MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

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.

Pecco Bagnaia could beat it, though. And not just by a few hundredths, but by over two tenths of a second. The looks on the face in the Pramac Ducati garage as Bagnaia crossed the line in a time of 1'56.337 were a mixture of respect, awe, and fear. If Bagnaia was this fast, he was going to take some beating.

Bagnaia knew it. "It’s incredible what we did today because already the lap time of Jorge was incredible," the Ducati Lenovo rider told MotoGP.com reporter Jack Appleyard in his parc ferme interview after qualifying. "Being able to drop this lap time was also super important for the mental side because I know how difficult it is when you are doing your maximum and your opponent is faster."

That much was clear from the look on Jorge Martin's face in that same parc ferme. Though he tried to put a positive spin on it - "first row was the target, so I'm happy," he said - his body language was that of a man who had just taken a beating.

For Martin and Bagnaia, there are only two riders on track. That much is clear from the qualifying times as well. Alex Márquez, who put in a superb lap to take the final slot on the front row of the grid, was two tenths faster than Bagnaia's pole record from 2023. But he was still 0.938 behind Pecco Bagnaia, and 0.722 behind Martin. Bagnaia and Martin were destroying the rest of the field, making them look silly.

The entire year has been a battle between the two of them. Looking back, it is easy to see why this championship was always going to go down to a straight duel between Martin and Bagnaia. Counting the number of podium appearances in both the Saturday sprint and Sunday GP races, Jorge Martin has 29 podiums and Pecco Bagnaia 23 in the 37 races.