Two MotoGP wins say a lot.
Because MotoGP races are shorter than most top-level motorsport contests, and so dependent on the conditions and the starting parametres, when a bit of chaos is introduced you can perhaps ‘fluke’ one win.
‘Fluking’ two is much, much less probable, so if you reach that milestone it’s clear that you have something special about you even taken among your top-level peers.
Had, say, five years ago, we’d have been told that by mid-2023 Aleix Espargaro would have two MotoGP wins, the universal reaction would almost certainly have been ‘oh, wow, really? Good for him’.
But what’s very telling about the performances he has been putting in since is that though his statistics are just two wins in 226 MotoGP starts, the idea he’s only occasionally capable of mixing with the very best now seems very outdated.
Silverstone didn’t just show a ‘couple of wins here and there’ rider – it showed one with potential to be truly elite, to be so good that the usual framework of seeing his MotoGP rise as a ‘Cinderella story’ feels borderline condescending.
Win chances can be unrepresentative of the quality of the season. After all, there have been only two non-Ducati winners in grands prix in 2023 so far, and it’s not like many others wasted ‘open goal’ chances.
Of those two, LCR Honda’s Alex Rins was exceptional at COTA but he was only 11th in the standings even before his injury – not something down to him but more to the quality of the package.
Likewise, Espargaro’s win at Silverstone has only lifted him to sixth in the championship, at exactly half the points haul of championship leader Pecco Bagnaia.
The Aprilia has been outmatched by the Ducati this year – but not by as much as that points deficit suggests. It is clear to everyone, Espargaro included, that at least before Silverstone he and the team had collectively underperformed and under-capitalised on what they had.
It will have been fair to wonder what one of the established MotoGP superstars – your Marc Marquez, your Fabio Quartararo – could’ve done on that bike in the meantime. Yet that too feels increasingly condescending to Espargaro, especially after Silverstone.
And it’s not really even because of the race.
It was fantastic win in probably the best race of the season, yes, but it was conditioned by so many things, as they often are.
Espargaro was fortunate in a couple of places – having Marco Bezzecchi crash out up ahead, having Bagnaia likely play it a bit more safe given his championship situation and the treacherous almost-damp conditions, having team-mate Maverick Vinales first effectively remove Jack Miller out of the way and then struggle in the aforementioned conditions right after he’d got ahead.
If anything, it was more Espargaro’s first win in Argentina last year that was more straightforward, more of a ‘superstar’ win. But the true mark of a superstar is being able to achieve those positions again and again.
Except, well, Espargaro did something on Friday that was borderline as impressive, even if nowhere near as valuable, as the win.
Leader’s margin in Friday afternoon practice, 2023
Portimao – 0.037s (Miller over Vinales)
Termas de Rio Hondo – 0.162s (A. Espargaro over Vinales)
COTA – 0.063s (Martin over Bagnaia)
Jerez – 0.002s (A. Espargaro over Vinales)
Le Mans – 0.119s (Miller over A. Espargaro)
Mugello – 0.063s (Bagnaia over Bezzecchi)
Sachsenring – 0.040s (Bezzecchi over Martin)
Assen – 0.130s (Bezzecchi over Martin)
Silverstone – 0.671s (A. Espargaro over Martin)
One of those numbers is not like the other.
And, yes, the Aprilia is famously good out of the gates. Yes, it was cold and sketchy at Silverstone on Friday and getting the tyres in the right window was of a bigger importance than usual.
But Espargaro’s margin to Jorge Martin was more than Martin’s advantage over 13th-placed Marc Marquez. And, like it has been all season, that session effectively served as ‘Q0’ – so everybody showed the pace they had.
Martin felt he had done “already a great lap”. Fellow Ducati rider Fabio Di Giannantonio joked of Espargaro: “Which circuit was he doing?!”. RNF Aprilia’s Miguel Oliveira wondered if Espargaro got “an amazing tyre”.
It was just not a normal margin to have on a dry track in modern MotoGP.
In that context, the subsequent win makes a whole lot of sense, and whatever lucky breaks Espargaro caught were just compensation – compensation that normally should’ve been insufficient at that – for the fact he didn’t get to unleash his dry-track pace in the wet in qualifying.
“Even if I started 12th I felt immediately super good with the bike,” was how he described the ride. “One of those days that you feel invincible.”
Back in 2020, the normally-very-cordial Danilo Petrucci – in the middle of a perhaps unsurprising public row with Espargaro, given how outspoken both always are – mocked the Spaniard on Twitter by posting their respective grand prix stats, the screenshot for Espargaro showing zero wins and just two podiums in what at that point was 252 starts across MotoGP, Moto2, 250cc and 125cc. Jorge Lorenzo weighed in on a similar theme soon afterwards too.
Espargaro was always better than that suggested, but given he was at that point only sniping the occasional top 10 for Aprilia, having been dropped by the more competitive Suzuki after being vastly outshone by a much less experienced Vinales, it was perhaps a safe-ish bet that he’d never match Petrucci’s factory Ducati highs.
The signs, though, were already there. Espargaro has never been shy about talking up his performances at Aprilia – but with every year it felt more and more earned.
Team-mate after team-mate was coming to Noale and couldn’t live with him. And now, reunited with Vinales again, his strongest Aprilia team-mate yet, it is still Espargaro who is the torch-bearer.
This year has been tough, and the 2023 Aprilia RS-GP deserves more than a single moment of glory.
But for now, his two wins – first aged 32, second aged 34 – are no Cinderella story. They are, instead, a reflection of him actually being every bit as good as he’s been telling us all along.
