Highly respected MotoGP nerd Mat Oxley has forgone any future luxury free meals in the Ducati hospitality unit by claiming two of their riders knowingly ran illegal tyre pressures at Jerez.
What?
Oxley, who is no doubt set to release another book about Valentino Rossi to pay for the new extension he’s having built, was leaked the tyre pressure data by a begrudged none-Ducati engineer who has become fed up with the constant cheating.
The chart clearly shows that the race winner Bagnaia, along with race crasher Jorge Martin, ran their front tyres below the agreed minimum pressure.
Soft is good?
The softer the front tyre pressure the better grip it gives. In a similar way to the more Uccio eats the harder he is to chip off the sofa. The decrease in pressure for the under pressure Bagnaia probably helped give him a significant enough advantage to win the race in front of the none-cheating, but still French, Fabio Quartararararo
Who cares?
The problem is that if the front tyre pressure is too low there’s a chance that the tyre structure will fail inevitably causing a crash. Worse still if the tyre fail is on Marc Marquez’s bike the resulting spill will probably cause his eye to fall out again and him have a few more races at home.
Why wasn’t Bagnaia excluded?
For reasons unknown tyre pressures are all governed by a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between all the teams. A gentleman’s agreement is a ruling that everyone agrees to adhere to unless they choose not to. The best part about breaking such an agreement is knowing there won’t ever be a punishment linked to it.
What about Jorge Martin?
It would appear Jorge may need all the help he can get in the grip department given he’s fallen off in four of the six races this season. For this reason it seemed a worthwhile risk for Primark Ducati to take.
What can be done?
The problem with a gentleman’s agreement is everyone needs to be a gentleman – hence why such agreements never occur in Romania. The only way this can be changed is if Dorna gets involved and starts handing out punishments for riders and teams who cheat on the rules.
Until then we can only hope that the sneaky engineer that supplied Oxley with the tyre pressure data continues to do so – so we can continue to see which riders are cheating and then boo them when we see them on TV.
Where can I find the original article (even though I already know it won’t be as good as this one)?
Have you another example of a gentleman’s agreement being broken?
The most famous broken gentleman’s agreement was the 1989 Formula One race at San Marino. Back then F1 was going through a golden age of mind-numbing boringness given the McLaren team had such a massive advantage over the rest of the field. Only their two drivers, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, had any chance of winning. To make matters even duller Prost only had a chance of winning when Senna broke down.
Before the weekend Prost and his team of travelling lawyers drew up a brief 376 page gentleman’s agreement with Senna that stated that whoever led into the first corner would stay there for the opening laps to avoid any unnecessary excitement. This meant that while Senna was busy fine tuning his car and claiming pole position Prost was upstairs sweet-talking the race director into finding out how long the red lights would stay on at the start.
As the race began, and Prost was given the nod by the race director, the Frenchman stormed into the lead followed by Senna. However Senna, possibly troubled by the Amaryllidaceae odour, immediately pulled out of Prost’s slipstream to get some fresh air and then overtook his teammate. From there Senna went on to win the race in front of thousands of sleeping viewers.
After the race Prost was furious and stormed off to check the fine print of his gentleman’s agreement whilst watching a moody black and white film.
Luckily Prost got revenge on his bitter rival at San Marino two years later when he spun off on the warm up lap not allowing Senna to beat him on track. This is just one example of why he earned the nickname “the Professor”.
King Frog’s Take:
Looking through Mat’s work he seems to have a weird almost stalker like fascination with Valentino Rossi. Interestingly Valentino’s hero was Barry Sheene and not me – which goes to show what a poor judge of character he is.
Anyway I have this on good authority from Barry himself that he always thought this was very odd as he had purposely gone out of his way to be rude to the young Valentino whenever he saw him hanging around the pitlane because he didn’t like the shape of his head. Something I assume Mat has missed in his numerous picture books.
As for Ducati cheating? I think they deserve to have an unfair advantage to help balance out the time I was forced to win championships for them on a bike that was unfairly hindered by having a 25% capacity advantage over the rest of the field. And you didn’t hear me complain about it unlike that none-starter Troy Corser.