Speaking after a fifth place in Sunday’s main grand prix race, the South African smiled:

“Honestly, I haven’t hit the limiter yet, so clearly there’s still a couple of ks there for us!”

Aside from the top speed itself, Binder and KTM also turned heads by being 12.1km/h faster than his best speed during last year’s event (354.0km/h)

For comparison, the highest 2022 Mugello speed was a 363.6km/h by Ducati’s Enea Bastianini, who was also the quickest Desmosedici this time around with a similar 364.8km/h.

“It’s weird. You don’t feel 3-4-5 ks extra. The place where you really feel it is when you sit up to brake at the same place and you’re going 10-15 ks faster [in a slipstream],” Binder said.

“That’s when you feel the difference and when you notice, ‘I came in pretty fast there’.

“But it’s impressive. In the Sprint race I got some really good slipstreams and my bike was hauling! The guys have done an amazing job and it’s quite cool to have that record again.”

Binder and team-mate Jack Miller then topped warm-up with 362.4 and 360.0km/h respectively, but the afternoon grand prix ‘only’ saw a peak of 358.8km/h from the RC16.

“We had a headwind on the main straight. I think that’s where the speed goes,” Binder explained.

Binder in a spin on Sunday

Binder, eleventh in the Sprint after serving a Long Lap, switched from the soft to medium rear tyre for the full-length race. With hindsight, and the knowledge that team-mate Miller (seventh) had no real endurance issues with the soft, it was perhaps a mistake.

“About 10 laps in and I started to think maybe I have a shot of trying to catch the guys in front of me and then lap after lap, I was just going a little bit slower, little bit slower, a little bit slower… And it was all down to just rear grip,” Binder said.

“I was spinning so much and by the time I got to 5 laps to go, I had absolutely zero tyre left on the right hand side and the thing was spinning up straight. So it was really tricky to get the bike home.

“We used the medium tyre thinking it would last a bit longer, even though we didn’t really have to if we looked at the wear from yesterday. But I think with less grip I had maybe a little bit more spin and if you spin a lot you also destroy the tyre. So I think maybe that’s what happened today, but I actually don’t know.

“Mugello was a little bit more of a challenge than I expected for us, but it is what it is.

“Everyone’s here to win but at the end of the day, when things aren’t going well, a fifth is not bad. But when things have been going a hell of a lot better [for us this season], fifth don’t feel so great.

“So it’s funny how [expectations] evolve, but that’s sport, when you feel like you have more and you can deliver more of course, you always get that sense of a bit of disappointment.”

Binder has now dropped behind Jorge Martin for fourth place in the world championship standings heading into this weekend’s German Grand Prix.

It was the second time in a row that the 2021 world champion has been unable to match past performances on the M1, having also set a slower race time than last year at Le Mans (+13.092s).

A possible factor was the switch from the soft rear tyre he had used on his way to tenth place in the Saturday Sprint, to a medium for the full-length race. Team-mate Franco Morbidelli remained on the soft and finished a fraction ahead of Quartararo.

“Really difficult,” Quartararo said. “I was feeling much better with soft, but we talked with the team, that the soft was not going to handle the race. I was feeling great, but we chose the medium that for me was not the best decision.

“But we took that and it was difficult. I was behind Enea all the race and I could not even try to overtake.

“Then with the hard front, the temperature, the pressure was a little bit too high, but it’s difficult to control when you make all the race stuck behind [other riders].”

Morbidelli said of his tyre choice: “I was able to be quick also with the medium in practice, but I decided to gamble and go with the soft. It dropped at the end, but the front was more the problem than the rear.”

Either way, although a repeat of last year’s speed would have been good enough for Quartararo to claim fourth on Sunday, a repeat of his 2021 race time (41m 16.344s) would have seen him take victory by half-a-second.

“What is true is that the lap time I made in 2021 was much better than this year,” Quartararo said. “So if I did better, I don’t know, but the lap time is what counts, and the results.

“Of course it’s a totally different era, because already in 2021 I was doing 1m 46s in the race and was super fast. Today I didn’t do one 1m 47s low. So it’s difficult.”

Quartararo’s best race lap in 2021 was a 1m 46.836s (second best lap of the race after Johann Zarco), followed by a similar 1m 46.868s in 2022 (beaten only by Bagnaia and Bezzecchi) and then a 1m 47.624s (16th best) on Sunday. Morbidelli set a 47.344s (11th best).

That is despite Quartararo’s race top speed, along the fastest straight of the season, increasing from 343.9km/h (2021) to 350.6km/h (2022) and 356.4km/h. His weekend best was an impressive 360.0km/h, joint seventh and only 6.1km/h from the new all-time record by KTM’s Brad Binder.

Increasing top speed from the M1 engine had been Quartararo’s top priority over the winter, but Mugello added further weight to the theory the power increase has been at the cost of performance in other areas.

“Unfortunately, everybody else improved much more than what we did. And to give more power to the engine, we lost some rideability, unfortunately, and that thing is killing us right now,” Morbidelli said earlier in the weekend.

“So we wanted more top speed. We have more top speed, but unfortunately we lost some rideability along the way, and that’s killing us.”

Past lap time comparisons underline why Quartararo, after trying various parts and set-ups in winter testing and the early rounds, has now effectively settled on pairing the new engine with last year’s chassis and aero, plus a base set-up from the past.

However, “even if we put the same setup, the bike is different. So we cannot compare with 2021, and even with the 2022.”

“From the beginning of the year, we are trying to improve, but made one step forward, one step backward, we never really found a solution, so we decided to go with a setup that we know,” he added.

Leading the world championship after Mugello last season, Quartararo – who announced a surprise split from manager Eric Mahe over the Mugello weekend – is just eighth in this year’s standings, with one podium (COTA).

The Frenchman now heads for the Sachsenring, where he took victory one year ago.

“It’s difficult to expect something when you make this kind of race [at Mugello],” he said. “We are missing turning, that is something that, especially in the last corner I was struggling, and Sachsenring is a track where you have to turn a lot. So hopefully we can really find something in Germany.”

A strong 77,921 fans lined the hillsides and grandstands on Sunday with a weekend spectator total of 135,670, compared to respective figures of just 43,661 (Sunday) and 74,078 (weekend) last year.

Although still short of the glory days with Valentino Rossi, when the race day crowd peaked at 100,000 and 152,443 for the weekend in 2016, it was an impressive turnaround.

But Jack Miller believes the circuit would be able to rival the 116.692 race day crowd seen at the previous Le Mans round if ticket prices were lower.

“It was better, but for sure they need to stop charging these punters so much to come in and watch,” Miller said.

“We want to attract new people so you’ve got to make it reasonable and also you don’t want to piss off the diehard fans. Because without them, we’ve got nobody.

“It was better today for sure. But I think if they made the ticket [prices] like they were in Le Mans we would have had a bigger crowd here than we had in Le Mans.”E

Tickets for Mugello were reported to be almost double the price of the Le Mans round, which boasted a record of 278,805 for the weekend.

Other factors such as free parking were also hailed as helping encourage the huge French crowd.

Unlike France, Italy hosts two MotoGP rounds, the September event titled as the San Marino round at Misano.

But Italy also has a home reigning world champion in Francesco Bagnaia, the top two riders in the current standings (Bagnaia and Marco Bezzecchi) plus two local manufacturers in Ducati and Aprilia.

“Ducati won the championship last year. Pecco won the championship last year. He’s a quite iconic rider. They’ve got a lot of Italians doing well. But clearly they’re charging these people too much money. 200 bucks for general admission is f**king ridiculous,” Miller had said earlier in the weekend, after a crowd of just 18,403 turned up on Friday.

“That’s how it should be,” he added, when told Le Mans was 90 euros. “No one can afford that in this day and age. Even on a good wage. Average family, try and bring 3 kids, 200 bucks a pop, you’re dreaming.”

Bagnaia won both Mugello races, with Bezzecchi joining him on the Saturday podium as runner-up in the new-for-2023 Sprint.

The VR46 Ducati rider was never able to make an impression over the 23 laps, dropping from seventh to ninth and only regaining a place when Alex Marquez fell with eight laps to go.

“I don’t know,” Bezzecchi shrugged, when asked what had gone wrong. “But it was not like in the practices or in the Sprint.

“We have to check, but I felt very bad since the second corner, and from that moment, I understood that my race was going to be very very difficult.

“Unfortunately I didn’t have feeling at all with the bike. We have to check, but it’s very strange, because we didn’t touch the bike, but I struggled a lot.

“I was having many problems with the front feeling, losing the front many times. I couldn’t get close to any rider, because then I was also not stopping anymore.”

Bezzecchi’s words pointed to some kind of front tyre issue, but when asked directly he replied: “Still I don’t know.”

Like many, the #72 had switched from the soft to medium rear for the longer race, but highlighted: “This morning [in warm-up] with the medium, I was first. And yesterday with the medium, I was very very fast. So my bike was good with medium and soft.

“But it was more on the front, I felt very bad with the front, I had no feeling, I couldn’t brake late, I couldn’t go in with the brakes. And when I was close I couldn’t stop. I always go wide, I struggled all the race.”

The only positive was that “until the race today I was very fast.”

Bezzecchi, whose team-mate Luca Marini finished fourth, has now slipped 21 points behind double winner Bagnaia heading into this weekend’s Sachsenring round.

 

 

Although the RNF Aprilia was delighted with the results of his post-Jerez arm pump surgery, he had been ill in the run-up to the Mugello weekend, then suffered two heavy falls on Saturday.

After shadowing factory Aprilia star Maverick Vinales through the field for the opening eleven laps, Fernandez’s began to feel tired and then, literally, sick.

“I’m really happy with my arm,” he began. “The best thing that I did was to have surgery.

“But after yesterday’s crash, I felt very bad in the race.

“At the beginning I was behind Maverick, Oliveira and we were catching to Aleix on some laps.

“I don’t know why, but in the middle of the race, I started to feel very bad, very bad, very bad. I don’t know if it’s because of the crash or for the [painkilling] pill but I vomited on the bike.”

Fernandez reached the finish of the 23 laps but faded back to 17th.

“I tried until the end of the race, but I was riding bad. Going wide. My body was not good. I was super tired,” he explained.

“MotoGP is super competitive now. And if you are not at 100% or you don’t train at 100%, you will be in the shit.

“On Monday, Tuesday I felt bad at home [with flu]. Then I had two big crashes. I started to take pills. And today I felt bad with my body. Now I feel super tired and I have a headache.”

Fernandez cancels summer break, will train like ‘an animal’

The former Moto2 title runner-up revealed he and RNF are now treating the upcoming events, on consecutive weekends at Sachsenring and Assen, as a kind of pre-season, with the goal of being back to full physical strength after the summer break in Silverstone.

“I want to say sorry to the team, but we will have some opportunities in future and I will tell you now our target is to go to Silverstone 100% because we will have the summer break to prepare very well,” Fernandez said.

“I think the Sachsenring will be a good track for us but the important thing is arrive at Silverstone at 100%. I will prepare like an animal and [hope] not to have these f**king stupid things that meant I couldn’t train like normal.

“This is not the pre-season, but we will take it like a pre-season to recover our speed until we arrive to summer break. Then I will not do a summer break. I will go to train and prepare very well for the second part of the year.”

Team-mate Miguel Oliveira, returning from a dislocated and fractured shoulder at Jerez, crashed out halfway through the grand prix.

“I‘m happy that I was back. It was a weekend where the progression was there. I had speed, I had the pace. I just couldn’t finish the race, which was a shame,” said the Portimao, who qualified 18th and was in 13th when he crashed.

“I saw myself in a position where I could maybe challenge for the top 10 and I was very hopeful I could do it. At the end, this was [only] my second long race this year and I’m happy that I managed to do at least half of it and be competitive.

“The good thing is, we have another race next weekend. Then we can hopefully turn things around and give the whole crew the result that they deserve.”

Oliveira has finished twelfth in thr Sprint when Fernandez was 19th.

Espargaro, the second-best non-Ducati behind fifth place Brad Binder (KTM), achieved the feat despite being unable to use the rear brake on his Aprilia due to swelling in his right heel.

The Spaniard will now undergo further medical checks to try and reduce the ‘crazy pain’ ahead of the German Grand Prix at Sachsenring, which starts on Friday.

“I’ve never been happy after last year with sixth, but I’m pleased,” Espargaro said. “Sincerely I didn’t expect this after FP1, when I couldn’t ride.

“It was crazy the pain that I have. Tomorrow [Monday] I will go to hospital to do more tests, because the doctors don’t understand why I have that much pain, why the foot is full of blood if there is nothing broken.

“I need to do more tests because maybe there is something [wrong with the] ligaments or whatever.

“I had quite a lot of drugs for today’s race, and I didn’t really have a lot of pain but I couldn’t use the rear brake, so I was just leaving the foot on the footpeg without playing with the foot and I finished really really tired.

“I was not really able to move freely. But it’s not an excuse. We didn’t have the competitivity to match the Ducatis.”

The Spaniard, who had qualified in ninth place and took eighth in the Sprint, added:

“We worked until late last night trying to find a different balance of the bike, to be able to do more corner speed, but we couldn’t. Even with the change of geometry we did in the warm up I was fast, but I couldn’t match them [Ducatis].

“They are very fast. I did my lap record here in Mugello yesterday, but not enough. Pecco is flying. He is the man to beat. But all his mates in different teams are following him. Alex Márquez with Gresini, the Mooney boys, the Pramac guys are flying as well. So it’s not going to be an easy year for the others.”

Espargaro’s team-mate Maverick Vinales finished was the next best Aprilia rider, in twelfth.

Espargaro: I hope Rins recovers before his wedding

Espargaro wasn’t the only rider injured at Mugello with Joan Mir sidelined by a finger damage on Friday and Alex Rins breaking his right leg in the Saturday Sprint.

The LCR rider has had an external fixator attached to his leg but will need a second operation once he is cleared to travel back to Spain.

“I spoke with Alex, to understand how and when he was flying back home, if he wanted to join this [Sunday] afternoon with me, but I think he stays here, tomorrow he will fly to Madrid to have the real [second] operation,” Espargaro said.

“He destroyed his leg. So hopefully he will be able to make it for July when he will have the wedding. MotoGP is f**king difficult right now, and if you have a Honda even more. I’m disappointed. Alex is a really really nice guy, so hopefully he can recover quickly.”

With hindsight Marquez, who was under pressure from Luca Marini and Johann Zarco, admitted it might have been better to settle for a top five.

But the scene of his downfall, the apex of turn two, was also the last place he expected to lose the front of his GP22.

“I was pushing in a good way until that point,” said Marquez, who had crashed out of Saturday’s sprint after contact with Brad Binder. “I was suffering already a little bit with the front tyre, but not at that point.

“I was expecting to lose the front everywhere apart from there. So I was too confident in that point. I got in a little bit more [tight to the kerb], I touched the white line also a little bit more, there’s a little bump and I lost the front.

“A shame because we were fighting for a podium. Maybe today, I needed to say, ‘OK, take a top five’. But it was a podium and I tried for it.”

Alex Marquez: “I was sh*tting my pants!”

Earlier in the race, Marquez had a big scare in the turn 1 braking zone when, unable to scrub off enough speed, he was forced to try and weave between brother Marc and Luca Marini, then inside KTM’s Jack Miller.

After running a little wide at turn one, the #73 made contact with Miller as he pulled his Ducati back towards the racing line. Both fortunately remained upright.

“It was really, really strange,” Marquez said. “But it’s what we always say, the slipstream absorbs you.

“I was not really late on the brakes because, as you saw, I didn’t turn too far [from the apex]. And I was braking with the same pressure as always.

“But when you lose all the downforce and have two bikes [ahead]. It was like impossible. ‘Vroom’ [I went between them].

“I said ‘f**k’! I was shitting my pants, honestly!”

Luca Marini: “Not so dangerous, just scary”

VR46 Ducati rider Marini admitted it had been a scary moment as Marquez whizzed past, but was impressed by how he then got the bike stopped.

“With the slipstream in the braking of Turn 1, it’s very difficult. Also because the bike starts to shake a lot,” Marini said.

“I didn’t expect that he could stop the bike, so he made a fantastic ‘pass’. Also the soft rear tyre helped him a lot, because I saw him pushing with the rear brake, try to keep the bike [from going too wide], and it worked.

“It was not so dangerous. Just scary, because it was really fast.”

Jack Miller: “Have a gander before cutting back”

Miller agreed it’s easy to get caught out under braking from the highest top speeds of the season but wasn’t pleased with the way Marquez tried to cut back after running wide, initiating their contact.

“If you get a double slipstream and then you lift the rear going into turn one, yeah, it’s an easy thing to do,” said the Australian.

“But you generally always have a gander at where you are coming back into. It’s not like he missed the line by half a metre [at turn 1], he missed it by three. And then cut back, very similar to what he did on the first corner [of the Sprint].

“Nothing much I could do. I was just trying to avoid the carnage. It is what it is. He stayed on the bike, so that’s a positive. And I didn’t get a Long Lap penalty, so that’s positive too!”

Binder had received a Long Lap penalty after contact with Marquez sent the Ducati rider down at turn one of the Sprint.

Marini and Miller went on to finish fourth and seventh respectively.