The European leg of the season is over, and the title fight is back on.
We learnt last year that the championship battle isn’t over until it’s really over, with Francesco Bagnaia overturning a 91-point deficit to claim his maiden title.
This year it’s Bagnaia who suddenly faces a flip of the script.
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How decisive will his injury from last weekend’s Catalan Grand Prix be in this championship battle?
Jorge Martin has eight races to figure that out.
WINNER: JORGE MARTIN
Martin has had an unusual year, lacking the consistency and even sometimes the sizzling one-lap pace that have come to define him as a MotoGP frontrunner. Even a mid-season resurgence before the mid-season break gave way to a slew of so-so results.
But now he’s got a sniff of the championship lead again, and the Spaniard looks close to unstoppable.
Martin led every lap of both the sprint and the grand prix from pole position to inflict maximum damage on the injured Bagnaia.
Since Barcelona last week Martin has taken 30 points out of his title deficit, shrinking it from 66 points down to 36.
The new sprint format means a good weekend can essentially pay an extra 50 per cent. With eight rounds still to go, if Martin continues this trajectory, he’ll be back on level pegging in hardly any time at all.
It’ll take only another good weekend or two to have Bagnaia back in the pressure zone. While the reigning champion has been generally much cleaner a rider this year, with fewer mistakes blighting his campaign, he’s also had things largely his own way for much of the year — having earnt that privilege by being just that much better than everyone else.
Can Martin bring him back into the heat of a close championship battle — and if he can, how will that affect Bagnaia and the new-found cool and collected confidence we’ve seen in him this year? The San Marino Grand Prix has set us up for a fascinating next chapter for the season.
Martin wins MotoGP sprint race | 00:48
WINNER: FRANCESCO BAGNAIA
Despite his almost halved title lead, Bagnaia did exactly what he needed to do this weekend: just score some points and limit the damage.
It’s remarkable Bagnaia should have been in the frame to ride in the first place following his sickening first-lap crash in Barcelona one week earlier. Though he miraculously emerged without any broken bones, the tissue damage was severe.
He’s spent the entire week with his right leg strapped up, and though he was able to mount the bike, he did so painfully. His gingerly limp in the garage gave away that all wasn’t well.
His advantage was that he knows the track extremely well. His disadvantage was that 10 of the 16 corners are right-handers — not ideal for his injuries.
You could see as much too. While he made sizzling starts to both races, he faded rapidly. That he managed to finish on both podiums was an incredible feat of endurance — just look at the vision of him absolutely spent on Sunday afternoon at the end of a gruelling 27 laps.
“We just have to be very happy with the work done,” he said. “One week ago we were struggling more. It was very difficult considering a race weekend like this, so I’m very happy, very proud of my people. We did something incredible, I think.”
He now has close to a fortnight to recover more comprehensively before tackling the new challenge of the Buddh International Circuit for the first Indian Grand Prix, where the long turn 9-10 right-hander will challenge his fitness.
But for now it’s mission accomplished, and he’s free to dream that regular programming might resume before the end of the month.
LOSER: JACK MILLER
Despite some glimmers of hope in Barcelona, Jack Miller’s mid-year slump has continued with a fresh low.
The Aussie is suffering a crisis of confidence. After a strong start to the campaign and to life as a factory KTM rider, his year took a turn with some set-up redirection before the mid-season break from which he’s been unable to untangle himself.
Qualifying 18th was always going to mean a tough weekend, but the races were even worse. His front ride-height device was stuck in the locked position in the sprint for most of the first sector, which cost him time and position, and while he was making some progress on Sunday, he was punted out of the race by Ducati wildcard Michele Pirro.
“A bit shitty to end the race like that, but there’s not much we could have done,” he summed up on his website. “Wrong place, wrong time. Unlucky.”
But Miller isn’t using it as an excuse for what was another weekend mystifyingly off the pace of teammate Brad Binder and wildcard Dani Pedrosa.
“We were just missing a little bit from myself and from the bike,” he said. “Whatever it was, we don’t know. We’re trying to discover what it was.
“The fast and flowing corners where you have to let the brakes off and go, I just didn’t have the confidence in it.
“I was missing confidence, especially turn 11, to let the bike flow through there — that’s such a crucial corner here, but I had no confidence. I needed to trust the front of the bike more to carry the speed. The flowing corners in the first sector was the same thing.”
Fortunately this week starts with the final in-season test, giving him an opportunity to rebuild some confidence before the long slog of overseas races — including, of course, his home grand prix in Phillip Island.
LOSER: BRAD BINDER
The weekend ended badly for all of KTM’s full-timers, with Brad Binder putting paid to his outside title chances with a crash trying to match the pace of the leading three Ducati riders of Martin, Bagnaia and Marco Bezzecchi.
Binder was his usual aggressive race-day self to put himself fourth in the early reckoning and in with a genuine chance of making up some ground on Bagnaia, particularly given both Pecco and Bezzecchi were likely to fade late with their injuries.
But at a real Ducati track — and a circuit around which both Bagnaia and Bezzecchi have bucketloads of experience via Valentino Rossi’s nearby academy — the South African had to really push himself to keep up.
In the end his pushed himself too hard and ended up in the gravel. He was able to resume the race but finished way down in 14th, leaving him 90 points off the title lead.
The disappointing weekend also left KTM lagging in fifth in the teams championship, with Aprilia back ahead by 11 points.
WINNER: DANI PEDROSA
But disappointment among KTM’s full-time riders didn’t preclude the iconic Dani Pedrosa, the team’s development rider, from putting in another storming performance as the team’s wildcard rider.
On one level it’s not really at all surprising. The guy’s a legend, and already he delivered sixth and seventh in his first appearance of the year in Jerez.
But he was even better this weekend as a perpetual podium threat, winding up fourth on Saturday and Sunday.
Remarkably those two weekends worth of results put him ahead of Marc Márquez, just for some context — just imagine how much better Honda might be doing right now had it retained him as its own development rider.
On a day both his full-time teammates crashed out, Pedrosa took the younger generation to school with a lesson in precision execution and extracting the maximum from your opportunities.
The 37-year-old made it look easy — not that it was.
“Now that I’m this age, if I stop to think about the day Valentino Rossi won his last race at 37, or Loris Capirossi at [34], at that time I, who was very young, didn’t value enough the fact that they were able to win at that age,” he said, per Autosport.
“Now that I have those years, I’m back racing some races and I’m fighting in front with the young guys, now I know that racing at the top level with all these years is more difficult than doing it when you’re younger. No doubt.”
Of course Pedrosa had two big benefits working for him: he’s been allowed to do some testing in Misano as the development rider and — most interestingly — he had a prototype KTM chassis at his disposal.
Pedrosa sampled a carbon fibre chassis in a major indicator of KTM’s development direction — and of how aggressively the Austrian brand is looking for the last step to close the gap to the leaders next season.
If Pedrosa’s performance is anything to go by, it’s been a very productive step.