MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

The tension which has been building up around the possibility of racing at Valencia after the devastating storms there defused after the MotoGP Safety Commission, the body in which the riders talk to Dorna and the FIM about everything of concern, from track safety to sporting regulations and more. Any journalist with a rider's phone number was messaging them the instant they emerged from meeting.

Which is how we found out that Dorna and the local authorities in the Valencia region had decided to cancel the 2024 Valencia round of MotoGP, set to take place from 15th-17th of November. Half an hour or so later, Dorna issued a formal announcement, stating that the round had been canceled and they were seeking an alternative location for the final event of the season. To the palpable relief of everyone concerned.

Saturday at Sepang was an almost perfect distillation of the 2024 MotoGP season. In one of the most thrilling qualifying sessions in recent memory, Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia drove one another to exceptional heights. On his first flying lap in Q2, Pecco Bagnaia smashed his own lap record at Sepang by three tenths of a second.

Five seconds later, Jorge Martin shattered that record by another two tenths, becoming the first rider to lap break into the 1'56s on a race weekend at Sepang, a feat that had previously only been done at the test earlier this year. On his next lap, Martin went a whole lot better, taking four more tenths off his own time and beating Pecco Bagnaia's time from the test by over a tenth.

A time of 1'56.553 was truly breathtaking, an astonishing achievement at Sepang. Surely no one would be able to beat it? That was the body language radiating from Jorge Martin, knowing just how good that lap had been.

At the Sepang International Circuit on Sunday, Pecco Bagnaia won the battle and Jorge Martin won the war. When the race restarted after the horrific crash between Turns 1 and 2, which miraculously saw everyone walk away relatively unharmed, Bagnaia and Martin unleashed three of the most ferocious laps we have seen in MotoGP this year. The reigning champion came out of that battle on top, and went on to win the race. But Jorge Martin finished second and took enough points to be able to clinch the title on Saturday in Barcelona.

You might say that with a 37 points still on the table, and Martin's lead a mere 24 points, that the championship is far from settled. If Pecco Bagnaia can get some riders in between himself and Jorge Martin on both Saturday and Sunday, then he might be able to claw back enough points to win the title. That is correct in theory, but the Malaysian GP demonstrated why that is more of an idle hope. While Pecco Bagnaia had the measure of Martin on Sunday, the pair of them are so much faster than the rest of the field that there is nobody there for Bagnaia to put between himself and Martin.

It is hard to overstate just how MotoGP has changed in the last five or so years. Where once bikes were short and high, to maximize turning and pitch under braking, now they are long and low, with a focus on acceleration and power. A lot of the change has been blamed on aerodynamics, as the most visible difference between, say, 2019 and 2024.

That is certainly how factories first saw the role of aerodynamics, but that too has changed since 2019. "Some years ago, if you looked at the telemetry, you can easily understand that one of the most important problems of the bike is wheelie," Ducati Corse CEO Gigi Dall'Igna told me in an interview in 2022. "You cannot accelerate as much as you think because of the wheelie. So you have to try to understand what you have to do in order to reduce this problem. So we started to develop the wings, we started to lower the center of gravity on the bike."

Before the introduction of sprint races, going into the final round of MotoGP the fans usually know exactly what a rider had to do to clinch the title. Sprint races have added an extra layer of complexity to those calculations, as there are points on offer on Saturday as well as Sunday. The mathematics involved is a good deal more complicated.

So Jorge Martin's lead of 24 points over Pecco Bagnaia is healthy, and gives him the chance to wrap the title up in Saturday's sprint race. That lead is healthy enough that even if he doesn't get the job done on Sunday, he is still in a very good position to clinch the title on Sunday.

But the various scenarios are quite complicated. Made even more so that in the case of a tie on points, Bagnaia becomes champion, as he has more Sunday GP wins than Martin (currently 10 to Martin's 3). So Bagnaia has to score enough points to draw level with Martin, while Martin has to outscore Bagnaia by at least 1 point to be champion.

Below is an attempt to set out the various options for both Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia to become 2024 MotoGP champion.

We were supposed to be elsewhere, but nature decided otherwise. The fearsome power of hot sea water and cold air caused an unfathomable amount of water to be dumped west of Valencia, destroying large parts of the landscape around the Circuit Ricardo Tormo near Cheste. As much as the city of Valencia and the town of Cheste love MotoGP, holding the last round of the 2024 championship at the circuit was clearly a non-starter.

And so we race not *in* Valencia, but *for* Valencia. The final round of MotoGP has been moved to Barcelona, with the aim of raising money to support the devastated region and to help them rebuild. There are auctions at the track on Friday and Saturday, and the proceeds of the ticket sales will go toward the relief fund.

One more day of practice, and then the final points of the season are up for grabs. On Saturday, Jorge Martin has a chance to snatch the MotoGP crown from Pecco Bagnaia, while Bagnaia needs to clean up on Saturday and Sunday to be in with a chance.

Martin stands a chance of becoming the first rider in the MotoGP era to win a title while riding for an independent team. There are some caveats on that claim - Martin has a contract directly with Ducati Corse, rides the same spec Ducati GP24 as Pecco Bagnaia (the few differences are solely down to personal preference, not availability), and the Pramac squad has full factory backing.

But it is still an incredible achievement - the factory Ducati Lenovo team has priority when it comes to processing the data from all of the teams, and the apparatus of Ducati Corse is built with the objective of ensuring the factory team wins the MotoGP title.

So it speaks volumes of the fairness of Ducati that they have proven themselves willing to treat both factory rider Bagnaia and Pramac satellite rider Martin so scrupulously fairly. Ducati have made a very public point of not interfering in the title battle.

Equal opportunities?

Normally on Friday I like to examine the pace the riders have set during the day and try to draw some conclusions (erroneous or not) about who might be in contention for the podium on Saturday and Sunday. That seems like a fool's errand at Barcelona, however.

Jorge Martin was asked if he was worried that there seemed to be quite a lot of riders with similar pace to Pecco Bagnaia and him, unlike at the last race in Sepang. "I think there were so many tires to try, and we didn't see any riders with a lot of laps on the tires, so we will see in the race," the Pramac Ducati rider pointed out.

Pace is difficult to figure out when riders are constantly swapping tires, trying to figure out what will be the best choice for the race. Of the ten riders that made it through to Q2 on Friday afternoon, only half of them put 12 laps (sprint race distance or half GP distance) on a rear tire, where normally it would be all ten. Marco Bezzecchi, Aleix Espargaro, Johann Zarco, Maverick Viñales and Alex Márquez stuck with the same tire to do sprint race distance, the rest didn't.

With one more race to decide the MotoGP championship, and just 25 points left on the table, who needs to finish were to take the championship?

Saturday saw a fitting penultimate chapter to the 2024 MotoGP season. Pecco Bagnaia knew he had to win both the sprint race and the Sunday GP, and he also knew that he was comfortably the fastest at Barcelona. So he deployed a brilliant qualifying strategy, in an attempt to elicit some help. Normally, when he leaves the pits during Q2, he is irritated when he finds he has a retinue in tow. On Saturday, he was pretty much offering his rear wheel to anyone who wanted it.

Marc Márquez knew that Bagnaia had to be fast, and was looking for the Ducati Lenovo rider's tail. On his second run, he latched onto Bagnaia, with Franco Morbidelli slotting in behind him, and the three of them took the provisional front row of the grid.

But Bagnaia also ran into the limits which will almost certainly see him come up short in the title fight on Sunday. Marc Márquez' time was good enough for the front row, but he was demoted to third by Aleix Espargaro. And Jorge Martin slipped ahead of Morbidelli to qualify fourth for the sprint race.