Remy Gardner: ‘Fun’ if traction control wasn’t allowed in MotoGP - but ‘pretty sketchy!’

Remy Gardner was ‘thrown in the deep end’ again at the British MotoGP when he was called up for a second stand-in appearance on the Yamaha M1 in as many events.

An injury replacement for Alex Rins in Germany, Gardner - currently racing for Yamaha in WorldSBK - was asked to take over test rider Cal Crutchlow’s wild-card slot at Silverstone.

The tracks could barely be more different: The 3.671km Sachsenring has an average speed of 160km/h while the daunting 5.900km Silverstone circuit averages over 180km/h.

But the Australian again backed up the ‘aggressive’ comments of factory star Fabio Quartararo, whose current priority is to try and regain the friendly handling of past M1 machines.

“It was just moving a lot. It likes to wiggle all the time and shake its head. Not easy to ride at all!” Gardner said after finishing the grand prix 18th and last, his adaptation made more complicated by trying new parts for the test team.

“I was testing some new parts,” he confirmed earlier in the weekend. "Can't say what they are - pretty sure they'd kill me! - but there's definitely some big parts that have been tested.”

One acknowledged area of weakness is the M1's electronics, which Gardner also struggled with in practice.

“Yeah, throttle connection, traction control, the way the traction keeps up with the spin, the way it acts, it's a bit of everything,” he said. “For sure, it's quite savage.

“There was not enough in the morning. Then it was way too much in the afternoon and we’ve got to find that happy point of throttle connection to what's happening on the tyre, without overspinning and obviously keeping everything in control. Now I'll sit down with the boys and go through corner by corner.”

Gardner explained that while riding without traction control would not be a problem with his R1, it’d be ‘pretty sketchy’ in MotoGP… but might also be ‘fun’.

“It's more basic in Superbikes and not as complex, the electronics for sure are not as good, but there's 60 horsepower less in Superbikes and definitely less spin sometimes, so it's a bit more easy to ride.

“I could ride my Superbike with no traction control. Let’s put it that way.”

You can’t do that in MotoGP?

“I could, but it'd be pretty sketchy!” Gardner smiled. “It would actually be quite funny to see! It’d be nice to just go ‘alright, nobody's allowed traction control anymore’. It’d be quite fun actually!”

Even with traction control, Gardner underlined that the current M1 is a handful.

“It was not easy to ride, so it was managing a lot today, I'm not going to lie. It was hard to ride today,” he said. “For sure, the Superbike is hard to ride fast as well, but it's probably a little bit more user friendly.”

Five days after Silverstone, Gardner was back on his R1 at Portimao where he finished 10th, 15th and 12th in the WorldSBK races and is now eighth in the world championship.

The 26-year-old previously admitted that switching back and forth between the different machines wasn’t easy, which is why he doubts he could become an official Yamaha MotoGP test rider.

“I don't think both things [racing SBK and MotoGP testing] are going to be possible,” he said at Silverstone. “It's a completely different bike and going from one to the other in one week, it's not the best.  [Better to] focus on one single championship.

“In Donington [after Sachsenring] it took me 5 laps to kind of go ‘okay, this is how to ride a superbike again’ and we struggled in Donington. I'm not sure if it was because of that or not. But we'll see this weekend in Portimao.”

And if he has to choose between testing and racing, Gardner has a clear preference.

“I'm a 26-year-old still with  ire in my belly. I had my first podium in nearly two years a couple of months ago and I want more. I got fourth in Most and I was gut wretched!" he said.

“I'm hungry for those podiums. I like racing. I like fighting and I still think I can fight for a championship in the future. Obviously the cards have to be there, but I'm a racer.”

Rins is expected to attempt another comeback in Austria this weekend, while the date of Crutchlow’s return to Yamaha testing duties - after hand surgery complications - is still to be confirmed.