[cycleworld.com] - Sepang MotoGP Report

[Ninjette Newsbot]

One race remains, with no quarter given.

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Francesco Bagnaia finished in Sepang where he needed to: first—and more important—in front of rival Fabio Quartararo. (MotoGP/)The MotoGP season may be coming to a close, but at Sepang the racing was still fully engaged. Close championship rivals Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati) and Fabio Quartararo (Yamaha) sprang forward at the start, braking hard at the first corner and making up many places. Both men raced with focused intensity to finish first and third; Enea Bastianini (Ducati) split the two, starting and finishing in second. This resets championship points thus:

Bagnaia 258

Quartararo 235

Espargaró, A. 212

Bastianini 211

Miller 189

On some Sundays, when the finish order closely resembles the first two rows of qualifying, racing seems almost predictable. Then comes a day like Sepang, when mishaps hand out downfield starts to top riders. (New) championship leader Bagnaia qualified and started ninth after falling twice. Second-in-points Quartararo started 12th, and aspirant-to-third Aleix Espargaró was banished to 10th, where he remained to the end. Jack Miller, relegated to starting 14th after a highside in qualifying, would industriously fight back to finish sixth. His comment: “…yeah, it was pretty tense in there [the paddock] throughout the weekend.”


Bagnaia and Quartararo both lunged to the front at the start after relatively poor qualifying (the Yamaha rider shown here in fourth). (MotoGP/)From so many past rider comments we know how difficult it is to recuperate from low starting positions, as this requires sacrificing rubber to work past other riders. That leaves only one affordable way forward: a combination of nailing the start and outbraking other riders during the “cold-tire fear” of the first lap.

Pole-sitter and leader of the first seven laps Jorge Martín (Ducati) explains his recent speed with having gone back to a basic front-end setting after other experiments proved fruitless.

“Toward the middle of the season we were lost. We made too many changes to the front of my Ducati. All I had to do was go back to my normal setup and go back to being super fast.”

The Miss Scarlet Solution

With the end of the championship now so close, journalism has all but abandoned discussion of the actual racing, instead speculating pointlessly about who is feeling how much tension. Think of this as “Pepto Bismol reporting.” Yet all of these riders have been racing since they were small children, so they all know the same truth: The only way forward is to focus on today’s contest and set energy-wasting worries aside as Scarlett O’Hara did in Gone With the Wind.

“I can’t think about that right now,” she said. “If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

I well remember when Gary Nixon won the Laguna Seca national despite rumors from do-gooders that his home situation was coming apart. Focus on the problem at hand.


Jorge Martín looked strong and ran up front…until a crash took him out. Data showed that he entered a turn 1 kph faster than on his previous lap. (MotoGP/)In similar fashion, Quartararo and Bagnaia addressed the problem at hand in Sepang: this race, today. Bagnaia, when passed on lap 11 by Bastianini (the two will be teammates next year on factory Ducatis), responded by being observant and analytical.

“[My] reflex at the [starting] lights was really great but also the first braking. I risked a lot to be in the front.

“This helped me a lot in the fight for the win. Then Jorge [rode] with an incredible pace, but from the start he was forcing a lot. After two laps following him I just relaxed a bit because [his pace] was too much [for his tires to last].

“It was one of the hardest parts of the race when he overtook me,” Bagnaia said. “It was quite difficult to follow him at the start because he was with more traction in fast corners. I was with more traction in slow corners, but I was braking so hard.”


Jack Miller has a reputation as a hard-working rider, and Sepang further cemented that. He started back in 14th, but fought his way up to a sixth-place finish. (MotoGP/)When his pit board showed that he was gapping Bagnaia and Bastianini behind him, Martín decided, “OK, now is the moment maybe I can go away. I changed the map, so it was time to push a little bit more. And then I crashed.”

Martín’s data told the tale: “I entered just one kilometer per hour faster than the lap before.”

Bagnaia continued, “I tried to manage, and when [Martín] crashed I did it even more. We were at the limit with the front tire.

“When Enea passed me I thought he could get away, but I saw that he had the same problems as me.”

Advantage, Ducati

Ducati riders have commented on this before, that all eight men on Ducati understand each other’s problems. Bagnaia had no need to panic, for he saw that Bastianini was as occupied with tire fade as he was.

Bastianini: “When I saw [Martín crash] I understood that it’s my moment and I tried to go in front. I overtook Pecco in turn 4 and then tried to manage the tire in the best way possible, but after two or three laps something changed.

“Especially on the right side it was impossible for me to be fast in the middle of the corner, and my exit was a disaster.

“I repeat again, for Ducati it is important to win the title but I tried to win today.”

Ducati Team Orders?

More fuel for the burning but pointless question: Were team orders in effect? Did Bastianini receive today’s equivalent of “suggest mapping 8?—a command to let Bagnaia go? For any team, the worst of all possible outcomes is for a private battle between team riders to crash them both out, turning triumph into disaster. All very well for trackside vets to shrug and say “That’s racing,” but sponsors and top managers cannot.


Enea Bastianini’s race, in a nutshell: Started in second, finished in second. (MotoGP/)Bagnaia summed up: “I can truly relax after so many mistakes. In Valencia I will have to understand that I can be fast even without making mistakes and today’s race proved it. I kept up a good pace without doing anything crazy.”

Crazy? This recalls the final days of Andrea Dovizioso’s tenure with Ducati, when he was urged to embrace risk—in effect, to “give crazy a try.” No, the ideal for riders is to attain the skill to win while riding with something in reserve. For dominant American AMA 250 champion Rich Oliver this was business as usual. When hard-pressed by a rival, he would raise the pace until his pursuer ran out of technique, and was making ever-larger gambles (mistakes) that threatened to end his ride. Instead of embracing risk himself, Oliver fed it to his rivals until they choked.

TV cameras zoomed in on Ducati leadership in conference with furrowed brows. It’s possible there were team orders, but we outsiders can never know. As Bagnaia succinctly put it, “The words ‘team orders’ mean team orders, so these are things I can only talk about with Miller.”

Because Jack Miller is, for the moment, his teammate.


What of Aprilia-mounted Aleix Espargaró? The team bikes showed so much potential in the European rounds, but here in Malaysia they finished back in 10th and 16th. (MotoGP/)“I was losing a bit in the long corners,” Bagnaia continued, “because he was using more lean angle with the bike and was closing the lines with more speed. I was losing a bit of time there, but then my braking was very strong, and in the last part of the race it was the thing that let me win the race.”

Gather data. Analyze. Act appropriately.

While Quartararo did not nail the start, he did manage to scoop up many places before the first corner. Then he passed Marc Márquez, who had most remarkably qualified third; when Martín fell, Quartararo moved into third himself.

Working to his advantage was spending much of the race largely on his own, such that the clash of his big corner-speed lines with the V-shaped point-and-shoot lines of most rivals did not slow him down.

“At the end…I could stay a bit closer, but the last two laps I was really, really on the limit with the tires.”


Honda’s Marc Márquez continued to show speed at Sepang, qualifying an impressive third, but eventually moving back to finish seventh. (MotoGP/)What about Márquez, who finished seventh? After qualifying he said, “I’m really surprised to be on the front row. It’s a great surprise because the speed is not there, the feeling is not there, but in qualifying I was there.

“Today [Saturday] we used our experience.

“Tomorrow I believe we will struggle more because I’m fighting against the bike.

“…for a race distance the pace is not there.”

And what about the Aprilias of Espargaró and Maverick Viñales, 10th and 16th respectively?

Espargaró said, “In Europe, if I was not on the podium, Maverick was on the podium.

“And now we are not even in the top 10. It’s crazy.

“We are trying to discover what went wrong in the flyaways. It’s a technical issue, one hundred percent. Both Aprilia riders had the same problems.”

He spoke of “very slow today in the straight” and of “zero grip from the beginning.”

What more can MotoGP do to surprise us? To remain champion, Quartararo must win at Valencia and Bagnaia finish 14th or lower.