For the most part, sprint races have been a dour affair, over by the end of the first lap, with very little overtaking after that. But the Barcelona sprint delivered, if not a thrilling race, then at least one with enough punch ups through the field to make it entertaining.
Why? That's pretty simple. A fantastic layout with a number of places to pass, combined with a surface that has no grip and eats tires. If you wanted to prove the thesis that tires that won't last the distance make for great racing, Barcelona is where you get your quod erat demonstrandum. Not that excessive tire wear is the fault of Michelin at Barcelona. It is just the nature of the track.
The basic problem is that there are so many long right handers where you spend time accelerating and that there is so little grip that it is hard to avoid spinning the rear too hard. Spending time on the edge of the tire heats up the tire, and spinning it just makes that worse. But you have to do both to go fast. You have been dealt a poor hand, and you have to try to make the best of it, either going in early and suffering later on, or holding off and then striking when the rest are done.
So we saw Marc Márquez, Pedro Acosta, and Fabio Quartararo go at it tooth and nail in the first couple of laps, after Márquez got a less than ideal start and had the KTM and the Yamaha go past him round Turn 1. Márquez struck back past Acosta at Turn 2, then after a bit of gentle nudging by Quartararo out of Turn 10, Márquez was forced wide and Acosta came through again. The three roughed each other up into Turn 1 at the start of the second lap, with Márquez emerging in the lead ahead of Pedro Acosta.
Around the halfway mark, Enea Bastianini caught Brad Binder and Pedro Acosta in what turned into a bit of a knock-down, drag-out fight between the three KTMs over several laps, rather to the surprise of Pedro Acosta. "Normally with Brad we always have some kind of respect, because it's not good to take out your teammate," Acosta said. "But with Enea it was quite strange, because he passed Brad in Turn 4, and suddenly he passed me in Turn 5, and I was like, holy s**t!"
Risky business
Acosta pointed out just why he had been concerned by those kinds of passes. "It was quite tricky. Morbidelli and Martin crashed. Fermin and Marco crashed." It was easy to make a mistake, lose the front, and take out the rider you had been trying to pass. And end up with a Long Lap Penalty, as is the case for Franco Morbidelli and Fermin Aldeguer after the crashes.
But as entertaining as the race was, the result was the same as ever. Marc Márquez won the sprint race, his 15th win in a row, counting sprint races and GPs since Silverstone. And he did so despite not being the fastest rider on the day. "Of course today Alex was the fastest, and I was just able to win this race because of his mistake," the Ducati Lenovo rider said. "Because if you check the lap times already, I gave up. Two laps before I gave up because he was faster than me."
So why did the rider who wasn't fastest win? And why didn't the rider who was fastest win? The answer is simple. Confidence. Confidence is a fickle beast, which will lure you in, reward you when you use it right, punish you if you abuse it.
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