Francesco Bagnaia has come painfully close so many times this season to putting some big points on his rivals only to fall off the bike in ways we’ve become so used to in the last 18 months.
But finally the real, new, Pecco Bagnaia stood up in Italy to remind the sport that he’s the reigning champion and is ready to defend his crown.
The quietly confident Bagnaia so talked up during the pre-season was on full display all weekend in Mugello. There was a rarely a moment that the entire round didn’t appear to be fully in his grasp, and he pressed home that advantage to take a big title lead into the final two rounds before the mid-season break.
There’s still so long to go until the end of the season, but the next fortnight will be decisive as to whether any other rider will get a genuine look-in at the title battle this season.
WINNER: FRANCESCO BAGNAIA
It’s taken him six rounds, but Bagnaia has finally taken the 2023 championship by the scruff of the neck and looks poised to put it into submission.
This was easily Bagnaia’s most complete weekend of the season.
His pole position lap was particularly impressive given the pressure of Marc Márquez shadowing him for the slipstream, and on two counts.
First, he was clearly riled by the incident, gesticulating angrily at the Honda rider, but he didn’t let it disturb his focus for his final flying lap. Let’s be honest: we haven’t always been able to say that about Bagnaia.
Second, he managed to extract a track record breaking time from himself while also beating Márquez. The Spaniard had the benefit of the tow, and it’s ordinarily a done deal that the following rider clocks the better time, but nothing was stopping Bagnaia this weekend.
He was then cool and composed to ice the sprint, when rain kept the pack tight and threatened to turn the result into a lottery.
But it was his performance on Sunday that really reasserted his credentials as reigning champion.
Despite being briefly pipped to the first corner by Jack Miller, Bagnaia established a large lead early and spent the rest of the race eking out an ever-greater advantage such that no-one could really threaten him.
It was more than just a show of force. Building a comfortable gap over the field meant he avoided the kinds of skirmishes that have tended to trip him up in the past. He could focus on getting the best from himself, which turned out to be more than enough to cover any would-be challengers.
He’s now 21 points ahead of Marco Bezzecchi and 24 points ahead of Mugello runner-up Jorge Martin at the top of the riders standings.
It could so easily have been more had he not crashed in Argentina, the United States and France. But still, two more weekends like this and he’ll almost certainly have more than a full weekend worth of points over the competition heading into the mid-season break.
LOSER: HONDA
Marc Márquez’s qualifying heroics — controversial though his slipstream tactics might be — to start second on the grid was always going to be an outlier of a result given this circuit’s demands and given the Honda bike’s ongoing struggles.
But things were much worse than could’ve been imagined by the time Sunday night in Mugello had rolled around.
Joan Mir crashed and broke his right hand. Álex Rins crashed and broke his right leg. Marc Márquez crashed in pursuit of a podium finish.
It’s unclear whether Mir, in the midst of a horror season, will be fit to return next weekend, but Rins will be out until after the July mid-season break. Márquez was fortunately unhurt.
Only Takaaki Nakagami made it to the flag, the Japanese rider the most consistent finisher in the stable this season.
Is it all just bad luck? Not quite, according to Márquez, whose frustration with his machine appears to grow by the weekend and was on full display in his confounded body language immediately after his crash.
“We are crashing too much,” he said on Sunday night, per Crash. “Honda has riders with a winning mentality and if you put riders with a winning mentality and you don’t have the chance to be [up] there, the problem is that you will crash more and more times because we’re pushing more than the others to be on the lap times. And this is what happened.”
The implication is clear. Honda riders are winners. The Honda bike is not, and it’s far from becoming one.
Márquez qualified and raced with the Kalex-built chassis this weekend, having considered it a definite step forward during practice. That’s progress, but it comes with the sting of Honda having to admit that an external supplier, not an in-house solution, is now leading the team’s recovery. It’s a short-term fix but not a path back to competitiveness.
“I keep going,” Márquez said. “I keep pushing, and we need to be together and work with the team to change the situation for the future — for these next races, the second part of the season, and especially for the next year.”
But it’s far from a given that the team can rebound in Márquez’s preferred time frame.
WINNER (WITH AN ASTERISK): FRANCO MORBIDELLI
Ahead of the weekend Franco Morbidelli spoke about being generally optimistic about his chances of renewing his Yamaha contract and extending his stay in MotoGP into next year.
He’s been a closer match for teammate Fabio Quartararo this year, he contended, and as long as that was the case, he could mount an argument for his retention — especially given the unattractive state of the Yamaha machine.
And the Italian Grand Prix was another strong weekend for the 28-year-old. He outqualified Quartararo to start 14th, and though neither rider scored in the sprint, Morbidelli raced to 10th on Sunday, one place up on his French teammate in 11th.
The numbers are unspectacular, but within the envelope of the M1’s performance, they were about as good as they could have been.
Surely that would’ve been good news for the Italian, but speaking to the MotoGP website on Sunday night, Morbidelli’s mood was considerably darker when asked about his future.
“Do I want to secure another year with Yamaha?” he said when asked whether results like those on this weekend would help him retain his seat. “Talk with Lin (Jarvis, team principal).”
The next three weeks are forecast to be the peak of the MotoGP silly season, with riders and teams attempting to line up their ducks before the July break.
Jarvis had previously identified the mid-season adjournment as the decision-making juncture on Morbidelli’s future.
Perhaps this run of improved form is simply coming too late for the 2020 title runner-up.
WINNER: JORGE MARTIN
In a not unrelated talking point, Jorge Martin strung together his second consecutive comprehensive weekend performance, taking another sprint-race double podium as Bagnaia’s round-long closest challenger.
The Pramac racer has been smarting all season about Ducati management’s decision to promote Enea Bastianini to the factory seat this year after an injury-affected first part of last season saw him lose promotion momentum to the Italian.
For a time it looked like he was letting it get under his skin, with inconsistent early-season form coinciding with him openly talking about the chances of leaving the Ducati stable next year.
But he’s managed to turn his form around. It started in Spain, where he collected a pair of fourths, and he hasn’t been off the podiums since then, including a sprint victory last time out in France.
You can speculate for yourself as to what’s motivated his rejuvenation.
If you’re Ducati, you might argue that his mind has been sharpened and his focus has returned to Pramac by the realisation the touted move to Yamaha would leave him way down the grid and out of reach of the podium.
Alternatively you might be tempted to buy into rumours that Yamaha is still chasing and close finalising an agreement with another rider on the grid, with Martin having long been considered a probable target.
We likely won’t have to wait too much longer to find out which it is.
