Jorge Martin has been crowned the 2024 MotoGP world champion, putting in a stellar season to defeat incumbent Pecco Bagnaia.
Finishing 10 points ahead in the standings, the Pramac rider became the first independent rider since Valentino Rossi in 2001 to clinch the title and the first in the MotoGP era, and will take the number one plate to Aprilia for 2025.
But did Martin win it with his performance or did Bagnaia hand it to him with his errors?
After a thrilling season finale, here are our verdicts on the championship result:
Championship of errors wasn't decided by one
Simon Patterson
Bagnaia said a few weeks ago that this was the title race of mistakes and errors, after a season where both he and Martin seemed determined to ensure that the other one won the championship.
The good news, thankfully, is that it didn’t come down to that in the end and we got a good clean fight right until the end, one where Bagnaia (like all season) was perfect when he was good.
However, too frequently he was terrible when he was bad, and despite the incredible number of race wins he racked up, it was Martin who managed the bad days as well as taking the most out of the decent ones.
His title, in the end, was wholly deserved. He rode a hell of a season, he was consistent even when he wasn’t always fast, and, in the end, he was the better of the pair at the final chequered flag of the season at Barcelona. A job extremely well done and a title throughly deserved.
Bagnaia would've deserved title - but not at Martin's expense
Val Khorounzhiy
The funny thing about this MotoGP title is that the narrative after the fact will almost certainly be - at least partly - Bagnaia throwing away the crown through errors. Certainly, he's given up more than the 10 points he lost by in unforced crashes.
But he's also had his Ducati fail on him in the Le Mans sprint - that's potentially more than 10 points right there. He's had two collisions with the Marquez brothers - that's well more than 10 points. He was the meat in a Marco Bezzecchi-Brad Binder sandwich in the sprint at Jerez - that probably wasn't 10 points, but it would've made it closer.
Martin, on the other hand, has avoided technical gremlins or being caught up in other riders' messes.
But once it came to the finale, it simply would've been too brutal for Martin to lose this. Over the whole of his stint as a MotoGP rider, he has done enough to deserve this. And once faced with a crucial advantage and needing just to keep his cool at the end of a gruelling 20-race (40, really) season, he did everything that was required of him with minimum fuss.
It would've been simply too demoralising for a season like that to be capped off by a heartbreaking defeat, followed by a 2025 move to a bike that is simply not ready to win.
Bagnaia didn't deserve to be the loser here, not really. But maybe he would've deserved to lose out against Fabio Quartararo in 2022 instead - so perhaps the maths has shaken out right in the end.
Don't downplay Martin's achievement
Matt Beer
Yes, Bagnaia blew a lot of points. Yes, the GP24 was the best bike on the grid and Ducati did an honourably even-handed job in letting Pramac make the most of it. Yes, all of Ducati and Pramac's opposition underperformed this year so it wasn't as hard to bank podiums on a bad day as it might've been in other years.
But there have been other MotoGP years with similar factors. And none of them ended with a satellite rider taking the world championship.
As much as we tease Simon Patterson on The Race MotoGP Podcast for his now disproven "satellite riders can't win championships" theory, there was always logic behind it.
The engineering strength in depth a factory team has, the extra mountains of data, the hard-to-quantify but very real impact of a smaller team battling through the flyaways at the end of a long season with fewer comforts than their works counterparts, it all adds up and has an effect.
But it didn't stop Martin and Pramac. And that's incredible.
You can't be champion with eight DNFs
Megan White
With two titles under his belt, the 2024 championship was Bagnaia’s for the taking. An experienced factory rider riding the wave of success to his third consecutive title should have been a relatively straightforward tale.
But it was eight DNFs which proved his downfall. Yes, as Bagnaia says, several of those incidents were not his fault. A collision apiece with his 2025 team-mate Marc Marquez and brother Alex, and a third for which he was not to blame, all took crucial points from his total. True, a fourth was a technical issue.
But the other four DNFs were Bagnaia’s alone, and he simply did not capitalise at times where Martin’s mistakes came - even if he did round off the season with his 11th win of the year in what was otherwise a great campaign.
This is not to disparage Martin’s enormous achievement: he was an incredibly deserving champion, proving the better in sprint races and ultimately putting in the more consistent performance across the season. But one or two fewer crashes from Bagnaia, and today could have ended very differently - a valuable lesson Bagnaia himself will have learned for next year.
Rough diamond smoothed out just right
Oliver Card
2024 produced mistakes and misfortune for each of the title contenders, but Martin taking the championship felt right this year. He showed he still had that extra level of excellence to achieve and fuelled by Ducati's rejection of him in favour of Marquez, channelled his energy into a knife edge performance to claim the number one spot.
There was no Sepang-style sparring in this finale but this was a tense race of survival. A classy Bagnaia was at his metronomic best, making ragged edge riding look effortless out front, but it wasn't enough in the end.
Martin was a benefactor of Aleix Espargaro's allyship but he kept his nerve to the end. He's always exciting to watch and it is satisfying to see the rough diamond finally smoothed just right.
