MotoGP | Michelin: Taramasso explains the new front tyre

After a complicated weekend at Motorland Aragon, Michelin had a decidedly more “relaxing” one at the San Marino and Riviera Grand Prix. The French company knows the Misano track very well, as it hosts not only the GP, but also the official and private tests of almost all the manufacturers.

So, she arrived in Romagna well prepared for any type of condition and in fact she wasn’t even scared by the rain that fell for just a couple of laps in the Sunday race that saw the second consecutive victory of Marc Marquez ahead of local idols Pecco Bagnaia and Enea Bastianini.

While there were no particular fears for the weekend, for Michelin the Monday test was very important, the last official one before the end of the season, because it needed to have the riders evaluate the new construction of the front tyre that it would like to introduce next season. There was a dedicated 30-minute session, on the basis of which conclusions will be drawn in the coming days, but in the meantime the manager Piero Taramasso explained to us how it has changed compared to the current one and what were the purposes for which it was designed.

“It’s a solution that we had already brought to Mugello, but that we didn’t have the chance to try because of the rain. We’re a bit late, so we have little information, but it’s still a new concept of tyre, with a new structure and a new profile, which weighs 1 kg less than the current one. It should be less sensitive to pressure and temperature variations, so it should help to follow another bike closely without any particular repercussions,” Taramasso told Motorsport.com.

“It will also have a larger footprint and therefore will guarantee a little more grip, helping when braking and entering corners. However, they will have to find a way to exploit this extra grip correctly, otherwise the risk is to weigh down the bike a little, making it less agile especially when changing direction. Now we will take a few days to evaluate the opinions of the riders and the data we have collected, then we will have to decide on the possibility of introducing it in 2025”, he added.

Let’s take a step back to the race weekend, which represented a return to normality after the chaos of Aragon…
“It was definitely a less demanding weekend than Aragon, but also because we went from a track that had very little grip to one that offers a good level of grip in both the dry and wet.”

On the front the choice was pretty clear from the start for everyone. On the rear the situation seemed more fluid…
“It was immediately clear that the medium front was the tyre of the weekend, and in fact it was then used both in the Sprint and in the race on Sunday. On Saturday, with the track conditions that were not perfect, the soft rear was more valued because it compensated for the grip of the track, in fact Bagnaia achieved a new track record in qualifying and it is the one that was used in the Sprint. With the data that we collected in the race on Saturday, we saw that the soft could also do the one on Sunday, because it had performed well in a Sprint that was fast in terms of times despite the heat. However, we knew that the medium was a good solution, because it is a specification that we had already used last year and that after three or four laps the times were aligned with those of the soft. Furthermore, over the distance it offered more consistency and more stability to the bike”.

The pilots who chose it in fact spoke above all of a stability issue…
“That is the characteristic of the medium compounds, which offer more support and less movement. While the soft tends to have a little more movement and in this way it also overheats a little. And in Misano stability is an important characteristic, because there are many changes of direction and fast corners on which a stable bike can give you more confidence. It is no coincidence that the riders who fought for the victory chose the medium, with Marquez who did the fastest lap on lap 20. So he was not only fast, but also consistent. Bastianini also had a good race with the soft, but it is true that in the last 3-4 laps he suffered more than Marc and Bagnaia who were ahead of him. So the weekend was positive, with a lot of data to use in view of the second race here in Misano, in which we expect everything to be a little easier, also because the allocation will be the same. It could be a little cooler and it would not only be better for the tyres, but also for the engines and for the riders, who suffered a lot from the humidity in the race Sunday.

The humidity was indeed very high on Sunday and had a big impact on the perceived temperature: is this a factor in the performance of the tyres?
“The tyre is not affected, it works as if the temperature were higher. That’s why the medium also worked well straight away and had no warm-up problems, while in the previous days we had seen that on the left side it took a bit of time to get it up to temperature. Instead, on Sunday it was instantaneous, because the temperature was 30 degrees, but there was a lot of humidity and so the perceived temperature was between 35 and 40. So the tyre perceived the same thing and worked perfectly”.

The only problem of the weekend was that of Enea Bastianini, who complained about his inability to exploit the average like his brand companions. What do you think is the cause of this?
“The medium is a good tyre, but on Friday and Saturday it struggled a bit to get up to temperature on the left side. Enea is one of those who suffered from it along with the Yamahas and the Aprilias. It can depend on many factors. One is the riding style, because the more aggressive you are, the sooner you get the tyre up to temperature. The second is the bike’s setting, both in terms of the load you put on the tyre and in terms of electronics. To make a tyre work, it has to spin a little: if you do it too little, you don’t get it up to temperature. If you do it too much, you overheat it and lose traction. You have to find the right balance. When you put all these factors together, you can struggle to make a solution work, but Enea still felt good with the soft and managed to get on the podium with that too.”

Inevitably, the most debated topic of Sunday was Jorge Martin’s strategic error, coming in as soon as the rain arrived to take the bike with rain tires while his rivals continued. A choice that, with the track drying out immediately, forced him to make a second change, relegating him to 15th place and costing him 19 points in the title fight with Bagnaia. How did you at Michelin see it?
“At that moment it is always very difficult to make a decision. Now it is easy to say that he made a mistake, even more so for those of us who are sitting behind the television. There, only the driver knows the conditions of the track, whether it is wet or not, so he has to decide 100%. If it had continued to rain, it would have been the right choice and he would have gained about twenty seconds on his rivals. Instead, it stopped immediately and therefore he lost them. I don’t feel like saying whether he did well or badly. At that moment he felt that way and unfortunately for him it turned out to be the wrong choice”.

It must be said that in that phase the slick tyres seemed to be behaving quite well, because the times dropped by about ten seconds in the space of just a couple of laps as soon as the rain stopped falling…
“It’s not the first time we’ve seen it, our slicks work well even when there are damp patches on the asphalt or in general when there’s a lot of humidity. If the drivers manage to keep it at the right temperature, the grip level is right. Then it’s clear that in these situations I always think of Binder in Austria in 2021, who in quite heavy rain managed to win by staying out on slicks. In that case he was a real tightrope walker, but it’s true that our tyres have a bit of this characteristic. It’s in the DNA of our compounds, it’s always been like this even when we were in F1 in the early 2000s”.