Bump-starting a crashed bike has been a common sight in MotoGP for many years, but the rules have changed. From now on, riders will first have to let the marshals push the bike behind the barriers. Only then can they try to restart the bike in safety before rejoining the race.

How will this bump-ban affect MotoGP, and what possible ways are there to minimise the amount of time lost due to the new rule?

Effects

Up until now, the situation has been as follows:

Approximately 4 race marshals arrive at the bike and pick it up. Once the rider has hopped aboard, the marshals start pushing. The fat one stops almost immediately because the sprint from his post to the bike almost killed him already. Another one or two manage a few more steps before being left behind.

Finally the last remaining marshal usually manages to shove the bike fast enough for the rider to slam all of his short and skinny bulk down onto the seat while dumping the clutch, and the engine fires back up.

(It’s a lot simpler in WSBK where the rider just hits the electric starter and sods off).

From now on, something like this will happen:

Approximately 4 race marshals will arrive at the bike and pick it up. The rider will try to get back on and frantically point towards the track. The marshals will point to a distant gap in the barriers and tell him to stop arsing around. A furious argument will ensue because the rider doesn’t know the rules. If he’s a hot-blooded foreign type like an Australian, he may attempt to deck one of the marshals.

By this point it would’ve been faster just to bump-start the bloody thing, but rules are rules. The marshals will win the argument ‘cos there’s more of them and they’re already pissed off after going through the same palaver 4 times during the Moto3 race.

There will then be a ludicrous scene as the adrenaline-soaked rider urges the marshals to put their backs into it and drag the 160kg bike through 80 yards of deep gravel with a little more gusto. He’ll almost certainly try to help and just get in the way. Eventually this ridiculous Keystone Cops routine will arrive behind the barriers.

The rider will then angrily demand that the exhausted marshals shove him fast enough to bump-start the bike. They might manage this if it’s a tarmac service road back there, but quite often it’s a dirt track that probably has an uphill slope and you’re never gonna bump-start the bloody thing like that.

Assuming that they do get the bike started, a furious argument will ensue over where the rider is permitted to rejoin the track. He may well run over a few photographers on the way to this entry point. Hopefully they’ll get some good shots of the bike instead of diving out of the way. Finally the rider will get back on track, having been lapped a couple of times in the process.

Possible Improvements

There’s no flexibility in the rule that a stalled bike must be moved behind the barriers before restarting, but once it’s back there, how can the bike be started more easily?

Team Member on Paddock Scooter

There are often team members scattered around the outside of the track on paddock scooters. Could one of these be used to help get a MotoGP bike going fast enough to bump-start?

In South-East Asia, 50cc scooters are used by families of 8 to move house, carrying parents, kids, grandma and all of their possessions including several chickens and a water buffalo. So even a small scooter with an internal combustion engine could surely help to bump-start a MotoGP bike.

Unfortunately, these days paddock scooters must be electrically powered (not due to emissions, the rule was introduced to make the scooters so awful that security guards wouldn’t bother stealing them). Pedro Acosta was filmed accepting a lift on one of these ecoscoots, and hilariously had to get back off and push when it wouldn’t go up a slope with a 63kg bloke as a passenger. There’s no way that one of these windscreen wiper motors on wheels would be powerful enough to shove a MotoGP bike faster than a crawl.

Fan Power, like in World Rally Championship

MotoGP stars such as Valentino Rossi have tried their hand at car rallying. The drunk and loveable bobble-hatted fans of this sport adore nothing more than to stand around for hours in sub-zero temperatures waiting for a 4-second glimpse of each car blasting through the forest sideways and often upside-down. When one of the cars inevitably ends up on its roof, the fans rush over to push it back upright and shove it out of the ditch onto the road. (Pecco could’ve done with this happening on Ibiza before the rozzers arrived and breathalysed him, the twat).

Could this be done in MotoGP?

If the track was Mugello and it was a VR46 rider, then yes. Swarms of fans would be delighted to help push one of their Italian mama’s boys up to speed and back into the race.

If the track was Mugello and the rider was Marc Marquez, then letting the fans out of their enclosures to “help” him could probably be filmed as the next sequel in the “28 Days Later” zombie horror franchise.

Probably best to keep the fans cooped up away from the riders, all things considered.

Giant Evel Knievel Toy

Retro is all the rage these days, with the likes of Stranger Things polluting watchlists across the world. It’s time to revive Evel Knievel mania, especially as MotoGP currently has its very own Evel Knievel impersonator, Jorge Martin. The main difference between them being that Jorge Martin, who is less impact-resistant than a glass Christmas tree bauble, really did break 433 bones last year. Whereas when disaster-prone daredevil Evel Knievel claimed that he broke 433 bones in his career he was just drunkenly lying to make himself sound cool. (He was a total dick compared to Eddie Kidd).

The Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle was one of the coolest toys of its era. Put the little plastic bike and rider on the base unit, wind the handle really fast to spin up his back wheel, then launch!

Surely it would be simple common sense for Dorna to order 15 to 20 huge versions of this Evel Knievel toy and strategically place them around the racetrack service roads. A stalled bike could quickly be fired up, and with the use of a suitable ramp, fired over the tyre wall and back onto the racetrack with minimal time loss, preferably doing a back flip in the process.

NB: They’re now making these extremely cool toys again and selling them for about £60 to cash in on the retro craze. They’d previously stopped making them in 1977 when Evel Knievel was convicted of seriously injuring his authorised biographer by battering him with a baseball bat while screaming “I’m gonna kill you!!!” after the biographer published a book saying that Knievel was a drunk and pill addict.  It emerged in court that Knievel himself had approved and signed off on the book’s manuscript, presumably while he was drunk and off his tits on pills.

Conclusion

This new bump-start rule will increase the drama and hilarity of MotoGP at a time when they are both badly needed. All that remains now is to watch Joan Mir becoming the first person to try it out.