Francesco Bagnaia needs more than a victory to come away from the Barcelona Grand Prix as a three-time MotoGP champion. Only some misfortune on Jorge Martin’s part could swing the title battle in his favour in the final round of the season.
The factory Ducati rider rode admirably on Saturday to clinch victory in the sprint and slash Martin’s advantage from 24 points to 19, while establishing himself as the rider to beat at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
Although Bagnaia still has a mountain to climb on Sunday, there have been similar cases where the second-placed rider has pulled off a major upset in the championship showdown.
Perhaps one season the factory Ducati rider could relate to is 2006, when Honda’s young gun Nicky Hayden was battling with Yamaha star Valentino Rossi for the title.
Incidentally, Rossi's campaign that year was very similar to that of his protege Bagnaia, with the latter winning more races than anyone but also crashing often. Hayden, much like current Pramac rider Martin, was the more consistent of the two title runners despite scoring fewer wins.
A major twist in the championship came when Dani Pedrosa crashed unaided at the penultimate round of the season in Estoril, taking his team-mate Hayden with him.
That left Hayden with a 12-point gap deficit to Rossi going into the season finale, which took place in Valencia the following week.
Rossi qualified on pole for the race while Hayden could only manage fifth on the grid, further boosting the former’s chances of adding another premier class to his tally.
But the pendulum began to swing again at the start of the race, when Rossi dropped to sixth place, directly behind his chief title rival Hayden. Over the next few laps, Hayden continued to inch closer to the front, while Rossi found himself down in seventh.
Then disaster struck on lap 7 when Rossi lost control of his Yamaha at Turn 2, suffering a low-speed crash into the gravel. The Yamaha rider was able to remount on his M1 but valiantly fought back to 13th place, scoring just three championship points in the process.
Up ahead, Hayden held his nerves and crossed the line in third place, overturning a 12-point deficit into a five-point championship triumph. The pictures of a weeping Hayden completing the cooldown lap while holding the American flag have since been etched into motorcycle racing folklore.
His championship triumph was even more impressive considering he had never led the standings until that point of the season, and had scored just two wins over 17 rounds compared to five for Rossi.
After Hayden’s epic turnaround in 2006, it wasn’t until a decade later that MotoGP featured another topsy-turvy title decider. It was again Rossi who lost the championship at the last possible moment, and the penultimate round again played a major role in setting up the stage for the finale.
In one of the most controversial seasons in MotoGP history, Rossi and his Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo were left to squabble for the title after Honda man Marc Marquez had dropped out of the fight.
Rossi and Marquez had clashed a number of times during that campaign, both on and off the track, but their battle came to its head in Malaysia when the Yamaha rider made contact with his arch-rival while passing him for third, leaving the latter on the ground.
Rossi was handed three penalty points on his license after being deemed guilty of causing the crash, triggering a back-of-the-grid penalty for the final showdown in Valencia.
That meant that team-mate Lorenzo, who was trailing Rossi by seven points in the championship, now had a real chance of winning the title.
Claiming pole position for the finale, Lorenzo put in a faultless performance to win his third premier class title by five points - marking a 12-point swing in the championship.
Rossi rose heroically from 25th to fourth place, but it wasn’t enough to prevent Lorenzo from overturning his advantage in the standings. Rossi continues to blame Marquez for costing him an eighth world title to this date.
The cases of Hayden and Lorenzo would certainly give some encouragement to Bagnaia, although with a 19-point deficit to Martin, he isn’t exactly in the same boat as those two.
For starters, the factory Ducati rider has to finish inside the top two in the race to have any chance of winning his third title this year. Even if he wins the race, Martin could finish as low as ninth and still join Aprilia next year as the reigning champion.
Bagnaia had made it clear that he wouldn’t be resorting to any mind games in order to get the upper hand over Martin. These, he believes, don't exactly work in MotoGP and will only serve as a distraction.
However, that doesn’t mean he won’t have a gameplan for the race, as he did for qualifying on Saturday.
Bagnia purposefully gave Gresini’s Marc Marquez - and Martin’s team-mate Franco Morbidelli - a slipstream in Q2, knowing that the Spaniard was struggling more than usual around Barcelona.
His plan worked, with Marquez qualifying third and leaving Martin outside of the front row in fourth. However, in his own words, Bagnaia would like to have more bikes between him and Martin - and this is where lies the real problem.
Ducati has been so dominant this year, particularly with the new-for-2024 GP24, that it is so hard for other manufacturers to mix up with it. It’s why smaller errors aren’t penalised as much as they would in another season and even a relatively off weekend for Martin (or Bagnaia) would mean they can still finish third or fourth.
While in 2006 Rossi was engulfed by a number of riders after a slow start and was being hunted down by Suzuki’s Chris Vermeulen when he fell from his Yamaha at Turn 5, Martin is unlikely to feature such a strong challenge from non-Ducati riders in Barcelona, especially with the factory KTM duo qualifying near the back of the grid.
The highest non-placed Ducati rider on the grid is Aleix Espargaro in second, with the Aprilia rider having openly admitted that he would be willing to support Martin in his championship challenge.
In a way, Ducati is a victim of its own success in MotoGP. There is no denying that the Borgo Panigale marque wants a rider on the factory team to win the championship. But its bike is so ahead of the competition that Martin is unlikely to finish 10th or lower even if he has a woeful outing in Barcelona on Sunday.
