I was wondering if anyone else had the same general feeling about CRT. In like a lion, out like a lamb.
I don't.
I can see what Ezpeleta is trying to do. Ever since the big three stopped leasing out bikes the costs have gone through the roof, with all bike development controlled by the factory, it will be a cold day in hell that a satellite team wins a GP.
Dorna gave the MSMA plenty of notice of what was to come if they didn't sort .... out - they didn't, this is what has happened.
We have a race series with three manufacturers, seemingly only one of which can win in a given year. Something had to change.
But it isn't going to happen overnight. In order to keep the show running, there needed to be a period of transition where we could continue to watch and identify with our favourite team/rider/brand.
While this may result in less than stellar racing in the lower-orders this year, maybe even for a year or two, I feel the direction is a positive one. If what Ezpeleta is doing means a return for Aprilia, Suzuki, Kawasaki, BMW et al. it can't be a bad thing.
However - I guess I am one of those glass-half-full kinda guys and I am looking at the CRT bikes and thinking - they are within a handful of seconds of the very fastest riders on the planet - not bad on less than a million Euros.
If you look back to 2001, the difference between Repsol HRC and Foggy Petronas at the Japanese GP was more than 25secs/lap. Things didn't change much for years - I think people have forgotten what it was like when there were bikes other than factory and satellite factory. It has always been like this - we are actually in a strange era - one where the only bikes on the grid are owned by the factories and have factory techs managing them.
I do agree with others that it seems like Dorna has made a series of ....-ups - it's pretty hard to argue that they have made things better, but the fact is, that's the past. It's either going to get better or Dorna are going to lose the franchise.
But...
I think we focus too much on the machines - where its the competition that is the thing. I don't particularly care that they are doing 330km/h or 295km/h - it looks pretty similar from where I am sitting. What I care about is that the competitive nature of GP racing returns.
For that to happen, the cost of competing needs to normalise. The rules need to stabilise for more than five minutes and there needs to be a significant reduction in those rules.
As in any high-tech sport the costs can run riot, but this is worsened by the continual rule changes.
If we were now at the end of 12 years of open four-stroke GP competition, where there were simple, easily-followed rules, an open formula that would allow innovative engineering solutions, some stringent dictates that prevented it being purely a money game (such as - tyres need to be checked in on Friday morning before FP1 - no overnight specials; no exotic materials; no positional/gps ECU) so the racing is more about innovation and skill, not the ability to snare a big fish sponsor, we would be seeing a lot more competitive racing.
How can we be sure? Because it has been this way in the past. Where some ....-hot young tuner has taken on a project bike and after a couple or three years, starts to see real results. Under Dorna, we have seen this sort of racing erode as all his work goes down the toilet after three years because they have changed the formula and none of his data is valid any more.
250GP racing was great, right up until it was canned. It was competitive, it was fast and any number of riders could be standing on that top step. There were problems - specifically Aprilia's gouging of race teams - but that could have been fixed. The reason it was such good racing and so competitive is because there was around 30 years of 250GP racing experience in the paddock - there were generations of tuners and teams with masses of data to fall back on.
With any luck, in the next couple of years we will see a levelling of the rules and we will enjoy another golden age of GP racing - but continually harping back or complaining about what isn't there is not going to get us any nearer that goal.
