MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

And then there were two. With both Marc Márquez and Enea Bastianini finishing outside the top ten Sunday's Grand Prix of Thailand at Buriram, and Pecco Bagnaia storming to a superb win ahead of Jorge Martin, the 2024 MotoGP championship became a mathematical impossibility for Márquez and Bastianini. The title will be decided between Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia.

Sunday's race was a textbook example of exactly why Martin and Bagnaia are left. In extraordinarily difficult conditions, Pecco Bagnaia rode a near-perfect race to take victory, while Jorge Martin got his excess of enthusiasm under control after a couple of tricky moments and did exactly what he needed to if he is to win this championship: finish second behind Pecco Bagnaia.

It was the second day in a row that Martin finished second. With his win, Bagnaia cut Martin's advantage for 22 to 17 points. But in effect, Bagnaia hasn't moved the needle of the championship. After the sprint race on Saturday, Martin had a lead of 22 points, with 21 points the difference between first and second in the remaining races. After the GP on Sunday, Martin's lead is 17 points, and there are 16 points difference between first and second in the two sprints and two GPs at Sepang and Valencia.

The win meant an awful lot to Pecco Bagnaia. Where on Saturday, his body language had been funereal, on Sunday he could barely contain his joy. He had not been able to fight on Saturday, and had been worried after the warm up on Sunday. But a change to his setup made all the difference.

Bagnaia thanked his team effusively in every interview, both in Parc Ferme and in the press conference after the race. " I want to dedicate it to my team," the Ducati Lenovo rider said. "After the warm up, we sat down and we tried to understand what was wrong, or what I was missing. In terms of braking, I was losing time and I wasn’t happy with the feeling on the entrance. I sat down and just tried to explain in the best way possible my feeling, and they had good intuition."

The rain had woken him at around 7am, the racket from the roof of his hotel making it impossible to sleep. At first, he had been fearful, hoping that the rain would stop before the race. But that changed. "I decided to accept it. That’s when I started the race," Bagnaia said. "I was confident that could be a positive race, because this morning in the warm up it was useful to understand the situation."

Bagnaia knew they had fixed his issues once he arrived at Turn 3. "As soon as I started arriving Corner 3 I understood it was better. My feeling was better. So I was super happy."

That mattered, because the pressure on riders to ride as precisely as possible without making mistakes is so high at this point in the championship. Add in the rain and a wet track, and it increases exponentially.

It is not hard to see why. On a track like Buriram, with light rain falling and enough water on the track for the bikes to kick up a spray, things get hard quickly. Unless you're ahead of the pack, you are caught in a wall of spray, riding on memory while trying to adjust for the fact that a lap is now 1'40 instead of 1'30. Plus the different feel of the tires, the need to get heat into the carbon discs, tucked away in their protective covers, and figure out the grip as it changes from corner to corner.

How hard is that? Riding alone in the dry during the sprint race, Enea Bastianini's lap times had varied by about four tenths over race distance. In the wet, Pecco Bagnaia's lap times by triple that. Maintaining an intense focus for the entire 26 laps is draining. And the worst thing is you have to manage it for an extra 4 minutes longer than you would in a dry race.

"In that moment of the championship, fighting when you are behind in the championship more than 20 points, you know that you don’t have to mess up and just try to do the best you can," Pecco Bagnaia told the press conference. "It was not easy, and on wet it’s even worse. So, I just tried to do the maximum. I just tried to be fully concentrated, tried to avoid any mistakes. Today I didn’t risk anything apart some with the front because it was impossible to don’t lose the front today."