MOTOGP IS GO!!!
Yes, last year may have been a corker of a GP season, but we’re sure that the fireworks, plot twists and generous flow of unsavoury gesticulations are set to continue at an even more ferocious pace. Or at least we bloody hope so. With the curtain raiser Qatar a mere whisker away, we’ve been doing our homework and studying all the new bits of tech, bikes, riders and teams that are set to hit our screens in 2018, to try and work out who’s going to be straddling podiums… and who’ll end up holding the wooden spoon. And believe us; it’s not as black-and-white as you might think.
On face value, 2018 has all the ingredients to be another vintage season. The changes that Dorna has implemented over the last few seasons with the aim of cutting costs on one hand, but more importantly levelling the playing field on the other, have done just that. The gap in performance across the manufacturers and teams from the front of the grid to the back continues to shrink apace. At the recent Sepang test an astonishing 13 riders were split by 0.8 seconds around a circuit where times can get notoriously stretched. To give this figure some context, at the 2016 Sepang pre-season test only two rides were within 0.8 seconds at the top. These are the sort of numbers that a well-known, supposed pinnacle of motorsport (coughs entirely unsarcastically) four-wheeled series can only dream of. Plus our heroes actually know what slipstreaming and overtaking is. As one of James Hunt’s former race mechanics so eloquently put it
