Cometh the hour, cometh the rider.
The build-up to what could have been a title-deciding Malaysian Grand Prix was coloured by crashes by both Francesco Bagnaia and Fabio Quartararo through qualifying and practice. It was a sign of just how high the pressure had been ratcheted up that neither could keep it steady before Sunday.
But on race day both managed to find the steel more in keeping with them being the two riders left in championship contention, and we were treated to an epic display of grit and guts to take the title battle to Valencia.
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Malaysia 2022 will live long in the memory for a host of reasons. Some aspects of it will reverberate into next season too. But the headline is that Bagnaia leaves Sepang with a 23-point lead.
It’s not enough to have claimed the championship, and while the advantage is still very much with him, he now faces the chaos of a do-or-die last-race title decider in which anything could happen.
After an unpredictable 2022 season, it’s the finale the sport deserves.
BIG QUESTIONS FOR DUCATI AFTER TENSE TUSSLE
The championship was and still is in Bagnaia’s hands, and while he couldn’t capitalise on the odds being in his favour in Malaysia, he did everything he had to do on Sunday to maximise his chances.
All Bagnaia could do was win and hope Quartararo finished too low in the order to keep the margin below 25 points.
His start was superb after a lacklustre ninth in qualifying, just about getting the holeshot to rocket into second with a sweet move on the brakes into the first turn.
But ironically there were two Ducati riders absolutely determined to make winning the race as difficult for him to achieve as possible.
The first was Jorge Martin, who sprinted away from pole towards what looked set to be a dominant victory before crashing out of the race on his own on lap 7.
That promoted Bagnaia to the lead, but his problems had only just begun.
Enea Bastianini was close in second and had his sights set on victory — something explicitly allowed in the Ducati rules of engagement despite the precariousness of the title.
On the same tour Martin came off, Bastianini executed one of his near-miss fly-bys at turn 14, coming close to taking both riders out of contention.
The barrage didn’t stop, and on lap 11 the Gresini rider barged past and into the lead.
Bagnaia hit back three laps later, and the sparring continued to the last lap, when a late-braking move from Bastianini came perilously close to wiping both out again but the factory Ducati rider held firm to take the flag with a 0.27-second advantage.
It was his seventh win of the season and gave him just about as close to an unassailable points advantage as he could get.
But the reaction in the Ducati garage wasn’t elation or satisfaction. It was pure relief, as if the entire operation had been holding its breath.
In fact Ducati team manager Davide Tardozzi revealed his heart monitor recorded his pulse rocket from an already stressed 200 beats per minute to 250 beats per minute as Bastianini overtook Bagnaia.
There’d been talk before the race that team orders would finally be explicitly enacted if it could put Bagnaia into a championship-winning position, but with Quartararo running third, that was never quite the case.
Regardless, the riders have been told to ride with extreme caution when battling Bagnaia given what’s at stake, and clearly the closeness of this fight — and these two have had some fraught battles already this season — clearly exercised minds judging by the furrowed-brow discussion on the Ducati pit wall.
Ducati got away with it this weekend, and Borgo Panigale can at least take solace in the fact that it would take a truly unusual situation for team orders to be required to win the title in Valencia.
It can also feel vindicated that its decision not to be more heavy handed about the situation hasn’t resulted in disaster.
But all this happens against the backdrop of Bastianini and Bagnaia becoming teammates next year. Compared to the harmony of the Bagnaia-Miller relationship, next year promises to be an extremely difficult campaign to manage considering the way they’ve gone at it this season and assuming the Ducati bike is a title contender again.
QUARTARARO KEEPS FIGHT ALIVE WITH CHAMPION-CALIBRE RIDE
Just as Bagnaia did everything he needed to do, so too did Fabio Quartararo, who turned a very lukewarm weekend into a commendable podium to keep his very slim title defence alive.
He too had a great start to rise from 12th to fifth on the first lap, which became fourth with a pass on Marc Márquez and third after Martin crashed.
In a way that turned out to be a sweet spot for him despite lacking the pace of the leading Ducati bikes. With clear air ahead of him he could achieve the sort of lap times he’s insisted he’s been capable of all season on a Yamaha bike he’s described as being designed for practice sessions rather than races.
It was interesting to watch Marco Bezzecchi’s pursuit of the reigning champion, the VR46 rider capable of putting the Frenchman into a title-losing position by demoting him to fourth.
The gap would seesaw each lap, with the margin coming down dramatically along the two long straights but then resetting to just about where it was before around the rest of the track, with Quartararo able to maximise his cornering speed with no-one ahead of him.
It eventually broke Bezzecchi’s challenge and was fast enough to creep up on the top two once their battle had taken the best from their tyres.
Doing that all with a fractured left hand from a crash earlier in the weekend and with the certain knowledge that a crash would mean his campaign was finished, the ride was incredible gutsy and befitting a champion who’s had to ride out of his skin to compensate for his bike.
“I feel so good,” he said. “It’s a long time [since I] took the podium.
“I gave my maximum today, I couldn’t do any better, but I’m proud of myself because [Ducati] made a good day but we also made a good day.
“I rode really well, one of the best of the season, especially the first laps.
“At least we bring it to Valencia. Even if the chance is super small, we did everything to bring it to Valencia.”
And the chance might be extremely small on paper, but there’s no telling what will happen in the pressure cooker of a last-race title decide.
The pressure could not be higher, and while Quartararo is clearly feeling it despite his protestations that he’s impervious, the majority of the expectation will be piled on Bagnaia, who has everything to lose.
The Italian will only have banished his crash-strewn reputation if he can take the chequered flag in Valencia. Until that happens, Quartararo and Yamaha must surely be keeping an open mind about a final twist being in their favour.
TITLE HOPES EXTINGUISHED
While MotoGP gets its final-round decider, the sport had to shed several contenders this week to get there.
Aleix Espargaró and Enea Bastianini both fell out of mathematical contention, and while the latter was always an outside chance, the former will be feeling the disappointment.
Espargaró and Aprilia set themselves up to be the fairytale story of the season. The bike had finally come good and the only rider to keep the faith wielded it to an early title lead.
But in the second half of the season the challenge has crumbled, and in Malaysia it was finally extinguished by an underwhelming qualifying and race result.
While Espargaró can never be accused of doing anything less than his maximum, you can’t help but wonder how much of his mind had turned to 2023 even as he turned up in his Sepang last-chance salon.
For one, he’d blasted the team for not being up to the challenge after his disappointing Phillip Island round — and his technical problems in first practice was further evidence of it, he said — and he went on to talk about an unresolved problem the team needs to address next season if it wants to challenge credibly.
“I really believe in this team and I really believe that next year we can fight again for the title if we do the same things we did in the first part of the championship, without any doubt,” he said before qualifying, per Crash.
“If I did more or less similar [results] from the first part of the championship, I would be leading now. So hopefully we can learn from this.
“It‘s the third year that we’ve had these problems actually, with both riders slower in the second part of the championship, but it’s something that we have to discuss internally.”
Espargaró didn’t elaborate on what the problem was but did point towards the bike losing a straight-line speed advantage it had earlier in the season.
For the last round Espargaró’s target is now to retain third, which he holds by a point ahead of Bastianini and 23 points ahead of Jack Miller. It would be comfortably the best result of his entire career and would be a great launching pad if next year really is going to be the year.
DUCATI WINS TEAMS TITLE AFTER MEGA MARVELLOUS MILLER RECOVERY
While Bagnaia didn’t walk away from Sepang with the riders title, Ducati will fly home with the teams championship, its second piece of silverware after taking the constructors crown earlier in the season.
It does so with a commanding 114-point margin over Aprilia with a race to spare.
While the odds were in the Italian team’s favour arriving in Malaysia, it has Jack Miller’s strong season to thank for it, and we got another glimpse of it this weekend despite the Australian not collecting another podium.
A super-conservative start from 14th, in the guts of the notoriously aggressive midfield, dropped him to just about last on the first lap, but the Australian unleashed ferocious pace to recover to sixth by the end of the race and collect enough points to surpass his career-best haul in MotoGP.
It wasn’t a standout result, and it was fundamentally borne of a mistake in qualifying on cold tyres, but it demonstrated that even on difficult days he’s capable of putting in a solid shift rather than disappearing as he was occasionally inclined to do.
It also means third place is still in play for the Aussie, albeit a long shot requiring him to win and misfortune to befall both Espargaró and Bastianini, but he can at least end the season and his Ducati career knowing he’s getting the most from his bike.
