Jorge Lorenzo leads Dani Pedrosa and Marc Márquez past the party deck in the early laps of the MotoGP race. It was only a matter of time before Márquez passed his collarbone-weakened fellow aliens.
I’m back from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where about this time every year they play the U.S. national anthem before the race but then wear out the Spanish national anthem after the races, where the big news is that next year’s race is not canceled, and where local jingoistic race fans (the kind who only cheer for riders with U.S. passports) are a depressed lot, and for good reason.
Marc Márquez, 20, supernaturally talented, confident and, for the moment, nearly invincible.
A motorsports race of any kind is never truly a foregone conclusion. Too many things can break, a miscalculation of inches can result in disaster. But running Sunday’s MotoGP race was about as close to a mere formality as you get in this sport. With Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo, the other two “aliens” of 2013, still not fully recovered from their injuries, and Marc Márquez having led every practice session and qualifying, while setting a new lap record in the process, nobody was betting on anyone other than the 20-year-old with the fast motorcycle, unhuman skills and sky-high confidence.
Nicky Hayden, still riding hard on the Ducati even though he’s a lame duck rider.
For the second year in a row, and the third in the last four, all three MotoGP races were won by Spanish riders. If last year seemed a depressing one for U.S. riders, with Nicky Hayden knocking himself out of the race with a crash in practice, this year was worse. At least Hayden injected some excitement into the race this year with a last-lap pass of his teammate, Andrea Dovizioso, that was the kind of bump-and-run move we’d more expect to see in the Brickyard 400. Colin Edwards did his usual fill-out-the-grid appearance on his uncompetitive CRT bike. Blake Young, hoping to revive his career with wild-card rides at the U.S. rounds of MotoGP, crashed in the first turn of the first lap. After all the effort that went into putting together his ride, through various misfortunes he never completed a single lap of a MotoGP race.
All that pales compared to the universe’s apparent vendetta against Ben Spies. Last year, he was contending for a win early in the race when his Yamaha did an impression of a mosquito-fogging truck halfway down the long Indy straight, spewing a cloud of oil smoke that could be smelled throughout the southern end of the huge speedway.
If that seemed depressing, this year has put it into perspective. After missing months with a shoulder injury (shoulder injuries have ended many a motorcycle roadracing career), he fell in practice and injured the other shoulder. In the long layoff, it seems he forgot that the traction-control on the Ducati doesn’t click on until the rider shifts into second gear, which doesn’t happen until turn four at Indy when a rider’s coming out of the pits.
And that brings us to the other news of the weekend: That MotoGP is coming back to Indy in 2014 and changes will be made to the infield track to address the complaints of racers and fans. The mix of different kinds of pavement on the Indy oval and road course has always been an issue, and the track layout never inspired adulation. Both will be addressed.
Even the top motorcycle roadracing series in the world can’t draw enough fans to fill much of the sea of seats at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
One of the cool parts of the Indy Red Bull MotoGP round is the free motorcycle parking on the back straight of the famous oval. No waiting to get in, no fee. Back when I used to watch the Indy 500 every year in the 1990s, I never thought I’d use that pavement as parking for my motorcycle some day.
As a fan, I have mixed feelings about the MotoGP races at Indy. Because it’s built to handle hundreds of thousands of fans, the facility easily provides a convenient experience for the 50,000 or so who show up for MotoGP. No waiting for anything, hardly. But the utterly flat infield track is uninspiring and I have to choose between being close to the action on the spectator mounds and seeing a tiny fraction of the course or sitting in the stands with a view of the big TV screen and feeling like I’m a mile away from the tiny motorcycles flying by. (I generally choose the latter and take binoculars.)
Of course if Indy goes away and I want to see a MotoGP round in the United States I’ll have the unpalatable, less convenient and far more expensive choice of going to the Circuit of the Americas in Texas, a great track but one I have issues with, or Laguna Seca in California, a beautiful place also known for price-gouging and traffic jams.
Considering all the years we had no grands prix in the United States, these are great problems to have, I’ll admit. Anyway, if the Indy MotoGP round ever goes away, it will be more incentive for me to save up and finally make that trip to see a MotoGP race at Valencia. With all due respect to the diminished Indy 500, to this particular fan, that sounds like a real spectacle of racing.
