This wasn’t the chapter we were expecting to be written in the story of the 2022 championship.
The Japanese Grand Prix was an unusual weekend of MotoGP on so many levels.
It started with an unusually compressed Friday schedule to safeguard against freight delays.
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Much of Saturday washed out by an enormous thunderstorm, including a crucial third practice session.
And then a perfectly dry and sunny race day delivered us a podium — indeed a top seven — with to relevance to the championship whatsoever.
Instead Jack Miller stole the show with the best ride of this premier-class career, dominating the field in a way he’s never before experienced and hinting that the best of his Ducati career might be yet to come — just in time for the Australian Grand Prix mere weeks from now.
Meanwhile, the title contenders were doing their best to score any points at all. Only one of them succeeded, and it’s not great surprise to learn it was Fabio Quartararo, who continues to grind his way to a possible second championship.
It was the kind of wacky weekend you get when the schedule is turned upside-down, and with thunderstorms forecast all week for this weekend’s Thai Grand Prix, we might be set for more in a few days.
MILLER FINDS ANOTHER LEVEL
This was Jack Miller, but not as you’ve seen him before.
Never before has Miller dominated a grand prix, not like this. Whereas in the past he’s leant on his impressive feel for changeable conditions or been quick enough to capitalise on the mistakes of others, there was no other rider on the grid in Japan capable of taking victory from him on any of the 24 laps of the race.
It was comfortably the best race of his career and a performance so strong in fact that it surprised even Miller himself.
“It was an emotional one that’s for certain as it always is with me, I don’t cry but I was crying like a baby on the in-lap,” said the Townsville-born rider.
“To be honest, I didn’t know I had that in me,” he wrote on his website. “I never though that I’d be able to win a grand prix like that, just pulling away from everybody and dominating. It was a pretty incredible feeling.”
It’s tempting to think things just clicked on Sunday given his lacklustre seventh after qualifying — in the wet too, conditions in which he normally excels — but the seeds of this victory were sown on Friday, when he topped the sole elongated practice session and experimented with the hard rear that he ultimately rode to a crushing victory.
In that sense it was close to a complete weekend, with the pieces put together long before lights went out — and it was all the more impressive given the compressed practice schedule giving him just one opportunity to get his ducks in a row.
It perpetuated a strong second half of the season for Miller. Excluding his fall in San Marino, he’s been strong and consistent since returning from the break, and this is his fourth podium from the last seven races.
And victory hasn’t just moved him up to fifth in the championship and within striking distance of fourth, but it’s also put him back on track to continue the year-on-year progression he’s enjoyed since his debut in the premier class. Every year in MotoGP he’s finished with an average points per race score higher than in the season prior.
He’s now only 22 points behind last year’s total, and given strong finishes to seasons are very much a Miller trend, we may well expect the best may yet be to come in the final four races of his Ducati career — including at his home grand prix at Phillip Island in a couple of weeks.
HUMAN ERROR WILL DECIDE THE TITLE
Ahead of this weekend’s race Fabio Quartararo revealed a little about his mindset in the tense final rounds of a championship campaign that months ago he looked almost certain to win but which has seen momentum swing to Ducati more recently.
“It‘s hard [to stay motivated] because you know you’re doing your best and it’s never enough,” he said, describing how Ducati has left Yamaha for dead this season. “You can do as much as you want; it’s never enough, so it’s hard.
“But we have to keep it until the end anyway, until it‘s over.”
Quartararo’s entire season has been built form leaving absolutely nothing on the table. The gap to his Yamaha stablemates illustrates how close to the limit of the bike he’s having to ride to have any hope of scoring decent points, yet he’s managed to almost completely avoid making mistakes.
His sole error came at the Dutch Grand Prix in a battle with title rival Aleix Espargaró. He’s otherwise yet to finish lower than ninth this year — bar last week’s DNF, which wasn’t really his fault — picking up maximum points at the races he can’t be competitive enough to win.
But compare that to his rivals, Francesco Bagnaia and Aleix Espargaró, whose campaigns are defined by errors.
Bagnaia is the highest profile in this regard. Japan was his fifth DNF of the year, which means he’s retired from just under a third of the season.
The Italian was having a largely off weekend. He qualified mystifyingly slow 12th — he would’ve started near the back had he not automatically made it through to Q2 — and was off the pace for pretty much the entire weekend.
But whereas Quartararo has made a virtue of maximising his bad weekends, Bagnaia crashed attempting to rescue two championship points in a battle with the Frenchman for eighth.
Espargaró, meanwhile, threw away sixth on the grid when the team accidentally set his engine in the wrong mode on the grid, forcing him to pit for his second bike and start from pit lane. He scored no points when he expected to finish on the podium — a massive open goal missed when neither Quartararo nor Bagnaia were going to score big points.
Combined with his infamous mistake in Barcelona, where he finished the race a lap early, he’s now dropped enough points to account for the 25-point gap to Quartararo through human error.
It’s a racing truism that you win the championship on your bad days, not your best days. Quartararo is ensuring he’s having virtually no bad days. Less can be said about his rivals, and Japan was only more evidence of that fact.
THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF?
It took him 1071 days and a return ticket to Japan, but Marc Márquez took his first pole position since breaking his arm in 2020 in a superb qualifying performance in Motegi.
His previous pole had been at this track on a dominant weekend in 2019, and after a strong race, it’s tempting to believe this weekend neatly closed the circle on his long-running injury drama.
Jumping off the bike on Saturday afternoon, Márquez was quick to play down the meaning of his pole position beyond personal pride, insisting not much could be read into it in performance terms.
“It’s only a pole position, it’s in the wet,” he said. “But it’s not the time [to think of victory]. This is what I believe.”
His reasoning was that the wet weather made the circuit less physically demanded on his still-recovering arm, whereas 24 laps in the dry would expose his problems.
And it’s true he slipped fairly quickly down the order at the start, but he managed to steady himself once he’d dropped to fifth and consolidate the position.
From there he seemed to be managing the pace in the expectation that his arm might give up before the end of the race — he’d forecast, after all, that there was a real risk he’d have to end grands prix early due to fatigue.
Not only did that moment never come, but he managed to find strong rhythm and pace late in the race such that he made his sole overtake on Miguel Oliveira in the closing stages of the afternoon to finish a commendable fourth.
“I didn’t feel pain during the whole race,” Márquez said afterwards. “I felt tired in the end, but I didn’t feel pain … for that reason I was also able to attack Oliveira.
“It was a long time ago since I had the feeling to attack somebody in the last laps.
“Everything was under control.”
Immediately springing to mind were Miller’s words from Saturday night.
“Of course he says it’s not [going to win], but he’s said that a thousand times before,” he said. “It’s the boy who cried wolf.”
It won’t take many more good results for Márquez’s protestations to be dismissed — and with a very wet round forecast in Thailand this weekend, he may be on for another one very soon.
BRAD BINDER ISSUES CRUCIAL REMINDER
Brad Binder has never finished on the MotoGP podium in Motegi. That’s because he’s never ridden a MotoGP bike in Japan before.
But that didn’t stop him from turning in one of the race’s best performances and yet another standout ride on machinery that has very little business scoring strong points.
After only his second podium of the year Binder is sixth in the championship standings and only 11 points behind Miller — and just let that sink in.
He’s ahead of Pramac’s multiple podium getters, Maverick Viñales on a title-contending Aprilia, both Suzuki bikes and his own race-winning teammate, Miguel Oliveira.
His consistency on a troubled bike has been extremely impressive this year. Only twice had he finished lower than 10th.
He’s managed that despite the KTM bike being generally no good over a single lap given it lacks the finesse to really attack on the brakes and its inability to turn sharply enough in slow corners, not to mention being a little down on power compared to the Ducati bikes — all things that should’ve counted very strongly against the RC16 at a track like this.
But wet qualifying dulled some of those sharp edged, and from a career-best front row-start Binder was determined to capitalise on his chances.
His typical lightning-quick starts — which are a big part of the secret of his strong Sunday results despite his Saturday pace — got him into an early lead, and though he couldn’t live with Jack Miller, he managed to beat Jorge Martin to second place after a sweet late move on the Spaniard from third.
And all that’s very good, but underlining the performance was the fact it was all completed with the hard rear tyre, which he hadn’t run at all during practice.
The lack of practice time in Japan — partly by design, partly thanks to thunderstorms — was one of the reasons we got such an unusual set of results by the end of the weekend. It challenges riders to do more with less. Binder rose to that challenge magnificently.
Binder praised the team after the race for making progress this season and described the podium as being “desperately needed” to validate that work — all true — but it was also a well-timed reminder that the South African will be a force to be reckoned with once the mechanical package starts to click.
SUZUKI EXITS ON A LOW NOTE
A final dishonourable mention for the race must go to Suzuki, whose shock MotoGP farewell tour has lurched from bad to worse and culminated in a home race shocker.
The team returned a double DNF at its final home race, meaning its scored just seven times since the new broke it would be leaving the premier class at the end of the year.
It arrived home for its first Japanese Grand Prix in three years without its world champion, Joan Mir, and though Takuya Tsuda stood in admirably, neither he nor Álex Rins could crack Q2.
Tsuda retired from the race with a catastrophic oil fire erupting from beneath his bike, and Rins retired with a broken front rim.
‘Sad farewell’ is how Suzuki described the result on Sunday night. There’s not much more that can be added to that.
