Jorge Martin isn’t one to look back.
It’s not that he has a paucity of plaudits over which he can reminisce, but eyeing the past is a distraction from future goals. Winning the 2018 Moto3 championship was big. Winning races in Moto2, nice. Pole and a podium on his second MotoGP start in 2021, sure. But the speedy Spaniard is all about the next. Eyes forward, throttle twisted, steely gaze engaged. Until his public mask – momentarily and unusually – splintered.
Martin was always a longshot to win the 2023 MotoGP championship coming into the final race in Valencia last November, needing to outscore series leader Francesco Bagnaia by 15 points to steal the title. He lasted all of four laps, his dreams ending when he rear-ended the Honda of Marc Marquez and crashed out.
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On his return to the pits, Martin’s helmet stayed on, the visor snapped shut as the TV cameras hovered. He’d blown it, and his body shuddered as the tears flowed. Months of repressed emotion – and the pressure of being the hunter rather than the hunted in a title fight – could be held no more.
From that despair, though, came a sliver of defiance. Later that afternoon, Bagnaia’s team boss Gigi Dall’Igna came to offer his condolences in Martin’s Pramac Ducati garage, which the Spaniard accepted. With a caveat. “Next year is mine,” he told Dall’Igna, snapping himself out of his lament.
Five rounds into the 2024 season, the 26-year-old has been as good as his word.
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After last weekend’s French Grand Prix at Le Mans – where he shattered the circuit record to take pole position before winning the sprint race and Grand Prix proper, Martin leads the championship by 38 points. He’s finished nine of the 10 races – crashing from the lead in Spain for his sole DNF – and has crossed the line in no worse than fourth place.
Bagnaia, the reigning double world champion, hasn’t been this far behind the eight-ball in the standings for two years.
Like last year, Martin’s pace suggests the title is his to lose. Unlike 2023, he might actually win it.
MARTIN, MARK II
So what’s changed? Quiz Martin, and he’ll suggest nothing – and everything. With the prize of a potential seat alongside Bagnaia at Ducati’s crack factory squad next year up for grabs – incumbent Enea Bastianini, satellite Ducati rider Marquez and Martin himself are all out of contract at the end of the season – Martin intimates the events of last year’s near-miss have impacted his evolution, yet the rider he’s always been remains.
“I am much stronger than last season,” he said after his French GP win, pausing to emphasise his point.
“We are doing a great job and I am improving a lot my skills, not only on the racetrack but outside, mentality … as a person, I also want to improve.
“I think I’m always progressing. Every race, every year I am a better rider. You can see from my first season in MotoGP until now. I don’t know where is the limit.”
France was the perfect embodiment of Martin’s previous limitations being stretched, but not snapping. Martin’s victory – his seventh in the premier class – was one he arguably wouldn’t have had the patience to execute even as recently as last season.
The speed was there – with Martin, the speed is never not there – but the way he deployed it was mature, cunning, calculating. ‘Martin’ and ‘slow burn’ don’t belong in the same sentence, usually. But he took the best pages from Bagnaia’s playbook and beat him with the lessons learned.
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Martin was jumped by Bagnaia from pole into the first corner, but rather than immediately retaliate as every instinct in his body demanded, the Spaniard instead kept his powder dry.
The weather at Le Mans on race day had flipped 180 degrees from the cloudless, sun-scorched skies that featured across practice and qualifying, with storm clouds looming and the wind whipping up. The track was colder, tyre grip less predictable, pre-race calculations on where to push – and how hard – out the window.
Bagnaia, Martin figured, could be the pioneer in the changing conditions. If something went wrong, it could go wrong for him first. Bagnaia’s class-leading reputation as the best manager of races in the business once he gets out front made Martin’s strategy a risk, but he backed himself. He’d sit and wait until it was time.
That time came on lap 20 of 27, when Martin glanced at his pit board and realised that Marquez – who had climbed to third from 13th on the grid – had pulled the pin and hacked a second out of the advantage Bagnaia and Martin enjoyed up front, drawing to within 1.3secs with ample time left to vault past both riders. It was go time. Martin immediately tried to overtake Bagnaia at the Turn 3-4 chicane, but overcooked it. The next lap, he tried again, succeeded, and got his head down.
“[Marquez] took one second in almost one lap, and I knew that I had to make the move and start to push because he would arrive and I could have finished third, not even second,” Martin said afterwards.
“I knew he was coming, and that’s why I tried to make the moves as fast as possible.”
An advantage of half a second was squandered when he made an error on the antepenultimate lap, allowing Bagnaia and Marquez back into his wheel-tracks, but Martin pulled away again on the final lap to leave Bagnaia susceptible to a Marquez dive-bomb, the reigning world champion more aware of what was behind him rather than Martin up front.
Marquez duly pounced into second place with a clinical move five corners from home, but by then, Martin had escaped.
Seconds later, he was a winner by four-tenths of a second – and the game-plan focus he’d kept so tightly bottled for 41 minutes exploded, Martin shattering the windscreen of his Ducati with a vicious left jab that released the pent-up aggression within.
“Beating Marc Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia, I think is outstanding,” he beamed.
“I didn’t do the best start ever, but being second was perfect today because Pecco had the weight of the race. I was just trying to follow him, he was a good reference with the strange winds of today. And then with seven [laps] to go I say ‘OK, I need to try’. It was the moment,
“I saw he was struggling a bit on some corners. It was difficult to make the move, he was strong and I went wide the first time. But the second time I did perfectly, and I was able to close the line and keep the position.
“Afterwards I tried to push a lot and keep the gap, don’t give him even a chance to try at the end, but I went wide with three [laps] to go and they catch me again. I was pretty nervous and tired at that time, but last lap I push, giving everything I had.”
USE ME, OR LOSE ME
It was the sort of win that, in normal circumstances, would seal a ride at the sport’s best team for 2025 and beyond. Marquez, of course, is no normal alternative for Ducati’s A-team – finishing second at Le Mans on a 2023-spec Gresini-run Ducati from the fifth row of the grid was just the latest demonstration of that.
Martin had an answer clearly rehearsed when the subject of his future – again – inevitably became the topic du jour at the post-race French GP press conference.
It was the new-spec Martin in a hastily-delivered sound bite – equal parts vulnerable, pragmatic and philosophical, and wholly authentic.
“All the riders, we have some doubts before starting the race,” he reasoned.
“I know I am strong, but sometimes I have too many doubts. I think maybe I don’t know how good I am. When I crossed the finish line, I am like ‘who is the number one? Who is the number one?’!
“I don’t have anything to demonstrate. About my future, I can say that the things that happen in the next races won’t change, even if I win or if I crash, I think I already did what I had to do. I’m really happy about my performance.
“I am the same rider as yesterday, the same rider as Thursday. So if [Ducati] have to take a decision … whatever it is will be good. I really want to go to the factory Ducati team, but if they don’t want me for whatever reason that we don’t know, then I will give my talent to another people.”
Who those “other people” are remains to be seen, as the announcement of Bagnaia’s 2025 teammate – predicted to come at or just after the Italian Grand Prix in early June – will be the first of many dominoes to fall as next year’s grid crystallises.
While Martin says he understands why Ducati might promote Marquez over him – “it’s Marc Marquez, eight-time world champion, marketing-wise he’s a beast,” Martin said in France – being in a position to win is paramount. After experiencing the other side of that coin last year, it’s a feeling he’s not keen to reprise.
“Right now, I want to win, I want to win races,” Martin said.
“My first option is very clear. If I don’t get that option, I will go for other clear options. My idea is always a winning bike, or a winning project.
“The Aprilia is a winning bike, the KTM is a winning bike. Surely Honda and Yamaha will be in a few years.
“But for the moment I’m young. And I want to win.”