After the mid-season break, MotoGP teams and riders are back from their summer hiatus with round 10 due to get underway to the Brno Circuit in the Czech Republic this weekend.
Last season’s runner-up Andrea Dovizioso was the race winner in Brno last season, and he holds the race duration record which he set in 2018. He was joined on the podium by his then teammate Jorge Lorenzo, with defending champion Marc Marquez in third. Marquez still holds the outright lap record, set in 2016.
The 5,403m long circuit features eight right-handers and six left-handers, and the unbalanced layout does put the right shoulder of the tyre under a little more strain as a result during a lap with Turn 10 through to Turn 12 being highlighted by Michelin as a particularly high stress zone.
This weekend all rear Power Slick and Power Rain tyres will be of asymmetric design, with a harder rubber on the right-hand side of the tyre. All front options will be symmetric.
Speaking ahead of the return to racing, Michelin Motorsport 2-Wheel Manager Piero Taramasso stated:
“Its always good to have a break, but its even better to get back to racing. Brno is a big test for the tyres, it is quite complex and features a big change in elevation from the lowest parts of the track to the highest.
It has many demanding sections that require the tyres to work in many different ways, heavy braking, hard acceleration and an array of different corners that give varying levels of stress and load to the side of the tyres.
We have a range of slicks that we know will work well here and the added performance from the compounds we introduced this year will be ideally suited to this track. We are hoping for the best weather conditions, but if it does rain we know that the wets perform very well here, so we are expecting a good race, no matter what happens.”
