When Jorge Martin went from a 39-point world championship lead to a 10-point deficit across three race weekends - a period that surely not coincidentally began with Ducati picking Marc Marquez over him for the 2025 works seat and Martin quitting for Aprilia within hours - the 2024 MotoGP title bid felt like it might be a foregone conclusion, even though the points remained close.
‘Momentum’ may be a nebulous concept but in this case, it was weighty and tangible enough to be worth taking seriously.
As the satellite Ducati rider against the works team’s reigning champion, Martin was the underdog even when he was stretching his points lead early on.
He was back in his old habits of inexplicable solo crashes from strong positions.
Plus his and Pramac’s separate splits from Ducati were surely going to both lead to them being ostracised by the factory over the balance of 2024 to make sure both information and the no.1 plate weren’t heading out of Ducati for 2025. And title rival Pecco Bagnaia had got back in the habit of seemingly effortless dominance, racking up four straight grand prix wins plus a pair in sprints too.
The glimmer of hope provided by Martin winning the Sachsenring sprint was followed by the calamity of him crashing from the grand prix lead with two laps to go the next day and handing the win and championship lead to Bagnaia.
This was all going one way.
But now it isn’t. Now it really could go either way.
MARTIN’S ADDRESSED KEY WEAKNESSES (MAYBE)
Martin’s June 2024 was a haze of rejection and gravel. His July was spent on the beach and training like all riders in the second summer break, but also thinking hard with his Pramac team about those crashes.
They found enough congruence between his falls in not just the Mugello sprint and Sachsenring main race but also earlier in the season in the Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez to suggest a riding style and/or set-up change (Martin declined to share specifics) that could be trialled in practice and enacted in races to reduce the chance of repeat shunts.
Martin's race results since Ducati picked Marquez
Mugello - On pole for the sprint but crashed, third in the race after losing second at the last corner
18 points ahead of Bagnaia, was 39 points clear after the previous race
Assen - Second in the sprint, second in the GP
10 points ahead of Bagnaia
Sachsenring - Won the sprint, crashed in the race
10 points behind Bagnaia
Silverstone - Second in the sprint, second in the race
3 points ahead of Bagnaia
Martin suggested that change was “really difficult to identify when I’m riding” and added that he was keen not to “get really obsessed with this because the way I ride is how I arrived here today”.
But having ended the Sachsenring weekend mystified by why he kept crashing out of races in that manner, to begin Silverstone with an idea for what to do about it was significant.
A single race weekend is too small a sample set to declare that a success, but the circumstances of the British GP were potentially classic Martin-in-the-gravel territory: tyres wearing, late in the race, under pressure from a fast-closing factory Ducati as Enea Bastianini closed in. Yes, Martin ran a touch wide and let Bastianini through. But then he followed him home smoothly for second.
And how Martin described that race hinted at something else changing.
“Either Sachsenring wasn’t that bad or a disaster, or here is the best day,” he said.
“We have to get a balance from all the season. I think we are doing an amazing job. The summer break wasn’t my best one. I wasn’t happy, for sure. But doing a solid result is fantastic.
“Second was the maximum. I tried to do a really intelligent race, I tried to manage a lot of different things.
“The pace was fast, I tried to win until the end but then Enea was catching and it was impossible, he was on another level today.
“I am 100% focused on what I can control. I cannot control if somebody beats me. If I do my best, I do my best.
“Today [Silverstone race] that was second and hopefully in Austria it will be a better result.”
It was hard not to draw a link between Ducati letting him know its 2025 decision and Martin’s messy June. His stance on getting that long-sought Ducati works seat had always been ‘what more can I do?’.
The answer was: be the most successful rider of the era, as that was the trump card Marquez could play in that battle. It was something Martin couldn’t control. Just like Bastianini having worn tyres/low fuel/late race pace wizardry no one else on the current grid can quite match.
Martin did his best. His best was great. It wasn’t enough to get a 2025 factory Ducati seat or win the 2024 British GP. But it’ll be good enough to win a lot of races and maybe a title, and it was good enough to ensure he beat a lot of other riders to the lead ride at the current second-best factory.
When Martin’s 2024 championship lead was at its largest, he actually trailed Bagnaia 3-2 for GP wins this year. He’d got very good at the start of this season of accepting when ‘his best’ was a podium and that that was just fine for the long game. It was that bit of his craft that slipped in the weeks after the Ducati/Marquez/2025 bombshell. And probably not coincidentally.
Let’s not pretend for a second that one smooth weekend means Martin will never over-reach or have an unexpected solo crash in a race again. He’s a MotoGP rider. He’s Jorge Martin.
But at Silverstone the combination of whatever that subtle style or setting change he and Pramac concocted was and flicking a mental switch back to the long game goal paid off well.
Throw in the sprint’s reminder that Bagnaia is far from over his own predilection for crashing out of races, and the narrative about where this title battle is going as everyone heads to Austria this weekend looks very different to how it did when they all left Germany at the end of June.
DUCATI CAN’T REALLY INFLUENCE THE OUTCOME
Since the 2025 line-up news, we’ve spent a lot of airtime on The Race MotoGP Podcast arguing over whether Martin and Pramac’s respective exits mean Ducati will prevent them from winning the 2024 title.
Simon Patterson’s adamant Ducati will do everything possible to avoid the marketing blow of Martin taking the riders’ title to Aprilia and that Yamaha-bound Pramac won’t be getting any upgrades or information either.
Valentin Khorounzhiy is equally adamant that Ducati wants to be seen to win ethically and wouldn’t risk the marketing blow of appearing to interfere with Martin’s title bid, citing Ducati’s acceptance of then-Gresini rider Bastianini hassling and even beating Bagnaia in key 2022 races when Bagnaia was trying to chase down Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo for the title.
That stance could’ve completely cost Ducati a championship. A Martin 2024 title is still ultimately a Ducati title even if it can’t use Martin in 2025 marketing.
Personally, I’m more in Simon’s camp and am certain it’s Ducati’s preference for its works rider who’s staying put to be the 2024 champion.
But how much can Ducati really influence this outcome anyway? No one’s expecting outright team orders, it’s more of a question of the flow of upgrades and data.
And in this instance, there’s no certainty of (or need for) a pile of shiny new development parts stacking up for Bagnaia at late-season races.
The GP24 Ducati is a refined and utterly dominant package that will surely largely carry into 2025.
Under the concession system, Ducati has no wildcards to use. There’s no chance, for example, of test rider Michele Pirro trialling something on a cameo appearance that then makes its way onto Bagnaia’s bike when proven to work, but not onto Martin’s.
In past circumstances that racer-tester role would probably go to whoever was on the second Pramac bike, but while Franco Morbidelli is staying in the Ducati fold with a near-certain 2025 VR46 seat, does Ducati want to give Yamaha a preview of its next developments by putting them in Pramac’s memory banks?
Misano post-race test day aside, there are fewer opportunities than is usually the case for Ducati to get significant new parts race-ready in-season and also much less need to given the margin the GP24 has over everything else.
So yes, Martin’s bike may well not change much from here to the end of the year because Ducati doesn’t want him or Pramac getting its fresh kit. But Bagnaia’s bike might not be getting a lot either.
Then it comes down to the psychological impact of key Ducati management being more distant from Martin and Pramac - if that even happens in any meaningful way.
Ducati may not, deep down, particularly want Martin to be the 2024 champion now.
But even if it wanted to actively intervene on that front, its options are limited.
DUCATI (GP24) DOMINATION WILL HELP
Making sure he’s still on the podium on a ‘bad’ day is more important than ever for Martin now because a ‘bad’ day in pure performance terms is probably a second or third place.
The 2024-spec Ducatis have locked out the podium at three of the last four grands prix and would’ve done so in the other one (Sachsenring) too if Bastianini had qualified better and Martin had stayed upright.
Marquez is having to ride out of his skin to get the 2023 Ducati near them. Its relative shortcomings mean the VR46 riders aren’t in the lead mix on pure pace either.
KTM has slumped. The very-Aprilia-friendly Silverstone layout may have produced an Aleix Espargaro pole but in the main race, he had nothing for the GP24s.
No one else has right now across a long race distance. And Morbidelli doesn’t ride his GP24 as fast as Bagnaia, Martin and Bastianini do. In straight fights, those three right now have a clear shot at the podium places at each grand prix.
This means limited opportunities for the title contenders to put interlopers between each other and consequently limited opportunities to trigger huge points swings. Unless Bagnaia or Martin (or their long-shot pursuer Bastianini) slips up.
And though the statistics suggest Martin is the one most likely to do so in any given race, the disparity between him and Bagnaia on the consistency front is nowhere near as stark as the stereotypes suggest.
If Martin maintains the equilibrium he showed at Silverstone and everyone stays fit, there’s no reason why the rest of the 2024 season can’t be a constant back-and-forth of Martin and Bagnaia (maybe Bastianini too) chipping away at each other.
That nebulous concept ‘momentum’ is going to be hard for anyone to generate.
