It’s rare for a rider to win a grand prix and not be the weekend’s biggest winner. Francesco Bagnaia might know that feeling this weekend.
It takes nothing away from Bagnaia’s superb and assertive victory at the Spanish Grand Prix to say that KTM had the biggest result.
Brad Binder and Jack Miller were both bested by the Ducati rider, but a comprehensive weekend-long performance for the Austrian marque amounted to more than what ultimately was a reassuring victory for a man who’s already the championship favourite.
Watch every practice, qualifying and race of the 2023 MotoGP World Championship live and ad-break free during racing on Kayo. New to Kayo? Start your free trial now >
The RC16 seems to be getting better and better, and its riders appear to be getting more comfortable and more willing to push with every passing round.
You wouldn’t want to overstate the team’s position, but with Honda and Yamaha all at sea and Aprilia regularly wasting its opportunities, why not KTM as the season’s natural challenger to title favourite Ducati?
WINNER: KTM
It may only be around six weeks since preseason testing, but it may as well have been six years ago for the turnaround in expectations for KTM.
At the start of the year the bike looked unwieldy and slow, so much so that the team itself actively revised down its expectations for Binder and new teammate Miller.
But after four rounds KTM is only two points behind teams championship leader VR46 and 17 points ahead of the factory Ducati team. Binder and Miller are third and fourth in the riders standings respectively.
Binder has claimed two sprint victories and a grand prix podium, Miller has made two rostrum appearances, both at the weekend in Jerez, his first for his new team.
“The thing is, I’m not that surprised in some ways,” Miller wrote on his website. “The bike has been phenomenal all year, every weekend I’ve felt like we’ve only been missing a little bit here or there, so it was nice this weekend to have everything polished and do it right.”
And the podiums were achieved in style too, duking it out with reigning champion and new title leader Bagnaia on both days — an inconceivable notion barely a month ago.
“We’re taking it to the big boys now, and it feels really great,” Miller wrote. “It’s the fourth grand prix, and we have a good package.
“We’re slowly but surely arriving at the front, and I’m sure we’ll come to some tracks that are even better for us.”
Forecasts were revised downwards in March. This month they’re not just being restored, they’re being elevated as high as they’ve ever been for the Austrian marque in the premier class.
Miller claims podium finish in Spain | 01:00
LOSER: FABIO QUARTARARO
With every passing weekend Fabio Quartararo’s MotoGP life gets a little worse.
Yamaha is being left behind in the premier class; we all understand this by now. Whereas for parts of last year an immense level of focus allowed him to hold an unlikely championship lead, this year no amount of concentration is capable of hauling the M1 far enough beyond its station to play a role in the frontrunning battle.
But his hopeless situation took a sad twist at Jerez. Normally one of his stronger circuits, he qualified a woeful 16th and struggled to make an impact on the top 10 all weekend.
“I never expected to be that slow,” Quartararo said after the grid-setting session, having never started lower than sixth in all his previous visits to the circuit. “This was a proper disaster.”
But an even bigger disaster was still to come, when he triggered an enormous multi-rider crash on the first lap of the grand prix that sent Miguel Oliveira to hospital with a dislocated shoulder.
He’d been pinched between Marco Bezzecchi and Oliveira when he lost control of his bike — although the stewards considered it irresponsible riding and slapped him with a long-lap penalty. He then improperly served that and had to take another trip through the penalty lane on his way to 10th place.
“I could not escape this crash because I just tried to brake and stop,” he said, per Crash. “But then the bike of Miguel took my clutch and I hit the bike of Bezzecchi.”
“I didn‘t try to make an overtake, I was just trying to stay on two wheels and survive the corner.”
But who, if anyone, should take the blame for the crash is beside the point. Quartararo was trying for the second race — and third start — of the weekend to make up as many places as he could after qualifying poorly, which is becoming his standard scenario.
The further back you start, the more at risk you are of getting caught up in an incident. And the more aggressive you have to ride to score points, the more likely you are to crash.
The concern for Quartararo isn’t that this was a poor one-off; it’s that constantly riding at 110 per cent is his sad new normal.
Embarrassing pit lane blunder explained | 03:03
WINNER: FRANCESCO BAGNAIA
Excluding his failure to make automatic Q2 qualification, this was as close to the flawless weekend Bagnaia needed to put the troubles of his early season behind him.
Jerez is the circuit that started to fire his 2022 title challenge into life, and it could well be reflected upon as having the same value for him this season.
Bagnaia was never out of title contention, nor had the favourite tag slipped from him in the opening three races; it’s just that he’d let so many points slips past him already that he was theoretically vulnerable to actually having to battle for the championship rather than claiming it by rights, such is his speed when he’s able to stay on the bike.
He qualified second despite having to breaking through a tricky and unusually star-studded Q1, consolidated in the sprint and then won the race with some incisive riding, albeit not without a touch of controversy.
A bold move that cut underneath Miller for second place raised the ire of the stewards, who ordered him to hand the place back. Some would’ve called it hard but fair racing, but whatever the case, he made the move stick a second time to cement second before picking off Binder for first.
And that’s the fire in the belly we want to see from a rider who’s been accused of being too in his own head to go out and dominate a season and land some knockout punches — something he came close to admitting himself in recent weeks when he said he didn’t automatically deserve the right to be Ducati’s leading rider.
Performances like these go some way to eliminating those doubts — for him as much as for us.
Lando pulls off ‘overtake of the Day!’ | 00:53
LOSER: APRILIA
It sounds harsh, but Aprilia, Aleix Espargaró and Maverick Viñales no longer have the potential to create a sporting fairytale with an unlikely championship.
That’s not because they don’t have the capacity to win the title; it’s because they’re no longer underdogs. Or they shouldn’t be, anyway.
Aprilia proved last year that it had a frontrunning bike. This year’s RS-GP is another step forward, albeit not as large a step as Ducati.
Espargaró proved last year that he can be a fairly safe set of hands, and Viñales has been on a steady upwards trajectory since his Yamaha switch.
But this year has seen a return to the poor execution that had the team and both riders considered minor players.
Strong qualifying performances that could have loaded pressure on Bagnaia have been too often squandered.
Espargaró has crashed three times — in the sprints in Argentina and Spain and in the grand prix in the US — in what looks like a worrying return to his crash prone pre-2022 ways.
Viñales, meanwhile, has had poor start after poor start — something of an Aprilia trait at this point, to be fair — before retiring with a snapped chain at the weekend.
Four rounds isn’t too late to turn it around, but these missed opportunities are already adding up.
Miller gets podium finish in Sprint! | 01:02
WINNER: DANI PEDROSA
It’s rare to see a genuinely good veteran comeback that doesn’t have that certain tinge of sadness about it, but Dani Pedrosa’s KTM wildcard appearance had none of that.
The 37-year-old Spanish master qualified a superb sixth, held position in the sprint and nabbed seventh in the grand prix, collecting healthy points all weekend in a defiant reminder of his standings in the sport.
Some attempted to twist Pedrosa’s cameo as a sign that MotoGP has regressed in the last five or so years, but that misunderstands just how good he was — and is.
Pedrosa is one of the original aliens, the club he comprised with Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo and Marc Márquez. Only Márquez — notably the youngest — remains of that glittering era. Pedrosa’s 31 victories speak to his ability; his lack of title as a crowning achievement speaks to his career’s unfortunate timing to coincide with so many other motorcycling icons.
And while he hasn’t raced full-time since 2018, he’s had a very active test program with KTM for much of the interim, much of which took place at Jerez, the fruits of which were on full display on a bike that was properly in its element this weekend.
But his weekend also shouldn’t be overstated. It was assured and exact and competitive in the way he’s always raced, but he was also on a victory-contending bike and finished outside the top five.
So what we saw was exactly what we got: a past great who hasn’t raced in years doing a perfectly good job a track he loves and on a bike he’s been integral to developing. He said afterwards that he’d enjoyed his weekend but has no inclination to make a full-time comeback.
It was a cameo that featured everything it deserved and nothing it didn’t, and that’s great.
