Are you really only as good as your last race? Clearly not.
Valentino Rossi signed off with a 10th place at the end of a pretty wretched final MotoGP season, and it didn’t change his legacy one iota.
Troy Bayliss took his only win in his final premier-class start, and while that’s extremely rad, nobody’s saying that he’s better than Rossi. Your final race, or your final season for that matter, does not define your legacy.
But for Pol Espargaro it might. Intermittently impressive as a Yamaha satellite rider, an indispensable spearhead at KTM and a crushing disappointment at Honda, Espargaro has failed in what was arguably his biggest chance, and is unlikely to get as prestigious a ride ever again.
But, coming into a new contract which is set to make him one of the 10 most experienced premier-class riders ever in terms of race starts, he has an almost storybook-quality opportunity to right the narrative.
Exhibit A – he will race for Tech3 again, even if it goes by Gas Gas Factory Racing now. His time at Tech3 when it was still a Yamaha partner was uneven, but once MotoGP switched from Bridgestones to Michelins he started to conclusively overpower long-time team-mate Bradley Smith.
Yet the factory team door was closed – Rossi showed few signs of slowing down, and as far as replacing Jorge Lorenzo Yamaha favoured Maverick Vinales and Dani Pedrosa as options over Espargaro, who ultimately left Tech3 after his best season yet.
Exhibit B – he will ride the KTM RC16 again, a bike that he was clearly central to developing after switching to KTM and reliably got more than anyone else out of in his time within the programme.
It speaks to Espargaro’s level of performance on the RC16 that its perceived similarity to the Honda RC213V at the time drove much of the optimism behind Espargaro’s subsequent move to Repsol colours, before said optimism was conclusively proven as misguided.
Now he’s reuniting with both team and bike, their first make-up date – the Valencia post-season test – yielding a torrent of positive feedback despite him ultimately placing just 16th on the timing screens.
“Pol is unbelievable. He’s not the youngest rider on the grid – but he’s for sure somebody with an incredible energy,” said Tech3 boss Herve Poncharal to MotoGP.com of his 31-year-old returnee.
“You can see the passion is still there. Monday morning [after the season finale], he was here [at the track] at 9 o’clock, sending me the a picture – I was still in the hotel – of the guys working on his bike. He’s like a kid in front of a Christmas tree.
“And he did his first run, and on his cooldown lap we all saw on TV, you could see the body language, he was dancing on the bike, a bit like Marc Marquez was doing when he got his front row position on Saturday. And when he came in he said ‘wow, I love it!’. This is the first thing he said when he came back into the box. He said ‘I’m back home’.”
Of that initial reaction on the cooldown lap, Espargaro told MotoGP.com: “I’m quite hot-blooded. I can need to express what I’m feeling in every moment. Maybe it was too early.
“But like I said, it’s like meeting an old friend. I had such good moments in the past with this bike. And right now, it has changed a lot but the DNA, it’s very similar.
“I can apply what I used to do, what I like to do. My really pure riding style. And it’s beautiful.”
It’s almost suspiciously positive. After all, Espargaro was also delighted with his first taste of the Honda bike, and had fantastic initial impressions of the subsequent 2022 version that was supposed to fit him much better.
And he did caveat his first day with Gas Gas by saying: “For sure we are far from where we want to be.
“But it’s a great beginning, no crashes and no big problems at all.”
For all the hindsight-enabled regrets it can accentuate, Espargaro’s excitable nature is obviously an asset, too. As Poncharal – who will step away from running Tech3 day to day, abdicating to Nicolas Goyon, but won’t quite commit to ending his streak of attending every race since 1985 – puts it: “We have 21 events next year. 42 races. This is our life. This is 80% of our life. And what we want to do is have these 21 weeks with a good atmosphere in the garage”.
“I’m 31 years old but in every project, the energy and the hopes are renewed completely,” Espargaro said.
“I’m going to work a lot this winter to come as fit as possible, and I’m pretty sure the mechanics are going to be super motivated for this next year.
“We have beautiful goals to achieve, and the factory needs to improve, so we are ready to do it.”
Tech3/Gas Gas will like having Espargaro around. Espargaro himself will probably love working with crew chief Paul Trevathan again, Trevathan having been by his side in that first KTM stint.
But all of that will only really matter as long as he’s delivering. For Espargaro also looks quite prone to letting his head drop – not only did his rhetoric in the second half of 2022, once it became clear he no longer had a future with Honda, grow more blunt, but his performance levels tailed off alarmingly, to the point where you can’t be sure it wasn’t irreversible decline.
If it was indeed that, he will almost certainly not win a MotoGP race, and he will probably leave the championship at the expiry of this Gas Gas deal. He will do so as a rider who had a credible premier-class career but was spent once he got his big break. And, as positive as the Valencia test has been, it would not be a massive surprise if that’s how it played out.
But the alternative path is also easy to imagine. Not only was Espargaro very good on the RC16, but the RC16 got worse once he left. KTM will welcome having his input again, and Tech3 will appreciate the change of pace after a deeply discouraging season with two rookies in 2022.
Will he dethrone Brad Binder as KTM’s golden boy? Probably not, no, as the South African was basically unimpeachable this past year.
But can Espargaro check a few more boxes in MotoGP, perhaps extend his career or go out on a high note? The ingredients are absolutely there: a bike he loves and a team he had worked well with.
As far as the last-chance saloon goes, it’s a pretty great hand to have been dealt.
