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The 2021 MotoGP riders’ title battle is still not decided, and given Francesco Bagnaia’s Misano prowess he’s probably marginally more likely than not to keep the battle going until at least the penultimate race of the campaign at Portimao.
Yet while Bagnaia is in-form and riding superbly, the fact remains that Fabio Quartararo just needs a trio of eighth-place finishes or better in the final three races to make sure of the title regardless of what Bagnaia does.
And Quartararo has finished every race but one in the top eight so far in 2021.
But even in case you’re not entirely convinced by the prospect of the Quartararo-Bagnaia title going down to the wire, there are other threads to follow through the final three races of the season beyond just watching the battles for individual glories.
The triple crown chase
The MotoGP teams’ and manufacturers’ titles are obviously much less prestigious than the riders’ honours, but there’s a definite allure to the triple crown – which basically asserts a manufacturer’s supremacy over a given campaign.
In the past decade, seven of the 10 MotoGP campaigns ended with a ‘triple crown’ – six of those going Honda’s way versus one for Yamaha. And Yamaha now stands with a good shot at adding to its tally.
But the margins are razor-thin. In the teams’ championship, the works Yamaha outfit trails its factory Ducati counterpart by two points, with Ducati having put up a great deal more points since Maverick Vinales’ release from Yamaha. As good as Quartararo has been, Ducati having two regular frontrunners in Bagnaia and Jack Miller has tipped the scales.
But post-knee surgery Franco Morbidelli is only getting fitter, and if his recovery goes quickly enough there’s still every chance for Yamaha to win this particular duel after all.
The constructors’ championship situation – in which all a marques’ bikes count not just its works team’s – is both simpler and more difficult. Yamaha trails Ducati by nine points, but with only the highest-placed bike scoring towards this classification, it really can lean on Quartararo, rather than hoping for a swift Morbidelli recovery, an expedited learning process for Andrea Dovizioso or a resurgence for the retiring Valentino Rossi.
However, Ducati’s deep roster can also play a big part here, with Jorge Martin in particular looking like he could lead the fleet of Desmosedicis on any given day just as well as the factory duo. Speaking of which…
Martin versus Miller
“If Martin takes my job, so be it. I’ll find a job somewhere else – if not, [I’ll] go home.”
It was an answer delivered in typically nonplussed Miller style, but if anything it did serve to publicly confirm that the Aussie is not oblivious to the extremely obvious threat posed by Martin.
And while Miller’s very much under contract for 2022, don’t forget how well in advance MotoGP contract cycles tend to play out.
Miller’s predecessor Danilo Petrucci received his marching orders for 2021 even before the 2020 season got underway – and while the COVID calendar was obviously a factor in that, there’s every reason to believe that how the current campaign concludes will strongly inform the direction Ducati goes in for 2023 and beyond.
Bagnaia, on current form, looks untouchable, and Ducati has long put faith in his ultimate potential. Miller has always seemed on slightly shakier ground as a less homegrown prospect – remember the weird saga with the mooted Jorge Lorenzo recall of 2019 – and as of late he has played second fiddle to Bagnaia on track.
He has not been bad, and whatever happens over the rest of the season this is still at least a two-win campaign. The problem is that Martin has been excellent at Ducati’s second team Pramac, making himself a part of the furniture at the front of the MotoGP grid virtually overnight once recovered from injury.
But Miller’s recent Bagnaia-aiding moves – from keeping Quartararo busy at Misano to waving Bagnaia through without a hint of drama at Austin – show he can be whatever Ducati needs him to be, and if he complements that with another top-step finish in the final races of 2021, he can give Ducati a real rider line-up headache going forward.
The closer-than-expected rookie of the year battle
Martin’s outrageous Red Bull Ring double-header performances were something clearly not achievable for the rest of the 2021 rookie crop at that point in time, and they really should’ve rendered the battle for ‘top rookie’ a formality.
But with three races to go it is not one, because Martin has been stymied by errors and some lingering fitness question marks from his massive Portimao crash in April – which, coupled with those injury woes of the first half of the season, have opened the door to an upset.
Martin would still probably be the rightful rookie of the year, but Enea Bastianini’s case is a good one, too. He rides an older bike for a lesser-fancied team in Avintia, but has already established himself as a late-race menace and, in the last few races, a genuine disruptor.
The 11-point gap to Martin is not insurmountable for Bastianini, though it’d probably require some further dramas for Martin. And while rookie of the year is not the most important honour out there, it could prove a useful scalp for either rider in positioning themselves as the future of Ducati.
An extended pre-season for two stars
Not to justify Vinales’ enraged over-revving of the Yamaha engine at the Red Bull Ring – some people clearly worked really hard on that engine – but it’s given us a welcome prospect of seeing two riders adapt in new circumstances mid-season, instead of just watching Vinales and Yamaha live out a relationship that has run its course.
Now, Vinales has been thrown in at the deep end at Aprilia, while Dovizioso – whose early Yamaha link-up was enabled by Vinales being let go – is in a similar position at the Petronas team.
Both are deeply interesting riders, and both have already shown potential and promise in their new surroundings, but are yet to produce headline results – unless you count Vinales topping a practice session at Misano.
But even if neither will be particularly results-focused in the 2021 run-in, there will still be lots to learn – and how the gaps in pace to their respective stablemates progress may well tell us a lot about the ultimate potential of the Vinales/RS-GP and Dovizioso/M1 combos.
Rossi’s final MotoGP note
The stakes are admittedly pretty low for the final races of Valentino Rossi’s storied MotoGP career. Since the announcement he’s leaving, the results have basically lost meaning – even though the occasional crashes show the Italian is still clearly nowhere near ‘autopilot’ mode.
But there are still a couple of things to fight for in Rossi’s farewell campaign, even if they won’t do anything to change his overall grand prix racing legacy.
Firstly, Rossi has never done a podium-less season in his time in this paddock. Even his really difficult Ducati years both produced rostrum visits.
That streak will almost certainly be broken this year – he has been nowhere near podium contention all season, and it’d take something absolutely monumental for him to get in the mix in a conventional race. Still, a weather-affected event might yet give him a shot at that coveted premier-class podium #200.
But he at least has a better shot of avoiding the full-timer ‘wooden spoon’, which currently looks set to go down to a straight fight between him and his brother Luca Marini, who is one point ahead.
Lorenzo Savadori was almost certainly going to be last of the full-timers in the championship this year, but he doesn’t really qualify after making way for Vinales at Aprilia – meaning that the Marini/Rossi battle for 20th in the standings effectively becomes the battle to not be last. And on Sundays they’re on track together all the time, so it might be a fun one to monitor.
A litmus test of Marquez’s recovery
He’s won at the Sachsenring and Austin, but Marc Marquez has found the going pretty tough in his comeback 2021 campaign, and the rhetoric from him and his camp has basically boiled down to the following picture: he’s improving but frustratingly slowly.
Conveniently enough, the rest of the MotoGP calendar looks almost tailor-made to provide a more empirical look at the progress Marquez has made.
First, he will head to Misano, where he has obviously already raced – to a decent but distant fourth place – a month ago. Then, we will see what he can do the second time out at Portimao, the very track he made his initial return earlier this season.
Finally, we’ll be served up with a Valencia venue that has been historically pretty neutral for Marquez, in that it’s not exactly his territory but also not a place where he’s obviously struggled relative to his average form.
All together, it should combine to give us a good look at how far Marquez has come with his recovery, and how far he’ll still need to go over the winter to get himself back among the title contenders in 2022.
