It’s Ducati’s world. The rest of MotoGP’s manufacturers are just living – and losing – in it.
Sunday’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone, a retro round to celebrate 75 years of the world championship that doubled as the midpoint of the 2024 season, was a throwback to the past aesthetically, but a reinforcement of the present statistically.
Enea Bastianini’s win – his first this season – was Ducati’s ninth in 10 Grands Prix this year, its seventh in a row since Maverick Vinales won the Americas GP in Texas in April, and Ducati’s 26th in 30 Grands Prix held since the beginning of 2023.
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Vinales’ Aprilia teammate Aleix Espargaro qualified on pole, set the fastest lap of the race three laps in (1min 58.595secs) for the fastest-ever race lap of Silverstone and rode “on the limit” – and still finished 9.514secs behind Bastianini in sixth place, the only one of the top eight finishers not on a Ducati.
So what makes the brand’s GP24 so good? Espargaro had a front-row seat, and plenty of thoughts.
“They [Ducati] have something more, on Sunday they make a big difference,” the Spanish veteran said after being one of just two riders to use Michelin’s hardest-compound front tyre in the race, looking for a point of difference to the Ducati in an attempt to find anything that might loosen their stranglehold.
“They always have something more for Sunday. I destroy the tyre to go at their pace. We took risks, we set a track record behind Jorge [Martin] and Pecco [Francesco Bagnaia], but there is a moment when I can’t do any more.
“Ducati has made a huge step since last year. I don’t think I rode badly during the weekend, I didn’t make any mistakes and always on the limit so to come home with a sixth place is definitely frustrating. There are days when you can’t give more, and this was one of those days. I was the only one able to fight with the Ducatis, but the gap to them is still gigantic.”
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With all eight of its bikes finishing inside the top 10 at Silverstone – only the 2023 German GP when Ducati was denied a clean sweep of the top eight by KTM’s Jack Miller has been more dominant – the Borgo Panigale brand continues to set the MotoGP standard. But in a year where Bagnaia and Martin looked set for a head-to-head repeat of their battle in two for the 2023 title, Bastianini’s first win since last November indicated he may well enter the championship mix before departing to KTM next year. For another half-season, he’s clearly on the right bike.
Elsewhere at Silverstone, Martin made amends for his blunder in the previous race in Germany to reclaim a slim championship lead, Miller took some solace from his second-best weekend of the season, and Aprilia’s Raul Fernandez committed one of motorsport’s cardinal sins by taking out teammate Miguel Oliveira.
HAS A NEW TITLE CONTENDER EMERGED?
Bastianini’s win on Sunday – his first victory since the Malaysian Grand Prix last November – came off the back of his first sprint race win since the format was introduced at the start of 2023, where his ascendant star dimmed because of injury and has never completely recovered.
The 26-year-old missed almost half of last season with myriad ills and was nowhere near his best when he did ride, his first season in the crack factory Ducati team stalling out as teammate Bagnaia took his second world title in succession. ‘The Beast’ has been perfectly decent this season, but the rider market madness around the time of his home race at Mugello in June saw him shuffled out in favour of six-time world champion Marc Marquez for 2025, Bastianini finding a home at KTM for next year.
Bastianini’s Silverstone double was inevitable in its game plan and unstoppable in its execution. The diminutive (168cm/64kg) Italian has long been regarded as the sport’s foremost tyre whisperer, his soft touch on the throttle seeing him regularly charge forwards late in races with tyre grip his rivals spent laps before.
One-lap qualifying pace has often been his bugbear, with his late-race tyre heroics often coming to nothing because he’d started too far back. At Silverstone, after he qualified third, it was game on.
Bastianini overtook Martin for the lead with three laps left of Saturday’s sprint and on the penultimate lap of Sunday’s 20-lap Grand Prix, Martin making life easy for him on Sunday as he ran wide at Turn 3 of the 16-corner layout and not being able to close the gap.
After he took second from Bagnaia with eight laps left, Bastianini was eight-tenths of a second behind Martin; six tours of the 5.9km British circuit later, MotoGP win number six was in the bank.
A perfect haul of 37 points in England drew Bastianini to within 49 points of Martin’s series lead with half the season remaining, but he wasn’t buying into the notion that he’s a genuine title contender, at least yet.
“Probably yes,” he responded when asked if the British GP was his best weekend of his four-year premier-class career.
“I missed only the pole position, but the rest has been perfect for me. I enjoyed a lot this race. The start is not really good for me because I lose some positions, I committed some mistakes. But at the end I bring my pace and I come back lap by lap. Jorge was really fast like yesterday, but I studied a little bit when it was possible to overtake him.
“I want to see me on the top three or four races .. I can [then] have a more clear situation if I can be a possible title contender. For the moment no, because Jorge and Pecco have demonstrated more consistency compared to me. But let’s see.”
TOP TWO TAKE THE POSITIVES
It was a muted Bagnaia and circumspect Martin who faced the press after the race, with Martin’s pair of second places at Silverstone allowing him to reclaim the series lead by three points over Bagnaia, who led for the opening 11 laps of Sunday’s race before fading to third, 5.866secs behind his race-winning factory Ducati teammate.
Bagnaia crashed out of Saturday’s sprint race – his fourth non-score in 10 short-form races this season – and has scored just 45 of his 238 points in sprints this year, Martin close to doubling the world champion’s Saturday tally with 86 points.
It’s a continuation of last year’s narrative, where Martin was the faster of two in qualifying and sprints but lost the title thanks to Bagnaia’s unerring Sunday consistency.
After his Saturday sprint crash that left a podium on the table, Bagnaia made a conscious decision to play the long game when he lost the lead to Martin on lap 12 on Sunday, unhappy with losing the championship lead, but ready to fight another day.
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“I tried, but after the crash of yesterday it was better to finish the race,” he said.
“Today I risked to crash at corner six … I lost the front and Enea overtook me. But in that moment I was struggling a bit and I was trying to follow Jorge, and I was taking too much risk. It was better to manage the gap from the guys behind and finish the race, so third position is OK.”
Martin, lambasted for throwing away victory in Germany and seeing a 30-point swing go against him with a careless crash, used the word “intelligent” several times in his post-race debriefs, indicating he’d clearly processed the need to sometimes ride smarter instead of always riding harder.
“Sachsenring wasn’t that bad for me, and here wasn’t that good,” he said.
“We have to look at the balance of all the races, and I think the progression is really high. We have to keep this way of work and this way of thinking.
“We always want the victory but I think [second] was our best. I think I did a really intelligent race [but] Enea at the end was on another level. I tried to keep with him the last lap, but it was impossible. I’m really happy I was intelligent, I tried to manage the situation and I finished on the podium.
“For sure when you lose the position because of a mistake, there’s a bit of frustration. We could be in different positions right now. But I think he was much stronger, so even if he overtakes me one or two corners later it was going to be really difficult to win.”
CRUMB OF COMFORT FOR MILLER
Scoring seven points over an event wouldn’t be something that would get Miller overly excited in the past, but the Australian’s 2024 has been so dire that Silverstone was his second-best weekend of the season, the KTM rider finishing seventh in the sprint and 12th in the Grand Prix to score points in both races for the first time since round three.
The 29-year-old came into the event with little clarity on his future after fielding no offers for the few vacant seats remaining for 2025 as he came home to Townsville during MotoGP’s mid-season hiatus, but was much more convincing than he has been of late at Silverstone, making it through to the top 10 on Friday and an automatic Q2 berth before banking points in both races.
Sunday’s 12th was frustrating after he’d run inside the top 10 for the first 18 laps, Miller passed by Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo and Ducati’s Franco Morbidelli late, Morbidelli recovering after serving a double long-lap penalty for skittling Marco Bezzecchi (Ducati) at the first corner of Saturday’s sprint.
Miller stayed 16th in the standings after Silverstone, but found some silver linings in his results, if not the gap to the front.
“All in all, a positive weekend but 25 seconds to the first [place], we want to be a little bit closer than that,” he said.
“The race wasn’t ideal, I threw everything bar the kitchen sink at it. I was just having a lot of grip issues entering corners, mainly Turn 3. Every time I’d go from fourth [gear] back to first, the thing would go sideways and I just couldn’t make the apex, I was just going in locked sideways watching the apex go past me and thinking ‘oh s**t, how am I going to protect the inside for the next corner?’.
“Fabio came past me with two [laps] to go and that opened the door for Franky [Morbidelli] as well, and then I watched Franky dispense of Fabio pretty quick. Seeing the amount of grip he had towards the back-end of the race was impressive.”
Fellow Australian Remy Gardner, filling in for injured British rider Cal Crutchlow as a wildcard rider for Yamaha’s test team, qualified last (22nd) and finished at the back in both races in 18th, his focus more on evaluating parts in a race environment for the Japanese manufacturer.
“I was in front of [Honda’s] Takaaki [Nakagami] for a few laps, but I don’t have the experience to keep the pace when the tyre drops,” Gardner said.
“That’s all down to race experience, and we haven’t focused on race pace this weekend, it’s all been about testing.”
RED FACES FOR BLUE-HUED APRILIA
MotoGP’s retro round inspired all sorts of liveries from the sport’s five brands paying tribute to their pasts, which left first-year American outfit Trackhouse Racing in a dilemma with what to do for the Aprilias of Raul Fernandez and Miguel Oliveira, with Silverstone the 10th race in the team’s history.
Trackhouse settled on a striking blue paint scheme complete with the faces of the 11 Americans who have won 500cc/MotoGP races to commemorate the occasion … and both its bikes were in the gravel trap six corners into Sunday’s race after Fernandez wiped out and took Oliveira with him.
Like Espargaro on the sister Aprilia, Fernandez elected to use the hard front Michelin tyre for the race, and a combination of the stiffer rubber, a cooling track and a bike heavy with a full fuel tank saw the Spaniard fall at Turn 6, his bike spearing across the track and wiping out Oliveira, who had run wide at the same turn ahead of him.
“I feel really bad with myself because at the end it was a really important weekend for the team and because of my crash they don’t get points,” Fernandez, who signed a two-year contract extension with Trackhouse during the mid-season break, said.
“I crashed and in the moment that I was on the ground, my bike tossed Miguel and I created the crash for Miguel.
“I didn’t touch Miguel before the crash, I crashed and my bike touched Miguel. For the race we were not ready to be in the top five but top 10 maybe was realistic, so the bad thing is I lost all the points for me and also Miguel.”