The Silverstone MotoGP sprint was a fruitless and uncompetitive outing for all three of the riders who are regarded as arguably the defining talents of the current era.
Reigning champion Pecco Bagnaia, 2021 champion Fabio Quartararo and six-time champion Marc Marquez all finished outside the points scorers, none coming particularly close to a place in the top nine that would have paid out points for the 10-lap event – and one of them in particular woefully off the pace.
The last time a MotoGP race of any sorts played out without any of the three picking up points was the first race of the October 2020 Aragon double-header, and that was with Marquez as an injury absentee. As for the races in which all three participated, having none of them score – or even be in the top 10 – hasn’t happened at all since Quartararo and Bagnaia joined the grid in 2019, until today.
Quartararo’s nadir
For Quartararo, Saturday was a strong contender for his least competitive showing in MotoGP so far – but so bad has been the 24-year-old and his employer Yamaha’s season that it hasn’t really registered a massive outlier.
Quartararo, who is 10th in the MotoGP standings, having led the way at the same point last year, was a torrid 21st in the 10-lap Silverstone sprint on Sunday, finishing 30 seconds behind winner Alex Marquez – which equates to a time loss of three seconds per lap.
This was partly set up by his qualifying, comfortably the worst in his time in MotoGP so far, as Quartararo was last in the wet conditions of the first segment – a surreal seven seconds down on team-mate Franco Morbidelli.
The gap was, of course, exaggerated in what was ultimately a hugely messy session for the Frenchman, who managed just one flying lap early on and was then shaken up by a major moment through Vale – in which he just narrowly avoided a highside but then had his bike stall out.
Lightning reactions to save that! 👏
But @FabioQ20 now can't get his bike started! 😮#BritishGP 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/ZybThsEetC
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) August 5, 2023
“I’ve had better days,” he joked when speaking to the media after the sprint.
“This morning the feeling was bad in practice, then in qualifying I did a mistake, the bike got stopped, I went back to the box to change something, the mechanic was in the back, a misunderstanding.
“I could’ve done better.”
But “better” will almost certainly not have meant even a spot in Q2, given Quartararo never quite looked on par with team-mate Morbidelli in the wet.
And though the track dried massively in the sprint, Quartararo never even broke into the top 20 – also because he had a ride height device issue.
“The pace we had was to be with the guys I had in front,” he said, referencing the fact that only around 3.1s separated team-mate Morbidelli in 15th and Quartararo in 21st.
“I had the front device locked for one and a half lap but it doesn’t make a big difference.”
Quartararo has never been considered a rain specialist in MotoGP but felt this alone was far from explanation enough, given he’d fought from the back of the grid – after contact with LCR Honda’s Takaaki Nakagami – to seventh in the wet Argentina race earlier this year.
“I know what I’m missing. But why we have it sometimes – like this year in Argentina, I was last, came back to seventh… so… I know basically how to ride in the rain.
“But to finish 30 seconds behind with only 10 laps, it’s something that is … I don’t understand it, you know? And we tried to work, I tried to change so many things during the race. But the problem was still the same.
“You try many things on the bike, many positions, more on the front, more on the rear, try to use differently the way of going into the corner, different engine braking I tried, but… you don’t learn, you just try to feel better.”
Quartararo was a MotoGP revelation after arriving to the premier class off the back of two Moto2 seasons that only yielded 13th and 10th place in the standings. And he feels this current run is worse than what his Moto2 tenure had felt like.
“Because in Moto2 I’ve always been s**t, let’s say. No, it’s true! To be honest, I made nothing in Moto2.
“I made a few [good] races, I made my victory [in Barcelona] but in Moto2 I had never been fighting for top three in the championship. ”
Marquez plays it safe
Marquez’s race was an eyebrow-raiser for some of those riding close to him, with Morbidelli saying he saw the Honda man “cruising” and admitting his surprise at this.
Still not entirely fit and wary of injuring himself again, Marquez didn’t necessarily contradict such a description, but maintained that his approach was informed by the lack of points on offer and the fact the 2023 Honda was not meaningfully more competitive in the wet than in the dry.
He was 13th on the first lap but only went backwards from there on, ending up behind team-mate Joan Mir.
Mir is another recent MotoGP champion who non-scored in the sprint, but for him finishing as the top Honda at least carried the appearance of relative success given his torrid season so far.
Marquez, for his part, effectively treated the race as a practice session.
“Today on the wet, of course we didn’t expect to struggle so much,” he said. “But already at the Sachsenring when we had the wet practice, I led there – but the feeling was not good.
“And today we reconfirmed that also in wet conditions we’re struggling a lot, and the problems we have on the dry are [also] on the wet.
“Honestly speaking, today when I saw so many crashes [in practice and qualifying] and I saw the feeling was not good, it’s true that in Q1 I pushed but not crazy, just calm. And in the sprint race I went out, I tried to push the first two laps, I saw that the feeling was not good.
“And then I decided to be calm – in one point then I looked behind, I saw that Mir was coming, then I decided to wait for him, to follow him the last two laps to understand from behind what’s going on on the bike. Because at the end it’s the same to finish 14th or 18th.”
Bagnaia’s confusion
Given the struggles of their respective employers, it was not totally unexpected that Quartararo and Marquez would endure fruitless days.
For Bagnaia, who has been in top form in 2023 and was on the podium in seven of the previous eight sprints, it was different.
And this wasn’t a result that particularly made sense to him.
“This morning on the wet I was second [in practice], in qualifying I was fighting for pole position. Then in the race I already understood on the warm-up lap that something was not working well, and it was quite critical, quite difficult to do everything,” Bagnaia said.
“When we started the race, and I did the first braking, I already almost crashed.
“Riders were overtaking me from the inside, from the outside. And I was a bit on the limit [even] going slow like this.
“We know our level, we know that 14th is not our position, not our target.
“We have to understand it better. I’m quite sure 100 percent that it didn’t come from my set-up.
“I don’t know what happened. It was the bike of the crash [in qualifying], so maybe we have to check that.”
Half a second up through the first split but it went no further! 🛑@PeccoBagnaia's pole challenge took a big knock due to this off! 💥#BritishGP 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/6GbexYArsy
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) August 5, 2023
