The 2024 Japanese Grand Prix was hardly a vintage display of all that makes MotoGP great.
But a "super boring race", at the end of a weekend that featured yet another swing in the title fight, at least gave Simon Patterson plenty of time to mull over the entire field's performances at Motegi and rank them from best to worst.
1 Pecco Bagnaia
Started: 2nd Sprint: 1st Finished: 1st
A pretty textbook weekend of domination from Pecco Bagnaia - the fourth of the season where he walked away with the maximum 37 points on offer.
When he’s doing what he’s good at, it tends to make MotoGP look a little bit boring, but that shouldn’t take anything away from his metronomic performance and outstanding title management skills. A few more weekends like Motegi and Jorge Martin’s title lead will soon be in danger.
2 Marc Marquez
Started: 9th Sprint: 3rd Finished: 3rd
Obviously, rules are rules - but if it wasn’t for both a systems failure in race control that damaged his qualifying and a bike downgrade that’s going to hamper the rest of the season, then Marc Marquez would have been closer to the sharp end.
Even as it was, though, he did a decent job keeping the better GP24s in check. Obviously, Motegi is one of his favoured circuits, but don’t expect his potential to change too much for the remainder of the season.
3 Jorge Martin
Started: 11th Sprint: 4th Finished: 2nd
Not an exceptional weekend for the championship leader, but a very solid one.
He was clearly at a little bit of a disadvantage against Bagnaia here, a reversal of fortunes from a week previously in Indonesia, and messing up badly in qualifying didn’t help at all. But the end result was the bare minimum of damage to his championship lead, an impressive feat given both the tricky conditions and the way Bagnaia dominated the weekend.
4 Enea Bastianini
Started: 4th Sprint: 2nd Finished: 4th
A solid weekend for Enea Bastianini, even if it was one that very much cemented his place as the third of Ducati’s GP24 riders and now battling Marc Marquez for third in the championship, not Bagnaia and Martin for the big prize.
He’s still exceptional later in the race, but this was a weekend where he left it too late to work his magic, especially in Saturday’s sprint.
5 Fabio Di Giannantonio
Started: 7th Sprint: 6th Finished: 8th
Fabio di Giannantonio was physically limited by his ongoing injuries and feeling the pain even more than before at Motegi due to the impact of all the Japanese circuit’s hard braking zones, so it was never going to be an easy weekend.
However, he was able to very much limit the damage to his season with a pair of absolutely respectable results that kept him right alongside VR46 team-mate Marco Bezzecchi, his number one marker at this stage of the year.
6 Franco Morbidelli
Started: 6th Sprint: 5th Finished: 5th
On one hand, there’s nothing at all to moan about with Franco Morbidelli’s brace of top-five finishes on Saturday and Sunday. Yet it still feels like there should be a little bit more coming from the Italian, given that Ducati’s three other GP24 machines are on the podium more often than off it.
Slow starts to both the weekend and the races gave too much away and ultimately he was left thinking about another weekend of missed podium potential.
7 Marco Bezzecchi
Started: 8th Sprint: 10th Finished: 7th
Given what we now know about Bezzecchi’s recently downgraded GP23, it makes sense that this weekend was once again a little off the pace compared to where we’ve seen him in recent rounds.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the situation is going to change for him this side of his move to Aprilia for 2025, so it’s going to be a case of managing expectations for the remainder of the current campaign.
8 Brad Binder
Started: 5th Sprint: DNF Finished: 6th
Motegi was a circuit that promised a bit of hope for Brad Binder given that its hard braking plays to the strengths of the KTM right now, but despite seeing flashes of that potential early in the weekend, it never quite played out.
Though he was able to salvage a top six come Sunday, he was hoping to challenge the Ducatis a little more - especially as fellow KTM rider Pedro Acosta demonstrated that there was more on offer.
9 Fabio Quartararo
Started: 12th Sprint: 12th Finished: 12th
It was never going to be a particularly easy weekend for Fabio Quartararo at Motegi given where the Yamaha riders struggle right now with the M1, and that was reflected in his average results.
However, things should have been a little better than they were, and Yamaha really needs to get a grasp on fuelling issues that once again cost him a position at the final corner when he ran out of gas just metres before the chequered flag.
10 Johann Zarco
Started: 16th Sprint: 14th Finished: 11th
This was a decent weekend for Johann Zarco on the LCR Honda; maybe not as good as his last one in Mandalika but, all things considered, certainly a better one than he had expected at the Japanese factory’s home circuit given the bike’s deficiencies. And it bodes well for his return to Phillip Island next after his first and to date only MotoGP victory at the Australian circuit 12 months ago, too.
The only thing that marks him down a bit is the contact with team-mate Taka Nakagami that took the Japanese racer out of his home race on Saturday.
11 Jack Miller
Started: 14th Sprint: 8th Finished: 10th
Finally a half decent weekend for Jack Miller, made all the sweeter by doing it as KTM’s form continues to be below the standard it needs it to be.
While undoubtedly aided by Motegi being the hardest-braking circuit of the season playing to the strengths of his riding style, that shouldn’t detract from some confidence-inspiring results ahead of his home race at Phillip Island next time out.
12 Aleix Espargaro
Started: 15th Sprint: DNF Finished: 9th
Frankly, this weekend really just wasn’t good enough from Aleix Espargaro. Both he and the Aprilia bike are better than a solitary ninth place.
That wasn’t entirely his fault on Sunday as he battled running out of fuel and spent much of the end of the race in economy mode, but that doesn’t explain his disappointing qualifying or the finish that he threw away on Saturday afternoon in the sprint.
13 Taka Nakagami
Started: 21st Sprint: DNF Finished: 13th
A big weekend for Nakagami at what, as things stand right now, was his final home race (at least as a permanent MotoGP rider). It got off to a great start, though, and he was unlucky to miss out on direct Q2 qualification by only a few hundredths of a second.
Unfortunately, a good result wasn’t to be on Saturday when team-mate Zarco wiped him out - but credit to the Japanese racer for both managing the risk and pushing on enough on Sunday to bag a decent points-scoring finish.
14 Pedro Acosta
Started: 1st Sprint: DNF Finished: DNF
So much undelivered potential for Acosta, who should at the very least have walked away from Motegi with two podiums and a comfortable lead over Binder in the internal KTM battle.
However, he’s still a rookie and rookie errors will still happen - something he proved by chucking it away not once but twice. He still demonstrated his pace, and the old adage about how it’s easier to make a fast rider stop crashing than to make a slow rider fast very much continues to apply in this case.
15 Luca Marini
Started: 20th Sprint: 13th Finished: 14th
Another rather solid weekend for Honda’s quiet man. Luca Marini still isn’t challenging the sharp end but, after a slow start to the year, he’s become a much more regular points scorer of late.
Motegi was never going to be a round that played to the strengths of the Honda the way that it did in the past, so keeping that form alive is impressive enough all things considered.
16 Maverick Vinales
Started: 3rd Sprint: 9th Finished: DNF
Maverick Vinales is another rider who really should have got more from the weekend. But while things didn’t go brilliantly for any of the Aprilias, it’s his crash out of Sunday’s race that really added a full stop to a weekend that peaked in qualifying and went downhill from there on.
It’s abundantly clear that he still hasn’t completely sorted his race-start issues, and it’s a massive blot on his copy book that he keeps managing to get it so wrong that he ends up in situations where crashes become much more likely.
17 Remy Gardner
Started: 22nd Sprint: 18th Finished: 17th
A fairly decent weekend for Yamaha’s stand-in test rider, all things considered.
Remy Gardner has repeatedly been thrown in at the deep end this year on a bike and tyres very different from the World Superbike machine he’s also trying to compete on this year, and the distance to Alex Rins should reassure Yamaha that he’s been the right choice to deputise for the injured Cal Crutchlow.
18 Lorenzo Savadori
Started: 22nd Sprint: 17th Finished: DNF
Honestly, there's not too much we can say about Lorenzo Savadori’s weekend replacing Miguel Oliveira.
He came, he tested, and he didn’t finish Sunday’s race - but that was due to yet another technical problem for the Trackhouse machine rather than any error of his own. Expect him to be a little closer to the sharp end if his services are needed at Phillip Island.
19 Joan Mir
Started: 17th Sprint: DNF Finished: DNF
It’s not the easiest weekend to assess for Joan Mir, considering he failed to reach either chequered flag but that he was also rapid when he was on track.
Pushed out wide early on in the sprint and forced to work overtime to catch up (before ultimately crashing), his pace when he was doing so was good enough for the top eight. However, a second chance to show his potential was ended early on in Sunday’s race by an errant Alex Marquez with a move that understandably left 2020 world champion Mir fuming.
20 Raul Fernandez
Started: 13th Sprint: 11th Finished: 15th
There’s a point where you’ve really got to ask where it’s all going wrong for Raul Fernandez. He’s clearly talented, and the Aprilia is a good bike (even if it wasn’t particularly so at Motegi), but it seems like whenever the rest of the manufacturer’s crew have a bit of a bad weekend, Fernandez falls off a cliff.
Unless he starts to make even a little bit of progress (something that was promised earlier in the season), Aprilia is surely going to start worrying if his new two-year deal was really the right choice.
21 Augusto Fernandez
Started: 18th Sprint: 15th Finished: DNF
One of these weekends, Augusto Fernandez will get a chance to show his MotoGP potential - but once again Motegi wasn’t it.
It finally feels like he’s making progress on the bike as he works with new crew chief Alberto Giribuola, but for whatever reason he can’t seem to string it all together when it comes to races.
22 Alex Rins
Started: 19th Sprint: 16th Finished: 16th
It’s little wonder really that Rins was left bitterly disappointed on Sunday evening, because his Motegi weekend was a pretty poor showing.
Obviously struggling to get the most out of the Yamaha, his biggest problem right now is that team-mate Quartararo is doing a decidedly better job. Sure, some of that is absolutely because of Quartararo’s experience with the M1 - but Rins is approaching the point now where that excuse is getting less convincing, especially here where he had Gardner also biting at his heels.
23 Alex Marquez
Started: 10th Sprint: 7th Finished: DNF
It’s one thing being the worst-performing Ducati out of its eight, as long as you’re still securing decent results now and then on it, something that Alex Marquez is more than capable of.
But when you’re instead torpedoing others off the track while way further down the order than you should be given the level of the Gresini package, there’s no excuses for both his continued dips in form and the reckless places that he all too often finds himself in.
