MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

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.

For most of the session, Pedro Acosta looked like a shoe in for Q2, setting best lap after best lap, but he peaked too early and ran out of steam and tire on his last lap, ending up starting from fifteenth on the grid. Phillip Island is proving to be a school of hard knocks for the GASGAS Tech3 rider.

Very hard knocks. Acosta crashed out of the sprint race at Siberia, slightly dislocating his shoulder as a result. He appeared at his media debriefs with his arm in a sling, and it is far from certain he will be declared fit for the GP on Sunday. "Nothing broken. It was more like the shoulder went out and in again and the ligaments are quite inflamed," Acosta said after the sprint race. "Painful, you know. We need to make another medical check tomorrow but let’s see how it goes in the afternoon and the night. But it already seems better than when I crashed."

The value of experience is what made the difference in Q2 as well. The track was dry, with just a few damp patches ready to take out the unwary. The right choice, in hindsight, was to take the hard front from the start and stick with it. But the risk was that you had to push hard to get heat into it, and that if you pushed in the wrong place, you'd pay a heavy price.

Jorge Martin got it nearly perfect. He knew it was a risk to take the hard front straight way, but it was one with a big payoff. "I wanted to try. I thought If I go with the medium and then the hard, I wont have time to get it in temperature. I said, OK, I’ll try it first stint and if I’m able to put some temperature I can continue. If not, I’d go with the M. so I think the strategy was perfect. Normally we struggle a bit more to make these things and make mistakes but today was really good."

It was really, really good. Martin took pole with an advantage of nearly six tenths of a second over Marc Márquez. Then he cleared off in the race to take a comfortable victory. He was just much faster than everyone else on Saturday.