Six races to go. Eight weeks to run it. Thirty points between them.
It’s the title run-in we didn’t think we were going to get barely a few months ago.
Francesco Bagnaia is bearing on Fabio Quartararo at a rate of knots. A whopping 91 points down just four races ago, he’s closed the gap at a rate of more than 15 points a weekend.
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If that trajectory were to continue, even if his four-race win streak were interrupted, he’d comfortably make himself champion before the end of the season.
But that’s on paper. He has six races to do the business, and given the nature of this weekend’s track for the Aragon Grand Prix, he has a golden opportunity to push his advantage around a circuit that will favour his Ducati — and hamper the opposing Yamaha.
But where does Aleix Espargaró figure in this? The Spaniard has lost momentum but pleased to be past circuits he felt were going to hurt his campaign. He’s targeting a return to the kind of consistently strong form that brought him into the equation to begin with.
The run-in to the title starts this weekend, and with six races in eight weekends, it’ll be over before the contenders know it. Best make every weekend count.
WILL ANYONE TAKE A LAST GOLDEN CHANCE TO KNOCK QUARTARARO?
Six races in eight weekends is as gruelling a test as they come in MotoGP, but imagine what it must be like for Fabio Quartararo as he sits on his fragile 30-point lead.
You get the sense that the walls are closing in a little on the reigning champion. It was barely months ago that he looked practically unbeatable atop the standings. Today he’s worried there’s not enough left in the bike to hold back the tide of Ducati riders hoping to topple him.
There was just the briefest glimpse of the season-opening Quartararo after he finished a flat fifth in San Marino, complaining that the bike’s hit a ceiling that he could ride around.
“That was the limit,” he said. “I was really frustrated because I know I gave my 100 per cent and I could not fight for more.
“There was no problem, that’s the thing. There was no problem. If you check the pace, I had the same pace as practice.”
Power and an inability to follow for rocketing front-tyre pressures — familiar complaints from his early campaign.
Now he arrives at a historically weak track for him and one that will punish the worst of Yamaha’s faults.
Only once in his entire motorcycling career has he finished higher than eighth — it was 2019, his debut MotoGP season, when he took the flag fifth, and even that result came sandwiched between a pair of podiums.
Yamaha hasn’t finished on the podium here since the days of Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo, back in 2016.
This is a power-sensitive track — just look at the 968-metre back straight — and thus Quartararo harbours concerns he could be dealt a painful championship blow.
“It’s going to be the toughest race of the last ones, I think,” he told the MotoGP website.
“I want to make a great race there. I’ve never made better than a top five.
“Hopefully we can be really strong and try to push ourselves to make a great race and be proud.”
An unexpectedly good second place in Austria when Yamaha wasn’t expected to do all that well might buoy him, though his other three of the last four results read: DNF, eighth and fifth.
It’s not the kind of form you want to take into a crucial rapid-fire final stanza.
CAN BAGNAIA MAINTAIN THE MOMENTUM — AND BEAT HIS DUCATI RIVALS?
It was at exactly this point last season that Francesco Bagnaia marked himself out as a potential champion.
In the final six rounds of last year — albeit with the championship well out of grasp — he won four races and finished on the podium in another. The only sour note was crashing out of the lead in Misano, which happened to hand Quartararo the title.
In those six races he slashed the deficit to Quartararo from 70 points down to just 26. That is, he made up 44 points on the champion.
This year with six rounds to go he trails by just 30 points and carries into this late-season dash a swell of momentum, winning the last four races in a row and six of his last finishes.
He’s the man to beat. But he’s not thinking that way.
“I will starting thinking about the championship when I will be 10, five points away from the leader,” he said, per Autosport. “In this moment I already made too many mistakes thinking about the championship.
“So my objective now is to be always competitive, always fast, always in front and try to win, always in front of my rival. This way of working has been key to this second half of the season.”
But his biggest challenge may not be Quartararo or even his own psychological game but his Ducati stablemates.
In the last two races he’s had to overcome rivals on Ducati bikes. In Austria he had to fend of Jack Miller early, in Italy he had to contend with Enea Bastianini late, beating him by just 0.034 seconds after some aggressive dicing.
It was so aggressive in fact that Ducati sporting director Paolo Ciabatti has raised the possibility of walking back his teams stance on having no team orders.
“We don’t like team orders but, obviously, we also have to think about winning the rider’s championship,” he told BT Sport. “We’ve only won once, with Casey Stoner in 2007, a long time ago.
“It is possible. We go to tracks where we will be competitive.”
“We won’t try any super-aggressive attacks on the last lap if we are first and second, because there is the risk that somebody will crash which would not be good for any of the riders.
“If somebody can win, maybe don’t try on the last corner to pass him. That’s what we need to clarify.”
Being backed up by the seven other Ducati riders, all on competitive machinery, should be one of Bagnaia’s strengths. He may just need them to play the team game if he’s going to weaponise it against Quartararo.
CAN APRILIA AND ESPARGARÓ REDISCOVER SOME FORM?
Aleix Espargaró’s title challenge has come off the boil since the mid-season break. From the end of April until June he didn’t finish lower than fifth and collected a string of four third-place finishes. Since coming back he has a ninth and a pair of sixths to show for his efforts, albeit that lowest result coming a day after fracturing his heel.
His title deficit has slid from 21 points out to 33. Certainly that’s by no means a disaster given Bagnaia is only three points closer, but the lack of momentum is what’s concerning for a rider who said going into the break that the toll of the championship challenge was already weighing heavily on him.
But just as Quartararo says some of his lost advantage is circuit specific, so too as Espargaró expect to come on stronger now that the Red Bull Ring and Misano are behind him.
“I’m super happy to finish Austria and Misano,” Espargaro said, per The Race. “Two sixth places — in the past when I finished sixth we did a party in Aprilia.
“Very difficult circuits for me — very difficult circuits.
“I made a big, big, big effort, super focused, working and giving my best and I finished sixth in both races.
“Now it’s downhill [in a good way]. we go in very good circuits where I have really, really good feelings with this bike, in the past also. I can’t wait.”
In other words, he needs to start winning from this weekend. With two riders ahead of him in the standings, it’s too late for him to play for points, and with Yamaha-favourite tracks coming later in the year, he must make hay while the sun still shines on his unlikely title tilt.
HOW WILL MARC MÁRQUEZ’S COMEBACK GO?
Now to the question more than 100 days in the making: just how is Marc Márquez’s fourth grand return to racing going to go?
It’s this time or bust for Márquez. There are no more comebacks. If his surgery hasn’t worked or if he discovers some physical ceiling from his broken arm and chronic follow-on injuries, then that’ll be it.
We’re unlikely to find out just close to greatness Márquez is going to get just this weekend. Indeed both he and the team have been explicit in describing this race and the rest of the year as being essentially an extension of his rehabilitation. He’ll get stronger, the bike will get some new development direction and together they’ll be a force again in 2023.
But even so, this is Marc Márquez. He only goes at 100 per cent. Surely there’ll be even a little glimpse of some of the old magic, right?
Quartararo even suggested somewhat jokingly — but only somewhat — that Márquez would be up to speed quickly enough to influence the frontrunner.
“I hope he can be fighting with us pretty soon, to destroy a little bit the plan of the red bikes,” he said.
His biggest hurdle after the endurance feat of a motorcycle grand prix will be to deal with a bike that’s fallen way out of the sweet spot he’d spent his career coaxing it into.
The team has scored just twice since he got off the bike and is now only 23 points ahead of satellite team LCR.
Secondary to that question is what Pol Espargaró can make of this impending final chapter of the season and his Honda career. He’s now slipped to 17th in the standings between the LCR riders and has spent much of the year protesting that the bike is no good.
“I can push whatever I want but I’m slow, we are slow and the bike is not working, so what can I do?” he said after crashing out in Misano.
“I want to be the fastest guy on the grid. I’m in the best moment of my career psychologically and physically but it’s super frustrating because I cannot take profit of this.”
Márquez had him covered even with his bung arm before his surgery. How they compare this weekend and through to the end of the year will be fascinating — and potentially damaging.
WILL CRUTCHLOW ENJOY A BETTER MOTOGP RETURN?
Andrea Dovizioso bowing out of the sport after his home race in Misano means reserve rider and three-time MotoGP winner Cal Crutchlow will return to the grid for a second time since his retirement — and he’s hoping it’ll go more smoothly than it did last year.
Crutchlow took on a four-race stint last year replacing the injured Franco Morbidelli and then benched Maverick Viñales but managed a best finish 16th at Aragon.
The Briton lamented a lack of riding opportunities last year, having only just joined the team during the off-season and while pandemic rules were more draconian, as playing a major role in his troubles.
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“I hadn’t ridden the bike in just under six months,” he recalled to the Last on the Brakes podcast. “I jumped on the bike and I nearly stalled the bike for a start, I nearly hit the pit wall, wobbled off down the pitlane and thought ‘I don’t remember it being that difficult’.
“I’ve been actively riding a little bit of late so I won’t come into it as bad as last year.
“But coming back and racing is not easy. There’s nothing like racing. You can test all you want and feel things, be at a good pace, at a good race pace, but the way the guys are going this year — the field is so strong.
“But we have no expectations. I’ll just do my job as best as possible, which is good for Yamaha still because we can give information on the current bike.”
He’ll have the advantage of having worked with RNF last year, so adjusting into the race set-up will be easier, but there’s no escaping the massive gap between Quartararo and the rest of the stable. Next best is Morbidelli in 19th, 185 points adrift.
So while Crutchlow might be better prepared than last year, it remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to tame such a picky bike,
