Was this the most important race of the season?
It’s impossible to say with five races still to run and the championship obviously still undecided, but the effect of the Aragon Grand Prix was to fast-forward the title table a couple of rounds, slashing Fabio Quartararo’s lead and solidifying Francesco Bagnaia’s ascendancy.
Quartararo suffered his second DNF in five races and just his fifth in three years at a crucial title juncture, his failure to finish thanks largely to his bike’s inability to qualify on the front row, heightening the danger of every standing start.
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Bagnaia couldn’t win his fifth in a row, but a close second place to future teammate Enea Bastianini was enough to bring him to within 10 points of the leader with his momentum largely undimmed.
With Aleix Espargaró’s title campaign given a boost too, the final five rounds of the year are no longer a chase but an all-out slog for supremacy by the time the chequered flag falls in Valencia.
QUARTARARO’S WISH COMES TRUE ON DISASTROUS FIRST LAP
Quartararo joked earlier in the week that the returning Marc Márquez might be able to influence the title fight. Unfortunately for him, he was right — just not about which rider might benefit.
It took only a matter of metres for Quartararo’s race to come to a premature end after rear-ending the Honda rider as he saved a slide out of turn 3. The crash was enormous and the landing heavy, but thankfully the Frenchman was largely unharmed beyond bruises and some abrasion.
With Bagnaia holding the lead from pole, the championship arithmetic started calculating itself, and the result was dire.
Quartararo’s lead was eventually slashed by 20 points, down to 10, over the Italian, and Espargaró sidled up to being just 17 points adrift.
For a title campaign that had already taken on a distinctly defensive tone, this was a real blow.
And it was doubly so considering the Frenchman had felt before the race that he might’ve actually been on a for a decent result after a career of lukewarm finishes in Aragon.
“I was super happy about my FP4, I was super consistent and fast,” he said, according to Autosport. “So apart from the race it was a positive weekend.
“Maybe a podium was something that was possible … I think fighting for third, fourth, fifth, sixth — we could have.”
To rub salt into the wounds of his pointless afternoon, the scooter that transported him back to pit lane also crashed. It just wasn’t going to be his day.
“After the crash a marshal hit the scooter,” he said. “I had a second crash — it was quite fast actually.
“Luckily I didn’t take off my helmet.
“But the marshal just hit face-to-face with another scooter, quite fast, luckily I didn’t have anything from that crash.”
The question now is: is 10 points enough of a buffer to grind out a title win with five rounds remaining?
After a run of races that hasn’t suited the M1, the final five should be a better match for a bike that’s now hopelessly underpowered relative to the Ducati machine.
Even the next race in Motegi, which on paper is a collection of long straights, should present an easier challenge, with Quartararo expecting the big braking zones to be enough to counteract some of the power deficit.
Thailand and Australia will be big opportunities to stretch open the lead again before the final two-race shootout in Malaysia and Valencia.
He’s in some of the best form of his career, but Ducati has the numbers and the momentum. Which argument proves more convincing on the title table is impossible to call.
MÁRQUEZ’S RACING RETURNED DERAILED
The Quartararo crash was the start of the end of Márquez’s first race back in MotoGP in more than 100 days.
Later on that same lap he wiped out Takaaki Nakagami in a side-by-side crash that threw the Japanese rider off his bike in the middle of the field, with only some quick thinking and decisive evasive action from his rivals avoiding what could have been a horrific accident.
All in all, a fairly inauspicious return to racing.
To be fair to the Spaniard, he was blameless on both counts, even if he caused both.
The rear snap on cold tyres was a typical first-lap incident, and with Quartararo so close behind him, there was nothing that could’ve been done to avoid the smash.
It turned out to be a crash of mutual destruction, because in the coming-together a piece of front fairing became lodged around the rear of Márquez’s bike.
At turn 7 it forced him left and into Nakagami, forcing the satellite Honda rider to the floor and potentially injuring his right hand one week out from his grid home grand prix in three years.
Though the fairing eventually blew off the bike, the damage had been done, and Márquez was forced to retire.
It’s unfortunate for all involved, with Márquez’s comeback target to finish every race this season in what is essentially a comeback aimed at getting him back to full fitness in 2023 and helping to develop next year’s bike.
While the development component will in part have been satisfied by his practice program, he’s now lost one of six race distances in his mission to build strength and endurance — precious time in a delicate recovery.
DUCATI BATTLE CONTINUES — BUT SHOULD IT?
Once the chaos of the first lap was complete, all eyes were on the Ducati battle at the front, which quickly boiled down to Bagnaia versus Bastianini — an increasingly familiar story.
Again we got confirmation that Ducati is avoiding implementing team orders in the final phase of the title fight, and again some were left wondering whether that’s the strategy that will deliver the Italian marque its second riders title.
All race Bagnaia was under assault from 2023 teammate Bastianini, who got past shortly before half distance only to run wide and cede the lead back almost immediately, starting the siege all over again.
Eventually he burst past on the final lap to pinch the lead, his victory margin just 0.042 seconds.
Bastianini was notably less belligerent in his aggression this race compared to some of his more daring moves last time out in San Marino. The fight was also much cleaner than it had been with Jorge Martin in Austria when they were battling for factory promotion.
But on the day Quartararo had only his third DNF in two seasons, will having allowed Bastianini to prevent Bagnaia from maximising his point haul come to be reflected upon as the wisest decision the team could’ve made?
It’s undoubtedly brave, and had Ducati management decided to pull rank on the battle, the spectacle would’ve been poorer for it. But by that same token you could say the pair crashing and handing victory to Aleix Espargaró — who’s also vying for the title — would’ve been an interesting talking point that benefited the sport.
What the team will be heartened by at least is that Bagnaia managed to avoid crashing out of his duel with Bastianini for the second week in a row, unlike in their battle in France earlier in the year, perhaps making the decision to let them fight an easier one to settle.
Bagnaia has talked openly about being mentally unprepared for the title fight this year, and ironically his previously massive deficit freed him to ride more naturally, which brought him straight back into the battle.
Perhaps that was the reset he needed — though one doubts he had a 91-point figure in mind as the required threshold to mentally adjust — but with that gap back down to 10 points now, his response to the heat of battle with Quartararo will be decisive in who gets the silverware.
IS BASTIANINI IN THE TITLE FIGHT?
But ironically Bastianini’s win will force Ducati — and Bagnaia — to contemplate a different question: is he back in the championship fight?
He’s 48 points adrift with five rounds to go — that is, he needs to outscore Quartararo by just under 10 points a race until the end of the season to close the gap.
He’ll also have to meanwhile keep Bagnaia and Espargaró at bay, with both much further up the road than him.
It’s a very long shot but certainly within the realms of realistic mathematical possibility — enough that, with his fourth win of the season under his belt, it may be difficult to enact team orders in the next race or so even if Ducati wanted to.
For the Beast’s part, he’s not buying into the chatter about a fourth rider entering the title fight late.
“I want to be realistic and not let it go to my head,” he said, according to GPOne. “Making up 48 points at this point in the championship is not an easy feat.
“I prefer to tackle the last few races one by one, obviously trying to keep giving my best and picking up the best possible results.
“Right now I don’t feel the pressure of the title race. There is still little hope at the moment.”
But at a minimum he’s bought himself a licence to continue having a crack, and given his strung uptick in form, he can’t be ruled out if not of winning the title outright then of deciding who might have the chance to claim it for themselves.
DID ESPARGARÓ MAKE ENOUGH OF HIS OPPORTUNITY?
Arriving in Aragon, Aleix Espargaró was in a battle to kickstart his fading title challenge, which had come badly off the boil since the mid-season break.
MotorLand was a much better match for the Aprilia than the last two circuits, but the Spaniard wasn’t a match for Ducati. He snuck into fourth via Q1, and in the race he was struck competing for podium scraps, with Bagnaia and Bastianini operating way beyond his pace, thereby restricting how much of an impact he could make on the title standings with Quartararo out of the race.
Interestingly, for a rider who before the break talked about being exhausted from the pressure of his first title challenge, Espargaró said the weight of expectation that this would be a big points-paying race for him played a role in ultimately restricting him to third.
“The pressure was very high to arrive in Aragon because I knew that it was one of the best tracks of the last part of the championship,” he said, according to Crash. “Maybe I started a little bit too hot.
“I crashed twice on Friday and so I lost completely the confidence.
“From FP3 I started to build again the confidence and I did a good qualifying, a solid fourth place, [but] in the race I didn’t have the pace to follow Pecco and Enea, I knew it.
“In the race they had something extra all weekend.
“But third place is super good for the championship. I’m happy to be back on the podium.“
Super good may be an exaggeration though. While it did close his deficit to 17 points, it had the feeling of a playing-for-points finish after having to judge his way past Brad Binder in the final stages of the race.
Playing for points isn’t going to be enough for Espargaró, whose bike is a solid all-rounder but has won just once all year. That’s particularly true when Bagnaia is finishing ahead of him.
CONSTRUCTORS CHAMPIONSHIP CLAIMED WITH FIVE ROUNDS TO SPARE
Finally, Ducati checked off the first part of its desired triple title this year by claiming the constructors championship at the weekend for the third year in a row.
The Italian marque has had at least one bike on the podium at every race this year and has won 10 of 15 races to date, half of them coming in the last five rounds, underlining the strong return to form lately after a somewhat uncertain start to eh season.
The Ducati factory team also leads the teams championship, albeit by a relatively modest 37 points ahead of Aprilia. It would be the team’s third title win and second in a row if it seals the deal, and with Jack Miller in good form in the final chapter of his Ducati career, the team would be feeling confident.
The final part of course is Ducati’s second riders title, which remains far from certain.
If it pulls it off, it would be the first triple championship won since Honda and Marc Márquez in 2019.
