My experience as a VIP Guest of Michelin at the MotoGP Bharat 2023!

I was lucky to be invited by Michelin India along with some of their premium dealers from across India to witness the first MotoGP race in India

BHPian Nikhilb2008 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Hello everyone, almost exactly 10 years back, I had the opportunity to post about my experiences at the Buddh International Circuit which had hosted what turned out to be the last Indian F1 Grand Prix.

The link is here.

This time, I was lucky to be invited by Michelin India along with some of their premium dealers from across India to witness the first MotoGP race in India, the MotoGP Bharat.

Michelin booked our tickets, and hotel rooms and arranged for all travel and transport. So, this was an all-expenses paid trip and of course, Michelin hopes that all their dealers will sell more

Michelin tyres, but this time, Michelin doesn’t have many tyres to supply.

The good news is that they may be allowed to import more tyres in 2024 compared to the previous years.

The other good rumour is that they may be starting production in India for passenger car tyres next year or in 2025. Scant details or no confirmations on that.

On the 22nd of September, Friday, we checked into our hotel which was the Leela ambience in New Delhi and from here Michelin made very nice arrangements for our stay. The next day, on the 23rd of September morning, after an early breakfast, we were told to board the buses to the track. These buses were EVs.

So this electric bus company is actually Michelin’s partner and they are a customer of Michelin, so Michelin favoured them and arranged the buses for them for this event. Initially, I didn't really notice that there was a number of engine noise and vibrations, probably because it’s been a while since I’ve traveled in a bus and whenever I do, it ends up being a Volvo B9R which is also quite silent.

The really cool thing about this particular bus was that it actually had very strong air conditioning. In this hot and humid Delhi weather, this was very welcome. The bus ride was comfortable enough. I caught up with a lot of other dealer Michelin dealer friends who were who had flown in from all across India and we reached the track in pretty good time actually. Once we reached the track, there were a lot of formalities in terms of where the bus had to be parked, where we could be let off, and everything.

But the Michelin had taken very good care of all of this and had made very nice arrangements. We basically had to enter what was called the MotoGP village, the VIP village.

This video was taken at the entrance of the VIP Village and from here we had a view of the parking lot and the main straight in the distance.

The view from our lounge

Quite nice as it was right above the pitlane.

Once you enter the Moto GP village, there were actually quite a few places and lounges where people could go and watch the race from. So one was for Petronas, another lounge was dedicated to Jaypee, may be their customers and guests. Then of course there was a Michelin lounge and then there were couple of other lounges like that. So we had lounge number 4 and it was completely decked up in Michelin’s branding. We also had couple of people from France who were there to guide us and take us through the whole experience. They had a fantastic array of dishes for breakfast, coffee, tea, everything ready for us as we reached.

So the breakfast buffet was actually quite nice, the usual stuff. Croissants, pastries, a meat platter, some cheeses, and then they even had an Indian section. They even had a live egg section with omelettes and scrambled eggs and similar dishes.

This particular lounge actually was right above the pitlane, so we could actually see, and of course, most importantly here, the bikes as they were leaving their pits and as they were entering their pit lane. And of course it overlooked the Main Straight. It was right opposite the grandstands.

But it was actually a lot of fun because of all the other tyre dealers who were there. We actually ended up discussing a lot about business which is inevitable when we all get together.

Michelin had arranged 2 exclusive activities for us to be done today.

Visit to the Michelin Tyre workshop

Visit to a garage – the Mooney Racing VR46 Garage

Another event for today was a pitlane walk along with all other people who had access.

Visit the Michelin Tyre Workshop at the Buddh International Circuit.

In this workshop, Michelin had their own tyre changers and their so-called balancing equipment which they were using to install the tyres and balance the tyres and wheels that were eventually fitted on the MotoGP bikes Michelin is an exclusive partner for the tyres for Moto GP. Dunlop I think supplies the tyres only to Moto 3 or Moto 2. So in this particular workshop, we had another French gentleman who oversees the entire operations and he works for Michelin Motorsport and he took us through the whole process of how they install the tyres and what conditions they have to work under. He mentioned that they bring in 1100 tyres every race and it is a combination of soft, medium and hard compounds. They also have a lot of wet tyres to deal with rainy conditions. Unlike Formula One, they don't just throw a red flag and stop everyone from racing when it rains. He mentioned that there are 10 technicians who work in that particular tyre department and each technician is highly qualified and highly trained to install a set of tyres and to balance it perfectly. And he says that even the balance is actually done by the teams slightly differently based on their suspension characteristics to eliminate so that the tyre and wheel actually work very well with the bike rather than just some absolute numbers of Perfect wheel balancing. This was quite interesting for me. He was also mentioning that the top speed on the track today was about 350 kilometres per hour. The bikes sometimes reach 360-370 kilometres per hour on some particular tracks and that is where even a slight extra vibration can really throw the rider off.

The wheel balancing at the track didn’t use any fancy equipment. They were actually using just a bunch of laser lights which were focused on the tyre and wheel assembly. So the first thing was to measure static imbalance. That, of course, is very easy to do by just allowing a wheel and tyre assembly to come to a halt once you rotate it a little bit, and based on the intensity of the pendulum motion that it has, the technician knows approximately how much weight to install, and that is typically installed at 12:00 o'clock position because the 6:00 O'clock position usually has the heaviest part of the weight. So this was the easy part of wheel balancing. I then asked the technical person how they managed to identify and resolve the dynamic imbalance.

Dynamic imbalance is basically when there is an imbalance in the side-to-side motion of the tyre and wheel assembly. He mentioned that the skills of the technicians are so good that they can actually identify them. And they can come to an approximate measurement and install the weights on that. So it takes a lot of skill and it's obvious that normal people wouldn't be able to just replace, you know, the skilled technicians.

And Coincidently and noticed that they use the same kind of wheel weights that we use in our tyre store. The tyre changers that they were using were very similar to what normal tyre shops use. There was a small modification where the bead press system which is where the bead of the tyre gets separated from the wheel was located nearer to the top of the tyre changer which was more accessible and was probably easier to use than the traditional side shovel where a technician has to bend over and focus on the wheel and tyre.

Mooney Racing VR46 Team Garage Visit

After this the second planned visit was to see the actual garage of a Moto GP team. They took us to the Money Raving VR46 team. This team is actually owned, or at least partially owned by Valentino Rossi, and it aims to bring in more Italian talent into Moto GP. This was in response to the influx of Spanish riders into MotoGP. So this was again a very interesting visit. We got to see a lot of things happening. We actually got to see how behind what you actually see on the TV. There is a dedicated area where some of the technical team, download the data from the bikes. They have these really long cables that go all the way back directly into their computers and they are able to download the telemetry and analyze it and then give feedback to the racers. There are of course tool trolleys everywhere and when we went there were actually setting up one particular set of bikes. To ensure that the bikes are ready to go at a moment's notice, they have a warm-up procedure. Every maybe 10 minutes or 15 minutes they just switch on the bike. They rev it gently a couple of times, allow it to idle for a couple of minutes and then switch it off and pull it back inside. This keeps the bikes warm and. Ready to go at a moment's notice.

They also showed us the brake discs, which are really huge and they said that the entire set of brake discs cost something like €20,000 for a whole race where they have like 4 different sets of rotors, brake pads and brake calipers. These are the and the ones that they were using today at the BIC were the largest that they have with them. That was because they realise that the top speed down the backstreet was quite high when they needed the big brakes for retardation. They also realised that the heat was a bit higher so they needed again more stopping power.

We also got lucky that when we actually went there, the mechanics weren't working on one of the bikes, so we actually got to go much closer to the bikes and see it. So when we went closer to the bikes we could actually see up close they showed us the 3 buttons on the left side of the handlebar. The rider used to control the 3 different maps for the engine, the traction control and I think they said the braking system. So each system has further 3 different maps that can be controlled by the rider based on their current requirements.

We were given headsets to where and another lady was wearing a headset and she was speaking into her microphone so we could hear her very clearly. I think this was done so that we were not disturbed by the bikes that were there and these. Big headsets were really, really nice noise-cancelling headsets which blocked out almost all the outside noise for us when we were in the pit garage.

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