Champ’s rocky GP opening
Bagnaia in uphill battle
Mick Doohan, Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez – a short list of the names of some of the all-time greats of the world motorcycle championship, who are the only riders to win three consecutive Moto GP/ 500cc championships over the past three decades.
It’s a select group that reigning MotoGP world champion Francesco Bagnaia could join this season with a third straight MotoGP crown for Ducati.
The 27-year-old’s road to immortality has got off to a rocky start, however, with Bagnaia arriving at this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix in Jerez off the back of his worst result in more than a year.
On the sport’s standout bike, Bagnaia was all-but anonymous last time out in Austin for the Grand Prix of the Americas in mid-April, finishing fifth in a race won by Aprilia’s Maverick Vinales.
A paucity of pace was one thing but having to ride to cover off what was behind him rather than focus on the front was an unwelcome throwback to his pre-championship past.
It’s something few saw coming after his imposing pace in pre-season testing in Malaysia and Qatar, where he lopped a whopping 0.8sec off Luca Marini’s pole-winning, circuit-record lap time from last November’s Qatar GP.
“I was thinking before lap six that I was able to fight for a win or for a podium, for the top, but I started to have a lot of chattering, a lot of vibration on the left side, and it was very difficult to manage everything,”
Bagnaia said in Texas, after falling to fifth in the championship standings.
“I completely destroyed the front tyre on the right side. So it was also very difficult to do corners on the right side.
“The fact is in the Malaysia and Qatar tests, we didn’t have any one of these kinds of problems. As soon as we started this race weekend, we started having these kinds of problems.
“The situation is similar to 2022. At the start of (that) season, I had to race in defence.”
Last year’s title defence, by contrast, was one of confidence and control. Bagnaia won the season-opener in Portugal and led the standings after 18 of the 20 rounds, his cool consistency the antidote to a late-season Martin avalanche before the Spaniard handed Bagnaia his second title when crashing out of the final Grand Prix in Valencia.
The sole similarity between 2022 and last year can be found in that Bagnaia really only had to focus on one opponent each season, with only occasional interlopers at the front of the field both years. The hunter against Quartararo’s fading Yamaha two years ago gave way to being the hunted last year in the face of a late-season Martin onslaught. Both times, he didn’t buckle.
Trailing Martin by a Grands Prix-worth of points three rounds into a season isn’t ideal, but with 18 events remaining, it’s far from catastrophic. The deeper difficulty may be the road back to the top, with the depth of rider talent and closeness of machinery in MotoGP arguably greater than ever.