2017 Qatar MotoGP Friday Notes: A Treacherous Track, and HRC's Bulges | MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin ThinksWaarom word er niet gereden..... ? Er hebben maar 8 man een tijd neergezet en ze zijn al bijna een halve dag verder
At Sepang, after losing so much time to the weather during the shakedown test ahead of the official test, Ducati boss Gigi Dall'Igna said that there was no point using Sepang as a test circuit, if the surface was not going to dry. "Maybe we have to test somewhere else," he said.
Now MotoGP is somewhere else. At Qatar, where the rain is never a concern (well, almost never), and the teams don't have to worry about the track not drying up. But arguably, the teams get even less track time at Qatar than they do at Sepang, even when it rains. The test starts at 4pm, with the fierce Arabian sun still beating down on the track. Sunset is two hours later, and it takes a while for the track to cool to the normal temperatures which will be found at the race.
Track temperatures are fine after dark, at least for a few hours. Around 10pm, an hour before the track closes, the dew starts to form. The time at which it starts tends to vary, depending on temperature and humidity, but it is very rarely before 11pm. Invisible damp patches on the track mean riders start to crash without warning. The sensible riders wait for the unlucky riders to crash, then take that as a signal to scurry back to their garages and call it a day.
Money Mirage
That leaves four hours of usable track time, from a seven hour test. But that is reckoning without track conditions: sand and dust tends to blow in from the desert behind the track, leaving it dirty and with unreliable grip, especially off line. Run wide and try to correct a little too forcefully, and you crash.
In short, there are much worse places to test than Sepang, with Qatar delivering a lot less than you might expect on paper. It has a glorious layout, sure. But its location, the time of year MotoGP visits there, the decision to run at night rather than during the day, all these mount up to make it a pretty terrible place to be either racing or testing MotoGP bikes. If it wasn't for the vast amount of money which the Losail Circuit pays to be the first race on the calendar – enough to cover the transport costs for the overseas races throughout the year, paddock rumor has it – Qatar would be a place MotoGP would avoid.
Cha-ching!