Paddock Pass Podcast

It's a busy week for the Paddock Pass Podcast crew. After last week's Yamaha bonanza episode, we have two shows out this week. Here's the first show, a WorldSBK special featuring Superbike regulars Steve English and Gordo Ritchie. In this show, Steve and Gordo get together to discuss all that happened at the Portimao WorldSBK test, the last test on European soil before heading to Phillip Island.

The show also features a couple of interviews, with Chaz Davies talking about the Ducati, and Alex Lowes talking about his transition to the Kawasaki Racing Team as Jonathan Rea's teammate.

It has been a wild week for Yamaha in MotoGP. On Tuesday, they announced that Maverick Viñales had signed a two-year contract extension to stay with the Monster Energy Yamaha squad for 2021-2022. They followed that up with announcements on Wednesday that Fabio Quartararo would be Maverick Viñales' teammate in the factory squad, and that Valentino Rossi had been given time to decide his future, and promised a factory bike, but not in the Monster Energy Yamaha factory team. And they finished the week off by announcing on Thursday that Jorge Lorenzo would be a test rider for Yamaha for the 2020 season.

That gave the Paddock Pass Podcast crew plenty to get their teeth into. Steve English, Neil Morrison, and David Emmett gathered to discuss what all this means for the future of Yamaha. What does it mean for the development direction of Yamaha? Will this allow them to finally beat Marc Marquez? What will Valentino Rossi decide to do, and how does this affect his decision to continue or retire? And does this bring a VR46 MotoGP team closer to reality?

The Paddock Pass Podcast returns after a brief winter layoff for the holiday period, and we still find plenty to talk about. Steve English, Neil Morrison, and David Emmett all go through what we are most looking forward to in the 2020 season.

The latest episode of the Paddock Pass Podcast sees Steve English, Neil Morrison, and David Emmett get together to take a look back at the 2019 season in both MotoGP and WorldSBK. We kick off the show with the three of us each running down our top five riders of the year, David and Neil looking at MotoGP, Steve giving his top five from WorldSBK.

We move on to talk about our highlights of the season. We each pick the best moment of the year, something which stuck in our minds from the 2019 season, and we also discuss what was the best event of the year, and why.

After the last MotoGP test of 2019, David Emmett sat down with Israeli TV commentator and journalist Tammy Gorali to discuss what turned out to be a rather tumultuous test at Jerez.

We kick off our discussion with what turned out to be the biggest story of the test, the news that Marc Marquez was to have surgery on his right shoulder, after having dislocated it a number of times during the 2019 season. We talk about how the news came out, and Tammy works out where Marquez picked up the injury originally.

On Wednesday morning in Valencia, Neil Morrison and David Emmett sat down to take a look back at a dramatic MotoGP weekend at Valencia, and to look forward to 2020 after the first day of the Valencia test. There was an awful lot to talk about in what turned out to be one of the craziest weekends in years.

The latest episode of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and in it, Neil Morrison and David Emmett take a look back at the MotoGP flyaways, and the fallout from those races. There was plenty to talk about as ever, and we take a deep dive into how they played out.

With strong Yamaha success, we discuss Maverick Viñales' resurgence, and his win over Marc Marquez, the only rider to beat the Repsol Honda man by more than a second, for the second time in a row. The win at Sepang came on the back of a thrilling Phillip Island race, which saw Viñales crash on the last lap behind Marquez.

With the WorldSBK season coming to an end under the floodlights in Qatar, Steve English and Gordon Ritchie sat down to look at the last weekend of World Superbikes, to look back, and to look forward.

Steve and Gordo start off with a look at Race 1 on Friday, in hotter conditions than either of them expected. Then they go on to take a longer look at the motivations of all concerned in the battle for third in the WorldSBK championship, with Alex Lowes, Toprak Razgatlioglu, and Michael van der Mark all having their own particular reason for wanting to finish third. (In the end, Lowes took it by a 14 point margin).

The WorldSBK round in Argentina skirted with disaster, as the newly-resurfaced San Juan Villicum circuit caused a rider revolt, with the WorldSBK riders judging the track too dangerous to ride on. Despite that, race 1 went ahead anyway, causing much bad blood.

Steve English and Gordon Ritchie were there on the ground, and saw it all at first hand. So in this episode of the Paddock Pass Podcast, Gordo talks us through exactly what happened in Argentina, what went wrong and why. As the only WorldSBK journalist on the ground at San Juan Villicum, he has a unique and full insight into events.

The latest episode of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and in it, Neil Morrison and David Emmett talk about the Buriram MotoGP round in Thailand. There was of course plenty to talk about, most of all, about what Marquez' victory and sixth MotoGP championship mean for the future of the series.

Naturally, Marquez wrapping up the title is the main subject of discussion. Neil and David discuss how he did it, just how determined Marquez was to clinch the title with a win, and whether this is as close to perfection as you can expect to see in a MotoGP season. We also take a deep dive into some of the background, including Neil and Peter McLaren's interview with Takeo Yokoyama, HRC Technical Director, on the development of the RC213V, and a reminder that Marquez had major shoulder surgery at the end of the 2018 season, and was a long way from being fit at the start of the season, a subject which Neil discusses in some depth here on On Track Off Road.