The stage is set for a three-round shootout for the championship. The points gap is down to practically zero. The challenger is in position to take the fight down to the wire.
But the title leader and reigning champion? He’s nowhere to be seen.
Fabio Quartararo disappeared as quickly as his points lead evaporated in the aftermath of the Thailand Grand Prix, and neither his media duties nor his obligation to the team to debrief what had been a shocking race to 17th in the rain were enough to coax him from the sanctuary of his private room at the back of the paddock.
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From there he slipped away to the airport unannounced and returned home to reflect on a devastating two months of racing.
When MotoGP resumed after the summer break the Frenchman held a comfortable points lead even despite his clumsy crash with Aleix Espargaró at the Dutch TT immediately beforehand.
His margin over Espargaró, who had been consistent with few outstanding results, was 21 points. Johann Zarco and Francesco Bagnaia didn’t even figure in the permutations, at 58 and 66 points back respectively.
Bagnaia in particular was given no chance after having fallen to a dramatic 91 points adrift only one week earlier. There’s no precedent for such a comeback in the premier class. There’s nothing even close to it.
But since the break Quartararo’s finishes have been as follows: eighth, second, fifth, DNF, eighth and 17th, accruing him just 47 points. His last three races were worth just eight points in total.
Bagnaia’s record? Win, win, win, second, DNF and third, totalling 111 points.
The gap is now just two points — as good as no points at all.
The margin was always likely to come down, and Quartararo knew it. It just wasn’t supposed to come down this quickly.
The Ducati has been growing into this year and is now consistently quick on Saturday and Sunday no matter the circuit layout or weather conditions. Bagnaia came within 0.042 seconds of claiming five wins in a row between the Netherlands and Aragon — he finished second at the latter to fellow Desmosedici rider and future teammate Enea Bastianini.
Were it not for the return of his crash-prone ways in Japan, he’d already have the title lead — and that’s before considering his four other failures to finish this season.
The Yamaha, on the other hand, has been at its performance ceiling pretty much since the start of the season given the amount of carryover from the 2021 campaign. Quartararo’s complaints about the machinery subsided after an especially outspoken beginning to the year, but with his last win now fully seven races ago, his pessimism about the quality of the tools at his disposal has returned.
His pointless ride in Thailand brought that all home.
While both factory Ducati riders were on the podium behind Miguel Oliveira, a poor start from Quartararo had him bullied down from fourth on the grid to outside the points. From there he could make no progress, his bike deeply unhappy in the wet and suffering its standard problems with tyre pressure while trying to battle in the pack.
Unable to score even a point by the flag, he sulked off after the race and hasn’t been seen or heard from since bar a brief comment via the Yamaha post-race press release and a message on his Instagram pace, where he’s removed his profile photo and his biography reads, “Having a break”.
“What a nightmare,” his last post reads. “Unfortunately we had a terrible race and couldn‘t score a point. After a really good weekend on dry condition it rains just before our race.
“We used to be fast this year but somehow we had difficulties, problems and terrible feeling.
“Time to reset, train and prepare Phillip Island!”
SVG cuts interview short to throw up | 00:48
And Phillip Island will be absolutely crucial to his chances.
It feels like it’s been a long time since we’ve visited a nailed-on Yamaha track — in part because the M1 has fallen so far behind the Ducati — but the iconic Victorian circuit may as well have been made specifically to revive Quartararo’s flagging title chances and morale.
The track’s fast, sweeping bends give a handy advantage to the nimbler in-line four-cylinder motors and bikes that can generate good edge grip to maintain a higher minimum speed, and the fact there’s really only one straight reduces the importance of pure horsepower.
It’s why Yamaha is one of two teams, along with Honda, to dominate the Australian Grand Prix since it returned to the Island a quarter of a century ago. Ducati has won just four races in Australia since 1997, though even that comes with the significant proviso that it was Casey Stoner who claimed the lot of them via his affinity for the track.
Victory at Phillip Island would give Quartararo a lead of at least seven points to defend in the last two rounds — not safe by any means, but it’s something to work with if Bagnaia can’t then manage to win the final two races.
The only problem is it might not be enough to rock up and hope the bike can fire. Yamaha needs the right Fabio Quartararo to turn up too.
Cast your mind back to 2020 and the final six rounds of that season. Quartararo held a 10-point championship lead over Joan Mir heading into the sextet, but a wet-weather ride from pole to ninth in France preceded another backwards-moving race from top spot in Aragon, this time to a pointless 18th, losing him the championship lead for the first time all year.
What followed was a pressure collapse of epic proportions. He didn’t just not win the title, but he finished a deeply underwhelming eighth in the standings and 44 points adrift of winner Mir.
Sure, a lot’s changed since then. The Quartararo of 2020 was in just his second premier-class season, had only just won his first MotoGP race and was in the thick of a title campaign at the height of the Covid pandemic.
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He proved in 2021 that he was able to move past the disappointment of defeat and better manage the stress of being the title leader.
But it’s also true to say that no-one was applying quite the same amount of pressure on him as Bagnaia and even Espargaró are this year. Quartararo never quite lost the momentum last season in the way he has this year, and there also wasn’t the same undercurrent of helplessness over the way his bike is struggling to keep competitive as the Ducati bike continues to improve.
And whereas in 2020 and 2021 he could rely on a wide range of bikes scoring podiums and taking points from one another, this year he’s up against an armada of Ducati bikes all capable of getting in his way and sometimes even working together to boost Bagnaia’s chances — though there are of course no formal team orders in place.
Getting the championship monkey off the back always counts for a lot, but it’s no guarantee of future success. Circumstances change, and Quartararo might be discovering he still has some old vulnerabilities that haven’t been fully addressed.
History seems set to repeat itself this year, it’s just a matter of which version we get.
If Quartararo wins at Phillip Island, he might dare to dream 2021 is repeatable.
If he fails to win, things will start to feel a lot like 2020.
It’s in Fabio’s hands which year gets another spin.
