Cal Crutchlow is the first British rider to win a premier class GP since Barry Sheene won the underattended Swedish in 1981. It rained at Brno, making all of practice and its careful decisions irrelevant. Crutchlow's satellite Honda went to the grid on soft F/soft R Michelin rain tires and he decided there to switch to hard/hard. His tires were initially slow but he raised the pace as the rain slackened – his lap times dropping from early 2:12/2:11 TO 2:08s by lap 9, allowing him to move up from a hopeless-seeming P15 to 2nd behind practice stand-out Andrea Iannone by lap 14.
There is no Superman whose X-ray vision could reveal that the soft front would chunk, becoming hot enough at the rubber-to-carcass interface to throw off big strips of rubber from tread center. Iannone had said his pace was unhurried as he led from lap 4 to lap 15. He said, “…today we once again had very high potential. I started the race without pushing really hard in order to try to save the tires as much as possible, and was still in the lead with seven laps to go.” Then his soft front tire gave up.
I had hoped that this race would tell us if Ducati have taken a big step or if their 1-2 win in Austria resulted from the close match between that track and the Ducati's strengths in top speed, acceleration, and braking stability. Now we have to wait for another dry race for more insight.
Front tire failure also struck Dovizioso and Lorenzo. The latter’s front chunked early. When he rolled into his pit, his crew had no idea what had happened, as his tire looked perfect; the missing rubber was on the bottom as he stopped. All he could do was go out on his ‘B’ bike, which was on slicks (in case the track had dried fast enough). Lorenzo would change bikes yet again and make fast laps, but too far back to prevent Marc Marquez from pulling away dramatically in championship points (Lorenzo was 17th at the end). The top-3 are now Marquez 197, Rossi 144, and Lorenzo 138.
Valentino Rossi, who would finish 2nd, had the same soft F/hard R combination as Lorenzo. His lap time history looks just like Crutchlow’s – elevens and twelves in early laps, followed by eights and nines. This progression was a matter of decreasing rain allowing the hard rear to gradually come to operating temperature – and of then making wise use of the grip it provided.
Marc Marquez ran nines and tens early in the race and was never far from the front (he was a lowest of 5th on laps 7 through 9, and again on laps 12 through 19). When Crutchlow and Rossi came past him, “I saw by the line on the tire (the color band) that they were on the hard and I say ‘forget, because their grip was so much more.’ “So he devoted himself to finishing ahead of the two Ducatis of Baz and Barbera.
Loris Baz, 4th, was also on Crutchlow’s hard/hard tire combination. Baz and 5th-placeman Hector Barbera were both on satellite Avintia 14.2 Ducatis – bikes whose chassis are reckoned by some to give a grip advantage in slippery going.
Rossi described his early laps; “Everybody overtook me, from the outside, from the inside – it was difficult. At one point I understand that maybe today it would dry enough to affect the race.”
When his hard rear tire ‘came good’, he “just tried to ride well and not make any mistakes.” While he was struggling with the hard rear in the early laps, he said, “I was also with Pol and with Smith, who had the soft tire and already after four or five laps, they suffer very much, so in the end it (the hard rear) was the right choice.”
Crutchlow, watching the big screen, saw that someone was closing on him and feared it was Rossi. He described his state of mind; “I thought ‘OK, I have to go now because I’m in trouble.’ I didn’t know if Vale had the hard front tire so I started to push a little.”
When he saw the gap to second increasing nicely, he knew all he had to do was ride around and finish the race. He had seven seconds on Rossi at the end. How did Crutchlow get his hard rear tire working sooner than the master, Rossi? Maybe Crutchlow’s natural style, which is Superbike based, worked his rear tire harder. Rain shifts motorcycle racing from a game of calculation to more of a game of chance. Skill remains central, but the tools it is given to work with are unpredictable.