When (if) MotoGP 2020 roars into action at Jerez on July 19 it will have been eight months and two days since the grid last turned a wheel in anger.

That’s by far the longest time any of today’s riders have gone without racing their MotoGP bikes. It will therefore be interesting to see what effect this absence has on their riding, both mentally and physically. Will some of them have got stronger? Will some of them have got weaker? Will it shake up the status quo? And will there be more crashes than usual?

Last week Red Bull Formula 1 team principal Christian Horner predicted some chaos when (if) F1 starts its 2020 season at Red Bull Ring on July 5. “The drivers will all be rusty as hell and there will be some incidents,” he told The Guardian.

Until Covid-19 arrived, the modern world of sport and commerce had shrunk the racing winter into little over three months. The 2019 MotoGP championship ended on November 17 and this year’s was due to start on March 7, an interval of three months and three weeks. The shorter the winter the longer the summer and the longer the summer the more ice creams Dorna gets to sell, if you know what I mean.

By the end of the 1980s GP racing had changed forever. It had become a high-octane TV show: a petrolhead’s soap opera

Many years ago, a seven or eight-month winter was the norm. The last time riders had this much time off their GP bikes was during the winter of 1985 and 1986, when the offseason stretched from the San Marino GP in early September until the Spanish GP the following May, a break of eight months and three days.

The previous three world championship seasons – 1983, 1984 and 1985 – had kicked off in March at Kyalami, South Africa, but the event ran into difficulties and dropped off the 1986 calendar. To emphasise the passage of history, in those days factory Honda rider Takazumi Katayama had to get special dispensation from the South African government to compete at Kyalami, because he was a non-white.

Of course, back then, many riders raced before the GP season started and after it finished, doing a bit of moonlighting for some extra cash. The world-class racing season traditionally opened at Daytona in March, where riders could at least re-accustom themselves to riding race bikes at crazy speeds, even though the Floridian banking was nothing like a GP track.

Daytona in early March also served as a kind of final preseason test, although it didn’t always produce the desired results. In 1984 Freddie Spencer chased home ‘King’ Kenny Roberts in the Daytona 200, riding Honda’s first NSR500 – HRC’s blue-sky-thinking wonder with its fuel tank under the engine and the expansion chambers over the top. HRC also equipped the NSR with carbon-fibre wheels, a first in motorcycle racing.

That year’s South African GP took place two weeks after Daytona. Soon after practice got underway at Kyalami on Thursday morning (yes, Thursday) Spencer crashed, because his NSR500’s carbon-fibre rear wheel had collapsed. As Soichiro Honda once said, “Success is 99 per cent failure”.

The cause of the wheel breakage remained secret for many years. “After the 200 I said to Erv [Kanemoto, Spencer’s pit-lane guru] the rear end seemed a bit unstable in the last few laps,” Spencer told me recently. “We thought it was the tyre, but when the wheel broke at Kyalami we realised it must’ve been the wheel spokes fatiguing on the banking.”

The g-forces experienced while hurtling around Daytona’s 30-degree banking would’ve been many times greater than those encountered at any GP track.

During the 1980s the world championship grew from eight rounds in 1980 to 15 in 1989, which shrunk the off-season from eight months to six. This was the era of expanding TV networks and booming sponsorship deals. The two worked to their mutual benefit: TV stations wanted content, sponsors wanted their products on TV. So there were more races and more sponsorship; most of it from the tobacco industry, which by the end of the decade bankrolled most of the grid: Marlboro, Lucky Strike and Gauloises Yamahas, Rothmans, HB and Cabin Hondas.