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.

The sprint race at Buriram may prove to be a momentous occasion in MotoGP. Two important barriers were broken. One that gets broken every year in MotoGP. And one that hasn't seen its like since 1996.

The most important barrier was Jorge Martin extending his lead to 22 points over Pecco Bagnaia. That means that with three Sunday GPs and two sprint races left, Bagnaia needs help from another rider if he is to defend his title. If Bagnaia wins all five races, and Martin finishes second, Bagnaia would outscore Martin by 21 points, 1 point short.

That doesn't mean that the title is in the bag for Martin. Far from it. The chance that Jorge Martin finishes second in every sprint race and GP is about as slim as Pecco Bagnaia winning all five races. Enea Bastianini and Marc Márquez have proven they can win races and end up on the podium, playing a role in determining the outcome.

Intellectually, we all understand that championships are won over an entire season. But nobody watches MotoGP, or any form of sports intellectually. The passion for sports is a deep-seated emotion that goes back to the dawn of human history. So when we get to the end of a championship, fans tend to look back and try to pinpoint a single event that decided the championship. Usually, that's the most recent and shocking or surprising event that fans can remember.

Take 2006. Ask a long-time MotoGP fan what cost Valentino Rossi the title and they will tell you it was the 5 points Rossi lost to Toni Elias when Elias beat him at Estoril at the penultimate round. But this glosses over the fact that Elias had knocked Rossi into the gravel at the opening round in Jerez, that Rossi had suffered massive tire problems in China, had mechanicals at Le Mans and Laguna Seca, and struggled with chatter in the first half of the season after being distracted by the possibility of a switch to F1. And there was the crash at Valencia. Nicky Hayden won the 2006 MotoGP title simply by being more consistent than Rossi over the full 17 rounds.

Will Phillip Island prove to be the decisive round in the 2024 MotoGP title? That's probably a bit premature, but the momentum definitely swung back again in the Sprint race on Saturday. Helped in no small part by the weather, a wet FP2 making it impossible for the riders to test the soft and medium tires or work on setup. They headed into qualifying and the sprint race pretty much blind.

Phillip Island dries quickly, though. Especially when the wind is as brisk as it was on Saturday, and despite the cold. By the end of FP2, a dry line was starting to appear and some riders switched from soft to medium wet tires. Ten minutes later, at the start of Q1, the majority went out on medium wets for their first run, before joining the four who started out on slicks.

Q1 was fascinating. The lap that took Raul Fernandez to the top of the timesheets was 5 seconds faster than Johann Zarco's best lap at the start of the session. Timing was everything. Being out at the end on a set of slicks you had gotten up to temperature was a ticket to Q2. Raul Fernandez and Enea Bastianini got it right, while Luca Marini just missed, finishing just too early.

At the height of his domination of the 500 grand prix era, when the only question in everyone's minds was who would finish second behind him, Mick Doohan was asked by a journalist if he was worried his stranglehold on the sport was making motorcycle racing boring. "What do you want me to do, slow down?" Doohan retorted.

Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix at Motegi would have been immeasurably improved if Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin had slowed down. Apart from the first seven or eight minutes, as the grid assumed its natural order, the race was utterly processional. Watching Bagnaia, Martin, Marc Márquez behind them, was like watching Doohan at his peak.

These are riders controlling a MotoGP machine at the highest level imaginable, putting a 300+ horsepower motorcycle in almost exactly the same place for lap after lap. Of the 24 laps of Motegi which Pecco Bagnaia completed, 10 were within one tenth of a second of the lap before, and another 7 were between one and two tenths difference to the previous lap. That is astonishing, metronomic consistency, and a sign of a truly great rider operating almost as close to perfection as is humanly possible.

The forecast was for rain at Motegi on Saturday, and rain certainly fell. Fortunately, most of it fell overnight, leaving MotoGP qualifying and the sprint race dry. Well, almost. The constant threat of rain hung in the air, spots of rain hitting visors in enough numbers to plant the seeds of doubt into the minds of the riders. And sometimes, hard enough to actually suck some of the grip away from the track.

If you are going to end up in those fickle conditions, where the track might be a little damp or it might not, then Motegi is the place to be. It has superb grip in the wet, riders managing 1'55s in absolutely torrential rain here in the 2023 race that was eventually red-flagged. But that doesn't make it any easier for riders to wrap their heads around, when drops start to spatter on their visors.

Those spots of rain ended up having a profound effect on qualifying. And they even had an impact on the race, perhaps denying Pedro Acosta his first sprint victory, though Acosta took all of the blame on his own shoulders.

If there is a lesson from Sunday's MotoGP race at Mandalika, it is not to get too excited about the apparent swings in the championship. Jorge Martin entered the weekend leading Pecco Bagnaia by 24 points. The Pramac Ducati rider crashed in the sprint race, which Bagnaia won, which meant the Italian halved Martin's advantage.

On Sunday, Martin led lights to flag, his hopes of victory only ever faltering when Pedro Acosta got close, and from a brief moment of self doubt. Problems at the start and then having to wait for the rear tire to come in meant that Pecco Bagnaia had to be patient for his podium, but it came at the end.

After two days of commotion, Jorge Martin leaves with an advantage over Bagnaia of 21 points, having lost just 3 points from what seemed like major swings back and forth. And if Enea Bastianini hadn't crashed out while chasing down Pedro Acosta, Martin would have lost nothing at all.