Francesco Bagnaia and Fabio Quartararo started the season as the two championship favourites, but if you’d attempted to plot out the campaign during pre-season testing, there’s no way you’d have come close to predicting the year we ended up getting.
Far from a titanic duel from the outset, both started the year way off the pace and downcast about their chances. They then took it on turns dominating the field in long stints until we got our three-race shootout to end the season.
But really campaigns can’t be segmented as neatly as that. They may have started the final stanza almost level on points, but the momentum that had waxed and waned between them had already set up an almost inevitable conclusion.
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Bagnaia, having passed all the tests needed to prove his championship credentials, rode home in Valencia to a well-deserved world championship.
This is how the season unfolded.
QUARTARARO PICKS UP HIS FIRST WIN: PORTUGUESE GRAND PRIX
Quartararo was clear from pre-season testing that the bike wasn’t up to standard.
While the M1 struck a perfect compromise between power and corner speed in 2021, the Japanese marque’s light-touch development for 2022 wasn’t enough to keep its head above the rising Ducati tide.
Power was a particular problem, and Quartararo was so downbeat about it that he said he could quit without tangible signs of progress. Ninth in the season-opening Qatar Grand Prix, up from a Q1-routed 11th, did nothing to improve his mood.
He had a difficult weekend in Argentina and then cost himself a better result in the United States after qualifying poorly, but on the sport’s return to Europe, having had time to digest the chaos of the opening overseas races, he finally strung a clean weekend together and won.
The secret may have been unlocked in the second round, when he finished second in highly unusual conditions in Indonesia. He’d hinted that the team had found some clues through some set-up experimentation; by Portugal he had a chance to process it and put it into action.
“The start of the season was not that good,” he admitted. “I was complaining a lot because after a big amount of time [trying] to find something on the engine we didn’t find anything.
“I wasn’t totally focused like I needed to be.”
It was crucial moment just in time to make a mark on the championship, with no rider having stood up to really take control in the early overseas rounds. In the six races from Portugal to Germany he won three times and took two second places to establish a 34-point title lead.
BAGNAIA PUTS HIS FOOT DOWN: QATAR GRAND PRIX
Ducati turned up to pre-season testing with a raft of development pieces it couldn’t quite make click together, and the freneticism of trying to find a workable configuration for the GP22 meant the factory team started the year undercooked.
Bagnaia’s biggest bugbear was with the power delivery of the 2022 motor, and on the eve of the first race a new engine specification was installed that blended the 2021 and 2022 specifications.
It allayed his concerns but meant Ducati was fielding a dizzying array of different bikes.
Pramac was running the full-blooded 2022 machines as envisaged, Gresini was fielding the 2021-era bike, VR46 had one of each and the factory team had a 2022 chassis with a bespoke motor.
It reduced the team’s ability to lean on its satellite network for set-up. Bagnaia and Jack Miller would have to do more of the donkey work — and having changed bikes after pre-season testing, it all had to be done during practice.
It didn’t suit Pecco, who said after a disastrous opening round — he’d qualified ninth and crashed out of the race — that he needed to focus on his campaign rather than spend Friday on testing duties.
“We weren’t ready,” he said at the time. “If we want to win, then we have to be more concentrated during the race weekend on me.”
The team agreed, and though some development work is unavoidable for a factory rider, Bagnaia ensured he had the breathing room to build a rhythm.
His results improved, and at the Spanish Grand Prix he was at his rapid best, taking pole, setting the fastest lap and beating Quartararo by just 0.285 seconds in a grand-slam performance.
He was finally in the championship fight.
BAGNAIA HITS ROCK BOTTOM: GERMAN GRAND PRIX
But it wasn’t the start of a glorious run of form Bagnaia and Ducati had envisaged.
His first win put him 33 points off the title lead, but then he crashed out of a battle for victory at the French Grand Prix in Le Mans, dropping 46 points adrift.
He subsequently won in Italy, but then he was punted out of the Catalan Grand Prix at the first corner to fall to 66 points behind Quartararo.
After nine races his title campaign was on life support.
He needed to win the next race in Germany, and he duly took pole and held second behind Quartararo off the line.
But then on the third lap he crashed, his fourth DNF of the season, and slipped to 91 points adrift of the victorious Fabio.
Bagnaia was a combination of furious, dejected and mystified in the aftermath, apparently at a loss to understand how he crashed at a relatively low-pressure moment of the race.
But it was at this lowest moment, when his campaign seemed shot, that the seeds of his rebirth sprouted.
“I was very competitive,” he said. “Like in Le Mans, I was there with a possibility to win the race. But I crashed.
“In that moment I recognised that my weak point was that — that I was a rider with a lot of ups and downs, with good speed but not consistency.
“To accept that was not easy.
“From that moment I recognised that I had a problem, and I tried to improve myself.
“I think I improved myself a lot during the season.”
In the 10 races that followed he finished off the podium only once and crashed only once more.
THE DECISIVE SWING IN MOMENTUM: DUTCH TT
Everything changed in the seven days between Germany and the Netherlands.
The title contenders qualified first and second, Bagnaia on pole and Quartararo second, but their races went in dramatically different directions once the lights went out.
Pecco sprinted out into the lead, but Fabio slipped backwards into a battle with then chief title rival Aleix Espargaró.
The Frenchman then made a crucial mistake, crashing into the Spaniard in a botched passing attempt.
Espargaró was able to restart and launch an epic comeback, but Quartararo’s bike was badly damaged. He continued, but a traction control problem launched him into the gravel while he was trailing at the back, putting him out of the race.
Fabio was on a two-race victory streak with all the momentum. He had a comfortable title lead. But this uncharacteristic accident stopped it all with a sickening jolt from which he never truly recovered.
Bagnaia, meanwhile, saw off Marco Bezzecchi for victory — the first of four in a row that would completely transform the title battle and set up the greatest comeback in motorcycle racing history.
QUARTARARO’S LAST CHANCE: AUSTRALIAN GRAND PRIX
Quartararo’s title lead absorbed hit after hit. His blameless non-finish in Aragon was a bad blow, but his non-score in Thailand after a team error setting tyre pressures was even worse.
It meant he arrived on Phillip Island for the return of the Australian Grand Prix with a badly diminished two-point lead with three races remaining.
The title race had effectively been reset.
Hope wasn’t yet lost. Of the three races still to come, Phillip Island was a Yamaha track, there were reasons to think Malaysia might return a decent result and then Valencia had previously been a happy hunting ground for the M1 — all on paper of course.
But that was old thinking. Ducati had come so far this year with its bike development that there wasn’t really such a thing as a Yamaha circuit anymore.
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Quartararo has played it cool all year as his title lead evaporated, but if panic ever set in deep below the surface, it must have been on Saturday in Victoria.
He qualified a respectable fifth but behind both Bagnaia and Espargaró, but on Sunday things got considerably worse. He was unable to make up ground off the line, lost a heap of places in a mistake through Miller Corner and then crashed out of the race in Southern Loop.
It was the season’s worst timed DNF and turned his slender lead into a 14-point deficit with two races remaining. The title was out of his hands.
BAGNAIA BEATS BASTIANINI: MALAYSIAN GRAND PRIX
With Ducati’s supremacy painfully clear, Quartararo’s only hope was for Bagnaia to do what he did so often this season: fail to score.
Pecco came surprisingly close to fulfilling that wish.
It wasn’t just the incredible mental pressure weighing on him to seal the deal; it was the on-track pressure applied to him by 2023 teammate Enea Bastianini.
Bastianini, not Quartararo, was Bagnaia’s true final test.
The 24-year-old firebrand Bastianini had been a thorn in Bagnaia’s side all season.
In France he got Bagnaia so flustered by mugging him for the lead that Pecco crashed out of the race, one of the several results that so nearly cost Ducati the riders championship.
It was around this time he accused Bagnaia of preferring Miller as a possible 2023 teammate because he’d be too fast on the same bike.
The more often they met on track, the more aggressive the racing became. The ante was turned up on Misano, which Bagnaia just won, but in Aragon Bastianini struck back. The back-to-back races were decided by a combined 0.076 seconds.
Their on-track action was thrilling for everyone bar those in the factory Ducati garage, where strained expressions made for some iconic television.
So you can understand why stress was so high in Sepang when Bastianini started attacking Bagnaia for the lead, poking and prodding him for signs of weakness.
It was the biggest pressure test of the season for a rider who’d developed a reputation for cracking under pressure.
“I think that the race in Le Mans helped me to understand that,” he said, recalling his crash in France. “In Le Mans I was riding under the pressure of Enea and I committed a big mistake.
“It’s the worst situation possible when you have someone behind on the last laps and you can’t commit any mistakes. It’s a situation where you can easily lose your concentration.
“This year I was always with a lot of pressure from behind. Enea was twice behind me trying to overtake and I was trying to manage perfectly the situation.
“I was knowing that second position was not allowed, so I tried to improve myself on that, and we did it.”
It wasn’t enough to claim the championship with Quartararo in third, but it meant he took a 23-point lead into the finale — just about unassailable, as it proved to be.
His biggest rivals had been seen off. The title had in effect already been won.
But 2023 will bring new challenges. Yamaha will have a quicker bike. A fully fit Marc Márquez will be coaxing more speed from the Honda. Aprilia will hope to consolidate its surprise 2022 form. And Bastianini will be next to him in the garage.
The lessons he’s learnt about himself this year will all be called to serve him again next season.
If they’re as durable as they looked at the end of next season, it’ll take more than just a bit of pressure to beat him.