Francesco Bagnaia is on the cusp of doing the unthinkable.
Just nine rounds ago the man christened as Bologna’s best hope was watching his bike slide through the gravel at the Sachsenring as reigning champion Fabio Quartararo powered up the road and to eventual victory.
His fourth crash of the year put him a staggering 91 points off the title lead. No rider has ever come back from such a margin.
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But Bagnaia was reborn in that crash with a new steel and composure. He slammed on five wins and eight podiums to reverse his deficit into a scarcely believable 23-point lead.
That’s a turnaround of 114 points in just nine races.
He now stands just one race away from his first premier-class championship — and from Ducati immortality.
Only Australian Casey Stoner has won a riders championship in Ducati leathers, and as the years since his famous 2007 triumph have ticked past in a haze of Yamaha and Honda victories, Bologna’s quest to re-summit motorcycling’s highest peak has grown only more desperate.
Now, 15 years later, Bagnaia could be the man to end Borgo Panigale’s suffering.
All he has to do is make it to the finish line.
HOW DID HE GET HERE?
Ducati’s late decision on the eve of the first round to switch engines to a compromise motor between 2021’s rideability and 2022’s power output meant the factory GP22 bike started the year undercooked.
The early months of the campaign were defined by set-up work and lukewarm competitiveness, and it was unsettling for Bagnaia, who publicly voiced his frustration with having to do big-picture development work during free practice.
Resultantly his season didn’t really get going until victory in round 6 in Spain, but three crashes in the following four races seemed to put him out of championship contention just as Quartararo hit his straps.
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After 10 rounds he was 91 points adrift and considered an impossibility for the title.
But that Sachsenring smash was the turning point he needed, and a fresh mindset delivered him four straight victories. It destabilised Quartararo, who was already at the limit of his underpowered bike, and returned him into the title frame.
Some judicious riding in Thailand and Australia to secure a pair of third places ensured he finally overhauled Quartararo on the table, and victory in Malaysia came within two points of being the knockout blow.
Bagnaia and his bike are in good form, and arriving at the final round of the season, they have all the momentum.
THE PERMUTATIONS
Bagnaia leads Quartararo by a comfortable 23 points thanks largely to his rival’s costly non-score at the Australian Grand Prix last month. He will win the championship if:
– he finishes 14th or higher; or
– he finishes 15th or lower and Quartararo does not win.
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Because he’s amassed seven wins to Quartararo’s modest three, he will win the championship if their points tallies are tied.
WHY HE’LL WIN IT
He has a massive points margin
With 25 points on offer for a win, 23 points is achingly close to the deal being done already.
Bagnaia needs to do little more than finish the race to claim the championship. Anything more than a point guarantees it; one point or less and it would take an unlikely Quartararo victory to turn the championship equation on its head.
Only once all season — in the highly unusual conditions of the Indonesian Grand Prix when he still wasn’t one with his new Desmosedici — has Bagnaia finished 15th. His three other non-podium finishes comprise a pair of fifths and an eighth place.
And given Quartararo has won only three times from 19 attempts this year, the odds are certainly in Bagnaia’s favour.
Indeed Quartararo has never outscored Bagnaia by 24 points when both have finished this season. Further, despite the Italian having crashed out of five races, in only two of them has the Frenchman inflicted maximum damage with a victory.
As if this needed further emphasis, consider the incredible feat Bagnaia has undertaken to turn a 91-point deficit into a 23-point advantage in just nine rounds, a turnaround of 12.6 points per race. Quartararo needs double that rate in the remaining round to prevent the new title leader from converting on Sunday.
He has the fastest bike
Part of Bagnaia’s suddenly formidable advantage stems from the Desmosedici GP22, which has found a superb purple patch in the second half of this season.
After the bike’s somewhat difficult start to the year, work to crack the machine came to fruition at the post-Catalan Grand Prix test, seen most emphatically in the uptick in form of teammate Jack Miller. The Aussie’s patchy early-season performances transformed dramatically after Barcelona, since when he hasn’t finished a race lower than sixth — excepting his crash from the lead in San Marino, having taken pole — and he turned in his best ride ever with a dominant win in Japan.
In that same time frame Bagnaia has recorded three of his five poles and eight podiums, including five of his seven wins.
It’s also evident in the broader range of Ducati bikes, albeit all four teams are running different specifications of machinery. In the 10 races since Barcelona, a Ducati has claimed 19 of the available 30 podium places, including seven victories.
What’s most impressive about this development isn’t simply that the bike has become stronger where it’s already had an advantage, it’s also that the Desmosedici has become much better in the areas in which it’s typically been weak.
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The GP22 has tended to struggle at tracks that reward mid-corner speed, but this is no longer the case. A Ducati was on pole in Australia, for example, and Bagnaia led much of that race, which ended with six Bologna bikes in the top eight.
Coming into the final round in Valencia, a track at which Yamaha has tasted more success than any other bike in the last 10 races, the GP22 will have nothing to fear from the layout.
He’s in good form
The bike’s good form is matched by Bagnaia finally hitting his stride, having worked hard to banish his crash-prone reputation after the German Grand Prix.
Bagnaia has talked about getting too wrapped up thinking beyond what’s immediately in front of him while in the heat of battle, and a speaking in the run of four victories that followed, he said a changed mindset had delivered him big dividends.
“I’m in my best moment for sure because since that critical moment I have transformed my approach with my family and team,” he said, per Motorsport Week. “We made a step in this area, but we need to keep going and see which area I next need to work on at the end of the year.”
He’s crashed only once since he began his recovery from 91 points down, which he put down into a relapse of his old mentality. If anything, that appears to have tightened up his mental game for the final four rounds, in which we’ve seen him execute maturely to overturn his deficit, including in the kind of wheel-to-wheel conditions that previously tripped him up.
WHY HE WON’T
He’s too crash prone
All that said, there’s no escaping the fact Bagnaia is the equal most crash-prone rider in the top 10 this year, with five DNFs to his name. Only Jorge Martin has come off the bike as many times as the leader, and at least he can point to nerve damage in his right arm being behind some of them.
The only reason Pecco is on the cusp of completing a historic comeback rather than having already tied up the championship is precisely because of his tendency to throw himself off the bike. His last crash, barely a month ago in Japan, threatened to derail that comeback entirely, with only Quartararo’s low score and following non-score in Thailand gifting him another chance.
Having five DNFs, four of which were entirely his own fault, isn’t usually compatible with a championship challenge, and hard though he’s worked to break his reputation as a win-or-bin rider, the only way he can truly put it behind him is to stay on the bike in the highest pressure race of his career.
In that way both reputations are still true this week. On Sunday he can decide which one will prevail into 2023.
He’s never raced in a title decider before
This is the first time Bagnaia has ever battled for the premier-class championship, and he’s never been in a do-or-die title finale in any category.
His only career championship, his 2018 Moto2 title, was decided with one race to spare, meaning he avoided the pressure of a final-round showdown.
Meanwhile, this is Quartararo’s third campaign in championship contention, and he’s already experience the lows of his 2020 collapse and the highs of his 2021 triumph.
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Bagnaia’s inexperience might be cushioned by his considerable points advantage, but there’s no substitute for having been there and done that in combatting the pressure of having one race decide the entire season.
Combine all that with the pressure of trying to deliver Ducati its first riders championship since Casey Stoner’s 2007 crown and only its second ever — that’s quite a weight on the 25-year-old’s shoulders.
“A really important weekend for us is about to begin, but I arrive in Valencia calm and serene,” he said. “We are in a more favourable situation than Malaysia, but we must stay focused until the end and think about working well from the first session to give our best in the race, as always.”
THE WILDCARD
If there’s one thing that’s differentiated Quartararo and Bagnaia’s campaigns this year it’s the size of their on-track entourages.
Fabio is usually the lone Yamaha rider in the top 10, while Bagnaia can count on seven other Ducati bikes scoring points from his title rivals and generally making life difficult for other riders.
Quartararo must win the race to have any hope of claiming the championship, but Bagnaia has seven other riders who could prevent the Frenchman from ticking this first crucial box if he’s out of contention himself.
Indeed so much of the season to date has been defined by the raft of competitive Ducati bikes that Marc Márquez has described the sport as the ‘Ducati Cup’.
“They have to take profit of this,” he said. “They have the best bike on the grid, all their riders are in front, and they need to use that power to win the championship.”
But that blessing might also be a curse.
How many times have we seen Bagnaia’s stablemates race him — and race him hard — for position, whether victory or minor placings?
Enea Bastianini, whose four wins puts him second for that count this year, comes in for particular mention here, having hustled his 2023 teammate almost all year. Their all-Italian duel even precipitated Bagnaia crashes in France and Japan.
Jorge Martin has also intimated that he effectively considers himself a freelancer after being snubbed for factory promotion for 2023.
Ducati has been steadfast in not deploying team orders this year, but surely all its riders will be told to race Bagnaia with something less than 100 per cent gusto this weekend.
Whether they listen is another question.
But the bottom line for Francesco Bagnaia is that the 2022 championship rests entirely in his hands. It’s up to him this weekend whether he’s willing to leave anything to chance.
