Michelin: Martin Qatar MotoGP tyre issue wasn’t a manufacturing problem

The Pramac Ducati rider struggled to a season-worst 10th in last week’s Qatar GP having battled with a lack of rear grip from the off.

After title rival Francesco Bagnaia finished second to take a 21-point lead into this weekend’s Valencia finale, Martin said Michelin had ‘stolen’ his championship with its problematic rear tyre.

On Thursday in Valencia, Martin said there had been no answers from Michelin yet over what went wrong.

But on Friday, Michelin motorsport boss Piero Taramasso said initial analysis of the tyre showed no manufacturer errors, but that further work was still needed to determine what went wrong.

“So, basically after Qatar race everybody saw Jorge’s declaration but we understand his position,” Taramasso began.

“He was fighting for a championship, a lot of adrenaline and everything. But as usual, we take very seriously this matter.

“So, what we did first thing straightaway, we called into France and checked the manufacturing process, if all the parameters when we built that tyre were OK.

“So, we have the answer. The answer was yes, everything was right in the manufacturing process. So there was no quality problem in Jorge Martin’s tyre.

Photo by: MotoGP

Jorge Martin, Pramac Racing

“This is the first thing. Second step is we analysed the data from the track, thanks to Pramac, thanks to Ducati who gave us the data. It was a lot of data from three days, we didn’t have time to analyse everything.

“Anyway, we did our best, we did some analysis in our side and last night we shared this with Ducati and Pramac. They did their analysis. The conclusions from both sides is that Jorge’s performance in Qatar was not in line from what everybody was expecting.

“We saw different things but at this moment we don’t have a clear answer. We still have a different hypothesis.

“We will do some work and analysis and we will come back to you, to the team if we see something more. We have been concentrating on Jorge’s data, now we want to look at Pecco’s data.

“We have different things. One thing we are working on is the hard rear compound, because the range of that compound is very narrow and based on how use this compound you can have better and lower performance. So, we are looking at that.”

Taramasso noted that Michelin hasn’t yet gotten the data from Pramac and Ducati from Martin’s start, but said his tyres were in the correct temperature and pressure during the sighting lap.

He also said Michelin received a lot of contradictory data from the Qatar weekend due to the new asphalt at the Losail venue, which is contributing to it needing more time to understand fully what happened to Martin.

The data Michelin does have at its disposal did reveal that Martin’s “pressures were higher compared to all other riders front and rear” which could be explained by the Spaniard pushing hard to make up ground from his poor start.