For the third time in three years, the MotoGP world championship will be decided at the final round of the year, as Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia have kept the 2024 fight alive until the very end.
That’s something of an anomaly in recent memory, happening only six times previously in the two-decade history of the modern MotoGP class.
But which of those previous six final-round showdowns were the greatest and which fizzled out?
Here's our ranking of them from worst to best.
6 Pecco Bagnaia vs Fabio Quartararo - 2022
This was very much a season of two halves. In the opening races of 2022 it was then-reigning world champion Fabio Quartararo who had all the momentum.
He had won three races in the first half of the campaign even as the Yamaha M1 started to show its weaknesses against Ducati while Bagnaia’s attempts to chase him down stuttered thanks to a succession of crashes.
However, things eventually clicked for Bagnaia, and a run of four wins on the bounce helped him build up an almost-unassailable lead as they headed to Valencia for the final round.
With Bagnaia only needing to score two points to ensure championship victory even if Quartararo won, it was a rather uneventful final race of the year as Bagnaia took the title with a nervous run to a ninth-place finish.
5 Marc Marquez vs Andrea Dovizioso - 2017
Few had expected Andrea Dovizioso to keep Marc Marquez honest throughout the 2017 season but, as the Ducati ascendancy started and Honda began to fade, that’s exactly what he did.
Racking up multiple last corner victories over Marquez, Dovizioso’s six wins to Marc’s seven kept the title fight alive until the last round at Valencia, albeit with the reigning champion still enjoying a healthy 21-point lead.
Always the showman, Marquez very nearly managed to throw it all away with a massive Turn 1 moment while battling with Johann Zarco that he only just managed to save and dropped him from the lead fight to fifth.
With Marquez taking incredible risks despite not even needing to beat Dovizioso (at that point locked in a frustrated battle for third with Ducati team-mate Jorge Lorenzo), remarkably the championship was decided a few minutes later when Dovizioso did almost exactly the same thing as Marquez - but didn't manage to stay on the bike. Title number four was secured for Marquez.
4 Pecco Bagnaia vs Jorge Martin - 2023
Obviously the most pertinent to this weekend’s season finale given the characters involved, there’s another added element to the race 12 months ago that applies this time around too.
Just like 2024, the 2023 season was a championship race decided by mistakes, when Pramac rider Martin managed to throw his final chance away by colliding with Marquez and added one final mistake to his list from an ultimately pretty inconsistent season.
However, the odds were always in favour of Bagnaia as he went into the weekend with a 21-point lead, even after Martin's sprint win trimmed it to 14. Martin's season-long inconsistency only made Bagnaia's situation more secure.
So while there was some tension going into the race about who would emerge victorious, the eventual outcome of a Bagnaia title came as no real surprise.
3 Jorge Lorenzo vs Valentino Rossi - 2015
This one will, of course, always be framed in the context of what happened two weeks beforehand at Sepang.
A close title battle all season long, going into the penultimate round it was only the two factory Yamaha riders left in contention when Valentino Rossi dramatically accused Marc Marquez of interfering in the title fight in support of his fellow Spaniard Jorge Lorenzo.
That came to a head at Sepang when the two went to war on track together and it culminated in contact between the pair that left Marquez in the gravel and Rossi starting the final race - again, at Valencia - from the back of the grid as a penalty.
Rossi still held a slim seven-point lead over Lorenzo, but it was abundantly clear on the day that no one was going to beat MotoGP’s human metronome Lorenzo as he rode away into the distance.
Rossi was able to claw his way back through the pack to fourth but, with both Dani Pedrosa and Marquez in front of him, it wasn’t enough to maintain his lead and Lorenzo claimed the title.
2 Nicky Hayden vs Valentino Rossi - 2006
The 2006 championship race had been one full of twists and turns thanks to Valentino Rossi’s speed and Nicky Hayden’s consistency, with Hayden there or thereabouts every single weekend despite taking only two victories at Assen and in front of his home crowd at Laguna Seca.
However, it looked like his title aspirations had been dealt a final blow at the penultimate round of the season at Estoril when a rare error from his then-rookie Repsol Honda team-mate Pedrosa took both of them out of the race, meaning that the championship went to Valencia with Rossi enjoying an eight-point lead that, given his speed all season, shouldn’t have been too hard to defend.
It didn’t quite go that way, though, and it was Hayden who got ahead early in the race and managed to ensure a gaggle of fellow Honda riders (Marco Melandri, Pedrosa and Casey Stoner) kept Rossi well behind in seventh when the unthinkable happened - a Rossi error that threw away the crown and left Hayden to ride to a comfortable podium finish and the title.
1 Marc Marquez vs Jorge Lorenzo - 2013
Winning MotoGP titles as a rookie is something that’s just not supposed to be possible, but it’s nonetheless what Marquez looked well on the path to doing when the championship turned up to Valencia for the final race of 2013.
Already signalling intent from his win in the second race of the season, he and Lorenzo had swapped places early on but a four-round winning run in the middle of the season meant it was advantage Marquez from that point onwards.
The 2013 title decider...
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) November 12, 2024
"Let battle commence!" 🙌#SolidarityGP 🏁 | #RacingForValencia pic.twitter.com/JHAPdVjGQj
And in fact while he headed to Valencia with only a 13-point lead, the title should have been wrapped up a round before that were it not for the counting error that meant he was disqualified from the lead at Phillip Island.
The fierce early battle for the win didn’t even feature Marquez, though, with his Honda team-mate Pedrosa instead being the one to take on Lorenzo in frantic racing until a mistake from Lorenzo pushed them both wide and let Marquez through.
Lorenzo gave it his all, though, and did the maximum - dropping Marquez and riding to victory, but it wasn’t enough to claw back all the points he needed to retain the crown.
