Malaysian Grand Prix polesitter Jorge Martin says that he believes he can fight for the 2023 MotoGP world championship if he can start next season with the form that he’s exhibited in the flyaway tour of this year’s series.
And that is despite crashing out of Sunday’s race at Sepang, as Martin sees that as another valuable step in learning his craft for the future.
The Pramac Ducati rider looked to be one of the dominant forces of the weekend at the Malaysian circuit as he continues to demonstrate a return to the time-attack form in particular that helped to define his 2018 title-winning Moto3 season.
He’s been in a rich vein of form pace-wise since MotoGP left Europe for Asia and Australia last month, with back-to-back record-breaking pole positions.
Even though these have yielded only a combined nine points on the two respective Sundays, the Spaniard’s confidence has been boosted to the point where he now believes that next year can be a game changer for him despite missing out on a factory Ducati seat to rival Enea Bastianini.
“I’m really looking forward to finishing this year and focusing on next season,” he said, “because I feel like I can be fighting with the top guys. I feel like I am one of the top guys. I’ll just take the experience, for sure improve because if not I will improve again, but I feel like we are so fast and we can battle for the championship.
“I’ve felt quite good but in Buriram, it rained and I didn’t have a chance. In these past races, the bike hasn’t changed and I’ve always been fast, so we have the base, I know the bike, I am riding better every day so I’m confident that starting the preseason like this and only deciding the engine [spec] the rest will come.”
And even though he failed to finish the race, he says that acknowledging what went wrong is a big step towards addressing it for the future as he prepares for bigger and better things.
Martin slid off at the Turn 5 left-hander while leading in the early stages of Sunday’s race.
“It’s a shame,” he explained, “because I entered [the corner] just 1km/h faster. In these conditions, a small mistake means you can crash, where it can happen. I was riding really smoothly, trying to keep the pace, was trying not to be too aggressive to save the tyres and for the physical side. But for experience for the future, I was the strongest this weekend, so I’ll take the positive.
“For me, the grip was quite good and I was managing it, but this can happen when you try to go away. You’re risking more than the rest, and maybe the grip wasn’t as good.
“Fighting [settling] for the podium had no sense for me: I wanted the victory and this happened. I’m relaxed because I tried – if I hadn’t tried I wouldn’t be as calm.”
Before looking at his 2023 ambitions, Martin will focus on trying for an elusive first win of the season in Valencia – a track that he feels is one of his best, and where he went pole-to-second in the race last year.
The Race says
Valentin Khorounzhiy
Can a satellite rider fight for the MotoGP title? Only Franco Morbidelli (and, in fairness, Fabio Quartararo, late-season collapse notwithstanding) fit the bill in recent years, and their Petronas Yamaha championship challenges were both part of a particularly strange season in 2020. And again, both fell short.
When Martin got snubbed in favour of Bastianini for the works team, Ducati was at pains to emphasise that the pair would still receive same-level equipment. That’s probably easier said than done whenever there’s a limited supply of some new parts, and indeed Martin has already found himself on a different-spec GP22 this year, having remained on the engine version that the factory team rejected. Equally though, the Ducati package is so good that as long as the fundamentals are there the odd detail probably won’t be make-or-break in terms of allowing a rider to at least mount a title challenge.
Now, can this specific satellite rider fight for the MotoGP title? Martin has one win and seven podiums in 33 starts and is 10th in the standings right now after a clearly-tricky sophomore season in which he both underwent hand surgery and struggled to get his GP22 “balanced” after an initial struggle for rear grip.
He acknowledged he’d been lacking in terms of braking, too, and suggested he only found a base set-up after the summer break.
A season like that suggests title talk is premature. But you cannot ignore back-to-back weekends in which a rider smashes lap records for fun.
It is almost self-evident that Martin has the raw speed to be MotoGP champion, and it feels like there’s something of a truism that it’s easier to get a single-lap hero to find consistency than it is to transform the qualifying fortunes of a dependable but not-explosive Sunday performer.
Maybe that’s not the case, or won’t be the case specifically here. After all, someone like Bastianini looks to have successfully transformed himself into a fairly nifty qualifier as of late, while there’s also the example of Martin’s team-mate Johann Zarco, who has eight poles but no wins.
But Zarco’s biggest pole margin is just over three tenths. Martin took pole by 0.456s last weekend. It really makes you sit up and notice – and ultimately, if you can take pole by half a second in fairly conventional conditions, it is simply not that big a leap to suggest a title challenge. That suggestion is, in fact, almost irresistible.
Jorge Martin’s Sundays will get closer to his Saturdays. Whether it’ll be a one-sided improvement or sacrificing some single-lap speed for race pace through focus and set-up and whatnot, it seems inevitable. That’s what happened for Quartararo, who was a qualifying demon in 2019 and then evolved into a phenomenal all-rounder.
If that happens for Martin in 2023, then why couldn’t he go all the way?
