Consistency: that’s what the results tell us wins championships. Look at Joan Mir’s title in 2020; one victory, yes, but a string of second and third places that just quietly racked up the points. True, 2020 was an unusual season, truncated due to all the lockdowns, but it proves my point. As does this season. Almost. Actually, maybe not!
Right now, Francesco Bagnaia is in the driving seat, after four back-to-back victories, bringing his tally to six for the season. This has brought him to within 31 points of Fabio Quartararo when the gap had been over 90. Those four wins have netted him 50 points more than Quartararo and all the momentum is with Bagnaia, especially as the next race is Aragon, where the long straight has Quartararo worried, as well he might be.
But hang on: this is the same Bagnaia who crashed out of three out of four races earlier in the season? Had he not done that, would he now be leading the championship? After all, he crashed out while at the sharp end of the race.
Because his consistency seems to come in blocks – three crashes, four victories – you don’t tend to notice it in the overall picture until you look back and analyse. But it’s there. Even Quartararo has been consistently inconsistent, with three victories and four-second places, but also retirement and some lacklustre performances out of fourteen rounds so far.
Behind all this, Aleix Espargaro is a model of consistency, with six podiums (including one win) and lots of top ten finishes and has only just been overtaken in the championship by the hard-charging Bagnaia. But Espargaro doesn’t seem at all worried. Maybe he’s just happy to be in this position, regularly running at the front?
But he just seems so calm. He knew before the start of the season that America, Austria and Misano would be difficult races for the Aprilia. America he was right about but Austria and Misano both netted him sixth-place finishes: useful points. Especially in light of Quartararo’s scoring. After the race at Assen, where Quartararo failed to finish and Espargaro battled from last to fourth in one of the best rides of the season, Espargaro was 32 points away from Quartararo and now he is still only 33 points away. Not bad after getting your three worse tracks out of the way!
However, he needs to be doing more than merely maintaining the gap if he is to challenge for the title. The number of races left is dwindling, meaning that at each race, he has to outscore Quartararo and Bagnaia by an ever larger margin and with those two at their respective peaks, that won’t be easy.
Maybe Aprilia should simply rejoice in what has been their best season by a long way. But, of course, that won’t happen – they’ll be completely gutted if they don’t take the title: they’re racers, what would you expect?
As Espargaro said after Misano: “In the past when I finished sixth, we had a party in Aprilia.” If they don’t do that anymore, then it’s a sign of how far they have come and what their expectations are from this year forward. No longer are they the also-rans but the step from finishing second or third in the championship to actually winning it is as big as from the back to the front of the grid, if not bigger, especially when you are up against teams that are in the habit of winning championships or, at the very least, races, consistently.
Towards the end of the Misano race, we had an interesting taste of what 2023 could look like as Enea Bastianini closed relentlessly on Bagnaia. The two will be teammates, of course, in 2023 and it was interesting to see what Bastianini would do to his future teammate who is currently fighting for the championship.
Bastianini would be keen to prove his worth with a win but, by the same token, he would not want to take Bagnaia out with a risky lunge up the inside. Nor would he want to harm his future team’s chances of the title by taking a few points off Bagnaia.
The fact that Bastianini couldn’t get past Bagnaia, even though the factory rider’s rear tyre was all but shot, harming his acceleration out of corners, was another indictment of Michelin’s front tyre. If anything, the Misano MotoGP was a bit of a procession, the top three or four running close together but no one having the extra grip for a banzai braking manoeuvre. Michelin is working on new tyres but these won’t be around until 2024 at the earliest. Until then, are we to be subjected to Formula One-style racing, without the benefit of pit stops providing the ‘overtaking’ excitement?
On Tuesday and Wednesday after the race, all the teams remained at Misano for the last test of the season. Of course, the main talking point was the fact that Marc Marquez would be making an appearance, his first time on track since his operation to finally fix the right arm break which had been so poorly fixed the first (several!) times.
That he is on the mend was evidenced by the fact that he completed 61 laps on Wednesday, finishing 12th on the timesheets. While that might not be the best news for Honda, they were trying out dozens of variations on a theme, including a preliminary 2023 bike, so it was clear they were not out for outright lap glory but looking forward to the development of next year’s bike, something that Marquez will be keen to have a hand in.
Also, a subject of scrutiny was the Yamaha. Quartararo has been vocal about the lack of straight-line speed compared to the Ducati and Aprilia and it is known that one of his conditions for signing a contract extension with the team was getting more top speed out of the Yamaha for 2023.
This they seem to have achieved, Quartararo’s best top speed is only 2 km/h slower than Jorge Martin’s Ducati. Yes, this speed was achieved with the aid of a tow from another rider, but the overall fastest lap time on Wednesday will give the Frenchman hope for next season, not to mention a boost for the remainder of 2022: the Yamaha team tried a new chassis and team manager Massimo Merengalli stated that it could appear in time for the next race in Aragon.
As usual, the post-Misano test asked more questions than it answered. For those answers, all we can do is wait for the remaining six races to run their course. What we all want, of course, is a championship that is in doubt right up to the last corner of the last race. On the current evidence of the form of Bagnaia, Quartararo and Espargaro, that’s not such an outrageous hope.
