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Making pre-season predictions is always fun, but revisiting them after the end of the season is usually even more entertaining – even if there’s bound to be bits that make you wince at how far off you were.
To mark the end of 2021 – and to present some form of accountability, Valentin Khorounzhiy, Simon Patterson and Matt Beer assess their expectations versus the reality of how this past season has played out.
The predictions here are taken from our post-testing podcast and our predictions feature.
HIT: Marquez will need time / MISS: Marquez is title favourite
Simon, feature: “He will win races in 2021, but he won’t win a title.
Simon, podcast: “I spoke a few months ago to Kevin Schwantz and he maintained that it takes two months to get back to speed for every month you’re off the bike. If that’s the case, we’re not going to see 2019 Marc Marquez in 2021. There will be – I think, even with Marc’s talent – there will be an adjustment period, there will be a time that it takes to get the brain back to 200 miles an hour.”
Val, feature: “Yeah, he’s out of practice, but he’s had a lot of time to prepare, he has a ton of performance margin to lean on (going by 2019 and the 2020 opener). And really, betting against Marquez just doesn’t work out in MotoGP.”
Matt, feature: “I’m taking inspiration here from the amount of times in his pre-MotoGP career and his first season on the grid when I thought there was no way Marquez could pull off a particular achievement and he still did it.
“His 2020 experience will make him even more calculating, and even more determined. I think those factors will outweigh the disadvantage of starting with two zero scores.”
SP: Marquez’s adjustment period was perhaps even longer than anyone expected in the end, taking right up until the middle of the season before he finally managed to return to the top step of a podium – and with plenty of mistakes along the way to highlight just how rocky a road it was to get there. There was a very clear progression from the Sachsenring right up until another injury prematurely ended his winning streak (and his season), but it bodes well for 2022.
MB: It’s so hard to judge what Marc Marquez achieved in 2021, but my pre-season faith in his prospects was either me underestimating just how serious the repercussions of his arm injury and botched recovery were going to be, or overestimating how much his talent could compensate for a situation that left him “riding with 1.5 arms” according to Honda team boss Alberto Puig.
Marquez felt Honda had lost its way too, but it hadn’t been the benchmark bike for years – he’d just made it look that way by hurling it around beyond its limits.
I suspect what Marquez achieved in 2021 was remarkable given the physical odds he was up against. I hope that isn’t the story of the rest of his career.
VK: The injury always looked very serious, but I just thought there was too much margin there and didn’t think time off would make a tangible difference. Clearly wrong on both counts, though that underlying blistering pace is still very much there.
MISS: Mir and Suzuki are primed for a repeat
Val, podcast: “Jack Miller sort of reflected a thought in the paddock that Suzuki haven’t showed their hand yet [in pre-season testing] – I don’t agree, and I think neither do the Suzuki riders. I think they did show some of their hand and it’s just that their hand when it comes to one-lap pace is not very good – but it wasn’t very good last year, and it didn’t matter then, and there’s every chance it won’t matter now. […] I don’t think their title defense is in any sort of trouble.”
Simon, feature: “I’m fully confident that Joan Mir and Suzuki can pull off a remarkable second title to go with last year’s breakthrough success.”
SP: The Joan Mir we saw in 2021 was the same one who won the title in 2021; consistent, aggressive, and there or thereabouts when the opportunity presented itself. But the real factor that changed was the bike underneath him, with Suzuki’s GSX-RR getting left behind very quickly as everyone else developed. There are a myriad of reasons why that’s the case – but the bottom line is that it meant he just wasn’t able to perform.
VK: I do give myself some credit for seeing Suzuki’s testing pace as not being some sort of act of sandbagging, but I still underestimated the underlying performance. Thing is, I believe Suzuki did, too. Its approach to testing – trying out a 2022 engine in the 2021 pre-season! – and early-season rhetoric suggested an overestimation of the built-in margin it had over the opposition from 2020, and I think reality set in coming into the summer.
MISS: Rossi will be rejuvenated / HIT: Pump the brakes on Rossi
Val, feature: “My post-launch, pre-test prediction on our MotoGP podcast was ’10th place, no wins’, and I haven’t seen anything in testing to make me deviate from that.”
Matt, feature: “I just fear he’s too far past his prime and his pre-season happiness has raised expectations too much. But gosh I would love to be wrong.”
Simon, podcast: “He sounds fired up enough to be able to go from being an on-again off-again podium content to being an on-again off-again race win contender.”
SP: Maybe this was wishful thinking on my part, but it was based on the strength that Valentino Rossi had shown at the start of the 2020 season, before a disastrous run of form compounded by catching COVID.
VK: Honestly, the 10th place prediction was probably on the upper side of my range of expectations. But I still was very much surprised – I think Rossi’s Friday and Saturday form in 2021 wasn’t actually that different from the preceding years, but the extra step he would tend to find when it counted most just didn’t seem to be happening.
MB: It’s now safe to admit it: I held back a little bit in my prediction for how (badly) Rossi would fare in 2021. I could see where my colleague Simon was coming from with his theory that swapping factory life for satellite team life might emancipate and rejuvenate Rossi but I just felt the legend’s form had been waning so conspicuously for so long that there was no way back now. A season (at least) too far.
HIT: Bagnaia will come good (but we didn’t know just how good)
Matt: “Though Miller’s getting all the early headlines at Ducati, his team-mate Bagnaia has some very high peaks. The bits in between remain something of a concern, but I’d expect one or two at least.”
Simon: “Gut feeling, this won’t be his year – he will score the occasional podium, he might sneak the occasional win somewhere like the Red Bull Ring, where everything works, but I think title contention is maybe a year out.”
SP: This wasn’t too far from how things really panned out in the end, with Bagnaia definitely finding his title-challenging form a little earlier than expected – but still too late to be a real threat to Fabio Quartararo. He’s certainly learned faster than I expected him to though, and once he did finally figure out how to win, he used what he’d learned.
MB: I may now look prescient for picking Pecco Bagnaia as 2021’s breakthrough winner but I’ll happily make clear that my train of thought was ‘he’s alright actually, he’ll probably do a bit better than expected’ rather than ‘he’ll smash Jack Miller and nearly take Ducati to its first title in 14 years’.
That late-season roll was incredible. Rider/bike gelling well + confidence + momentum equalling something I can’t believe even Bagnaia himself saw coming.
I can’t wait to see if this version of him was a temporary confidence of Ducati finding great form at a time he had nothing to lose, or whether this is now just what we should expect from Bagnaia every season.
HIT: Quartararo has a good shot
Val, podcast: “There’s a lot of recency bias in our profession and understandably so, and there’s a lot of problems that Fabio faced for the first time last year, but it’s also worth remembering that he was so good in 2019. Just incredible, absolutely out of nowhere unexpectedly brilliant – and brilliant week in, week out, he didn’t really have that Maverick Vinales peakiness. That came in 2020, his 2020 was a lot like Maverick Vinales’ 2017. But I think he might be a different character, this might be a different Yamaha, to where I do kind of believe – maybe not with a lot of logical reasoning, but I do believe that Fabio’s situation might be a little bit different here. So, honestly, if you were to ask me for a title favourite, assuming Marquez doesn’t return to Marquez 2019 form, Fabio’s probably mine.”
VK: The only real surprise about Fabio Quartararo’s season was how quickly and easily he was able to separate himself from the other Yamahas. I’m still not entirely sure why he overcame the hurdle Maverick Vinales never could – whether it was the mental side of it or the direction of bike development – but I’m not at all shocked he did. That 2019 season was good.
HIT: KTM will struggle – and miss Espargaro
Val, feature: “I don’t expect to see KTM match its 2020 form. It did lose its on-average quickest rider, after all.”
Val, podcast: “They did give up their highest scorer from last year, and the guy who’s led the programme from basically almost the start. Yeah, he didn’t win any of their three races, but I think Pol Espargaro is the guy who could get the most out of that bike, and they don’t have him there anymore.
“On the tracks that KTM was not so good, Pol was almost always the best. That part might also hurt a bit.”
VK: Yes, we don’t know how Espargaro would have fared if he’d raced the 2021 RC16… but I’m still claiming this one. KTM did have a disappointing season, and its two factory riders were only super-competitive in flashes. Maybe Espargaro would have found it frustrating, too, but I think the theory that the overall points tally would have been a higher one with him is a compelling one.
MISS: Espargaro a no-brainer coup for Honda
Val, podcast: “I’m fairly convinced – I shouldn’t say ‘fairly convinced’ because you can never be fairly convinced about a MotoGP win – but it looks really likely that he’ll at least win a race this year.”
Simon, podcast: “One thing we can say for certain is that someone at Honda has probably kept their job over the signing of Pol, because from a team that were nowhere last year without Marc Marquez they suddenly look like they’ve got a bit of depth of field again.”
SP: Arguably 2021 wasn’t a terrible season for Pol Espargaro – at least as debut seasons at Repsol Honda go for anyone who isn’t Marc Marquez or Casey Stoner. He took his best ever MotoGP result at Misano and he looked towards the end of the season as if he was finally getting to grips with the bike.
But the real tell of how successful his year was will come when we see how 2022 starts for him; if he’s actually managed to convince the Honda engineers to build a bike more suited to him and not just his team-mate, then it’ll be a massive success.
VK: Write-off of a season? Not quite, no. But it felt light years short of what I expected based on both Pol’s form on the RC16 – a bike with a similarly unwieldy reputation – and his pre-season performance. And I’m not too sure why – besides the obvious answer of “he couldn’t get the bike to work in the heat”.
MISS: Miller is now indispensable
Val, feature: “We couldn’t be further away from that mid-2019 talk that Ducati was pondering replacing Jack Miller with Honda-contracted Jorge Lorenzo in the Pramac set-up – not only because Lorenzo has retired, but because Miller is so clearly indispensable.
“He can seamlessly replace Andrea Dovizioso as the frontman of Ducati’s title challenge, as though he’s a bigger crash risk, he’s also just clearly quicker on the Desmosedici at this point than 2020-spec Dovi was.”
VK: Yeah, that one pretty much went out the window after the Qatar double-header. Don’t get me wrong – Miller didn’t have a bad year, and he warranted the seat and continues to warrant it now. But indispensable he is not – not for a manufacturer which has Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin.
HIT: Aprilia’s step forward is legit
Val, podcast: “Just looking at those times from both test, that’s a better bike than last year’s. It’s got a higher ceiling, I don’t know what its floor is but it’s definitely got a higher ceiling so the season’s definitely going to be better.
“Even if it’s a false dawn, it’s still going to be a better season because everything has shifted a bit.”
VK: I think it actually was a little bit of a false dawn – the bike wasn’t in the mix for podiums quite as often as the Qatar test may have suggested, and it seemed to stagnate in the latter half of the season. But the campaign as a whole was still credible and undeniable evidence of progress – perhaps best exemplified by the RS-GP’s 2021-spec being good enough to convince Maverick Vinales to take the plunge.
