Michelin: ‘No manufacturing problem, no quality problem’ with Martin rear tyre

Michelin have claimed that Jorge Martin’s rear tyre at the Qatar MotoGP had ‘no manufacturing or quality problem’.

24 Nov 2023

Jorge Martin, Pramac Ducati MotoGP Valencia 2023

Martin finished arguably the most important race of his season, maybe even his career, in tenth spot while title rival Francesco Bagnaia went on to finish second.

As a result, a furious Martin blamed Michelin after feeling as though a faulty rear tyre was the cause for his performance.

Saying the title had been decided because of a bad tyre, Martin then admitted that Michelin had given him no answers in the pre-event press conference for this weekend’s season-finale at Valencia.

But Micheling has since responded, with Piero Taramasso telling MotoGP.com: “I think everybody knows what happened in Qatar, Jorge was quite hard in his criticism of Michelin. We understand the position of Jorge, he was fighting for the championship. Riders have a lot of adrenaline.

“We spoke with Jorge, with Pramac and with Ducati. What I want to tell you is that we took this matter very seriously. Right after the race, we sent all data.

“We started to check all the processes of manufacturing, all the parameters.

“What I can tell you is that there is no manufacturing problem, no quality problem, about the rear tyre of Jorge. This is the most important thing for us.”

But that wasn’t it as Taramasso, who firstly thanked Pramac and Ducati for supplying the tyre manufacturer with extra data from the sprint race which Martin won, said that the concludion is not ‘100% clear’.

“Then, thanks to Pramac and Ducati, we got some data from the race and from the sprint,” began Taramasso. “We started to analyse. Yesterday, we exchanged the analysis with Pramac and Ducati. We agreed with the conclusion.

“The conclusion today is not clear 100% but we saw some hypotheses, some ways we need to work to make it more precise.

“What we agree is that the performance of Jorge was not in line with what everybody expected, especially from Lap 7 until the end of the race. We will still work, we still have a lot of data to analyse, it is only three days since the race finished in Qatar.

“We are working on different hypotheses. One hypothesis is the working range of the rear tyre, the rear hard compound.

“We know it is quite narrow. We need to continue with this, then we will have more answers later.”