MotoGP finally made its way to India with the IndianGP held at the Buddh International Circuit (BIC) on the fourth weekend of September. It was the first time that any of the riders rode at BIC which made it a completely new experience for them. From the practice sessions to qualifying and eventually the races, all riders faced several challenges to trace out the fastest and best line around the highly technical 16-turn layout at BIC that consists of high-speed straights with sharp corners producing heavy downshifting sectors. That said, here is a photo gallery of the MotoGP riders on their machines around the track.
That’s six-time MotoGP championship winner Marc Marquez in action on the Honda Repsol’s RC213V taking off at the crest for a quick airtime to further build more speed before going hard on the brakes of the chicane ahead.
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Francesco Bagnaia from the Ducati Lenovo factory team was early on getting a grip of the BIC’s challenging corners that require hard braking and precision steering inputs to achieve a fast and clean line. While the championship leader had a close dogfight with Jorge Martin in the initial laps of the race, he unfortunately went down with a crash taking him out of the race.
Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro had quite a challenging time in getting a hang of BIC’s technical layout. The rider on a few occasions overshot his braking marker at C1 which had also proved to be a challenging one for the other riders.
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Having clocked the fastest lap time at BIC and thus a pole position on the grid for the main race, Marco Bezzecchi started first on the grid, followed by Jorge Martin (Pramac Ducati) who had won the sprint race and then Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati Lenovo) in third. After a clean opening lap, Marco managed to stay in the lead and progressively managed to increase the gap with the other riders. By the end of the race, Marco had managed to attain a lead of eight seconds on crossing the chequered flag.
At the BIC, turn 10 is a double apex corner with positive banking that allows the riders to carry a lot of entry speed into the parabola. If executed perfectly and opens an opportunity to make a pass on the rider ahead at the exit.
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Since BIC is a highly technical circuit, the opportunity to make a pass is less and one needs to be at point precision on the braking markers to avoid going off track and eventually losing time. Corners C1 and C4 resulted in putting the braking system in maximum load. At C4, the riders were hitting the brakes to shed speed from 320 kmph+ down to under 100 kmph.
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Pramac Ducati’s Jorge Martin put up a fantastic show by winning the sprint race of the Indian GP. In the main race, Martin and Bagnaia were engaged in a fierce battle for second place but eventually, Bagnaia crashed, falling out of the battle. However, it wasn’t a smooth finish from there as Martin had to fight till the end as Fabio Quartararo had briefly taken the second position when Martin reclaimed in the last sector of the race.
Photography By: Kingshuk Dutta
