very well that it can have consequences on performance, that it is no longer Fair. So there you have it, there are a lot of “we just have to,” but if we don’t have enough races, we say we need more, and if there are a lot of races , we say that less is needed. Once again, we have to find the balance and without once again being blessed-yes-yes and saying that everything is for the best in the best of all worlds, I think that today we have a MotoGP championship which is beautiful , which goes to almost all continents, except Africa, but we are working on it and I hope we can find a solution within a while. There is a format which is super exciting with a Friday which already determines who will make Q1/Q2, Saturday with a short race which is superb, and then on Sunday, the apotheosis with the Grand Prix.
So there are some who will say that we are in show business, but yes, in any case that is the lot of motorsport and sport in general. Is football show business? Is rugby now show business? Is tennis show business? Sport, in any case, is a show, a performance, so yes, it can, in quotation marks, be show business, and it wouldn't be a bad word, show business. »
