MotoGP's brave new world
MotoGP was in serious trouble. With Kawasaki and Suzuki deciding that enough was enough and promptly moving on, the pinnacle of motorbike sports was on the brink of a potential meltdown with possibly farcical grid sizes.
Something needed to change but while bringing in more privateer teams seemed to make sense, it was obvious that the chances of this actually happening were extremely slim.
After all, leasing a prototype MotoGP bike from a factory team would set you back somewhere in the region of £1.2 million - that's per bike, providing there's no damage. And even after you've shelled out all that cash, you don't even get to keep the machinery.
However, with the re-introduction of 1000cc engines, Dorna was able to create a new formula to get more bikes on the grid. Claiming Rule Team (CRT) bikes are still a mass of carbon fibre and MotoGP tech but they are effectively beefed up superbikes that even use tuned SBK engines.
Now obviously we're still talking about a lot of money but budgets have been cut in half (at least) for a season running a CRT bike and the teams own all their hardware - nothing has to go back to a factory.
The big question was whether you can introduce a cheap and cheerful category to top level racing or whether you would end up with just another case of 'get what you pay for'.
Potentially, we could see CRT teams get up to the speed of the factory bikes, just as privateer teams used to do in the '80s and '90s, but it’s a tall ask.
The biggest factor at the moment is time. This season may as well be a right-off, as the teams need to focus on developing the bikes and beating each other before they can really think about challenging at the front, but progress has been impressive so far.
On first impressions, Colin Edwards' Suter BMW may have been one of the strongest of the new bikes but he was still six seconds behind Casey Stoner around Sepang. Although, after only a few months of development, Randy de Puniet was lapping his ART around Valencia around half a second off the 800cc lap record.
Whether or not this pace would transfer to out-right race pace was unsure and we had to wait until the Qatar GP to really know. Now that the race has been and gone, we can see just how much work the teams have put into making the bikes competitive.
Every competitive finisher finished on the lead lap, with Colin Edwards leading the pack only around 20 seconds down the road from Valentino Rossi.
There may still be a long way to go but at least we have now seen the first indications that Dorna may not have to step in and introduce measures to slow down the factory teams - a matter which has already prompted Honda to threaten quitting.
