The fourth part of Motorsport Week’s six-part look at the 2021 MotoGP World Championship season illustrates the difficulties Suzuki faced in trying to defend the driver and team titles it had garnered in a hugely successful 2020 season, a task which ultimately turned out to be a bit too steep for the brand.
Suzuki entered the 2021 MotoGP World Championship season as a factory with the goal in mind. The Hamamatsu-based brand had won its first drivers title since Kenny Roberts in 2000 with Joan Mir in 2020 along with the team award.
The relatively small and historically conservative organization had everything to do to fend off the advance of much better financed manufacturers such as Ducati, Honda and KTM – and at the same time had to cope with the loss of their beloved team manager Davide Brivio over the winter to the Alpine Formula 1 team.
Suzuki chose not to replace Brivio in the end for this season, instead taking on the role of the brand’s team manager, Shinichi Sahara, a decision that ultimately turned out to be the wrong direction as Sahara couldn’t spend much time engineering -Team back in Japan due to the Covid-19 protocol.
Suzuki was on its way back for 2021 following the departure of beloved team manager Davide Brivio
This meant that a positive development of his GSX-RR was rare throughout 2021, his rider line-up of Mir and Alex Rins was forced to get by with a largely unchanged machine, as Ducati and Yamaha in particular made great strides with their own prototypes.
The result of this season was a significant drop in earnings compared to the breakthrough in 2020. The only major upgrade for his bike was the long-awaited ride height device that supports starting from a standstill, driving straight ahead and reducing speed. the tendency of a MotoGP machine to do wheelies when exiting a corner – its rivals had perfected progress long before that.
At least I managed to enjoy a strong championship defense season as he consistently got the most out of Suzuki’s challenger – finished championship result his final reward.
Throughout the year, I was maximizing the potential of his GSX-RR, even though he was denied victories
The more worrying stat, however, was 70 points behind eventual champion Fabio Quartararo when all 18 races were contested, despite finishing outside the top ten only twice throughout the year – a pair of DNFs – suggesting a clear lack of absolute Performance suggests challenges the French.
In the meantime, Rins struggled to assert himself as Suzuki continued to fall behind in the overall rankings. The three-time premier class winner failed to win a race for the first time since 2018 when he took just a single podium finish at Silverstone – while a tough seven non-scores meant he hit a disastrous 13th overall.
While showing decent pace more than often through 2021, Rins suffered a string of falls while trying to push his GSX RR harder than he wanted, most notably battling Quartararo for the lead at the Portuguese Grand Prix – a disappointment that suggests the rest of his campaign.
A single podium at Silverstone was a poor return for Rins
The result was a drop from first to third place in the team table behind the factory teams from Ducati and Yamaha, and while he stuck to third place among the constructors, the gap to eventual champion Ducati grew from just 19 in 2020 to a monstrous 117 in 2021.
Suzuki was also one of only two of the six MotoGP factories, along with Aprilia, to not win a single race during the entire campaign, a scary stat for the reigning champions that won’t be repeated in 2022.
After the season ended, Valencia GP Mir admitted he was frustrated with his 2021 efforts, although he was significantly more optimistic after trying some of the upgrades he could expect from the organization’s 2022 package, including a new and more powerful inline four-motor.
“We have worked on the electronics to improve traction control, the engine braking and all these areas with the new engine so that we know exactly which direction we have to go,” said Mir after two days of testing the 2022 GSX-RR in Jerez .
“We sure have other things to try, we don’t know if this will be the last engine yet as we’ve given feedback that there is definitely more power, but we’ll find out.
“I tried a new fairing yesterday, Alex (Rins) tried it today but we mostly focused on the new engine and updated electronics but there were a lot of things to try, including on the chassis side that gave us help to make the motorcycle better. “
Suzuki brought several useful improvements to its machine in the post-season testing
Suzuki will certainly have to pull out all the stops to try to respond to the ever-improving Yamaha and Ducati, and as Honda brings an entirely new contender to the track for six-time premier class champion Marc Marquez – and KTM uses its might behind that Its RC16 returns to winning ways – it faces an uphill battle to try to give its newest star the chance to fight for the title again.
It’s close to the announcement of a new team manager so Sahara can focus on making advances on the technical side of the operation, and if the new team manager can bring the troops together as effectively as Brivio, Suzuki could really find itself again as that dark horse again that surprised the paddock in 2020.