Two laps, three years.
That’s how long Francesco Bagnaia has been headed in Austria since 2022, and Sunday’s crushing victory in Spielberg showed why the road to the MotoGP championship still goes through Ducati’s benchmark despite stablemate Jorge Martin lurking menacingly in his rear-view.
For when Bagnaia is in his sweet spot on a track that accentuates his positives, he’s as sure of a thing as you can get in modern-day MotoGP.
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Sunday’s 11th round of the season – the start of the year’s second half – was held in a spectacular setting in the Styrian Mountains, but quickly turned into a snore fest because of Bagnaia’s metronomic brilliance. And it was one that was as predictable as it was powerless to prevent.
The unique track layout of the Red Bull Ring – essentially three long straights coming out of slow corners with big braking zones at the end of each blast into the mountainside – plays perfectly to the strengths of Ducati’s class-leading bike, and even more so to Bagnaia’s unerring ability to stop a MotoGP machine better than his rivals.
Ducati’s GP24 and its rear ride-height device that squats the bike coming out of corners before launching it down the next straight has no peer, while Bagnaia’s soft touch on hard, late-braking gains him metre after metre, corner after corner, lap after lap. Add those two factors together and you get Sunday … and 2023, and 2022 that preceded it. In all, of the past 112 laps around the Red Bull Ring, the Italian has led 110 of them.
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Bagnaia’s bludgeoning pace was such that the gap between the winner and fifth (Brad Binder’s KTM, the sole non-Ducati in the top six) was 18.620 seconds; that, and the gap back to 10th (30.268 secs, Ducati’s Alex Marquez) were both season-highs. Yet Bagnaia’s world championship lead over Martin is just five points with nine rounds to go, Martin finishing second to Bagnaia in both the sprint and Grand Prix to minimise the damage.
Martin is hanging around thanks to his machinery – like Bagnaia, he’s on a GP24 – and his sprint race supremacy, the Spaniard finishing nine of the 11 short-form races this year on the podium and outscoring Bagnaia 95-57 on Saturdays. Half-distance races might be the only minor chink in Bagnaia’s armour, but he’s won three of the past five in that format, too.
The only thing that seemed to throw Bagnaia off in Austria was that Sunday’s 25th premier-class Grand Prix victory saw him draw level with legendary American Kevin Schwantz for 10th in the sport’s all-time record books.
Schwantz, whose combination of style and charisma has made him a beloved figure in the sport’s annals, won his sole 500cc title in 1993, four years before Bagnaia was born.
“You grow up with myths, these legends, and now to see my name next to theirs is crazy,” Bagnaia said.
BAGNAIA: PREPARATION THE KEY
With seven Grands Prix victories in 11 rounds, Bagnaia has already equalled his title-winning tallies from his 2022 and 2023 seasons, and did his best work early in both the sprint and Grand Prix to make up for the disappointment of losing pole to Martin in a qualifying session where the championship protagonists showed why they’re a class above the rest.
Martin slaughtered the circuit record with a lap of 1min 27.748secs on Saturday, with Bagnaia just 0.141secs adrift; the gap back to third (Marc Marquez, 0.544secs adrift) was the biggest between second and third on the grid in seven years. Bagnaia brushed that off and trailed the Spaniard for one lap in both races, gaining first when Martin ran deep at the Turn 2 chicane in the sprint before ambushing him at the first corner of the main race 24 hours later.
With so little to choose between the sport’s two standout riders and with both on equal machinery, Bagnaia pointed to the grind he’s been putting in on riding with a full fuel tank to simulate the start of races as a difference-maker.
PIT TALK PODCAST: In this week’s episode of ‘Pit Talk’, hosts Renita Vermeulen and Matt Clayton dissect the key moments from Round 11 in Austria, how Pecco Bagnaia was able to reclaim the championship lead over Jorge Martin, look at Marc Marquez’s charge after a horror start and assess Jack Miller’s weekend of promise that ended with a crash.
“I work a lot to have this kind of feeling at the start with the full fuel tank,” he explained.
Sometimes it’s worse, but sometimes it’s helping because for the race we are already prepared. It’s always very difficult in this track to overtake because you brake one metre [late] and you are wide, so it was very important to be quite calm and don’t do any stupid manoeuvre. We managed to be perfect.”
Bagnaia, who was a frustrated third behind teammate Enea Bastianini and Martin at the British Grand Prix to lose the series lead to Martin, admitted he arrived at one of his strongest tracks with additional motivation, and said improving his Saturday showings is a focus for the rest of the year.
“In Silverstone, we just lost the possibility for the win because of the condition of the weather, because it was too cold and impossible to go with the hard front tyre so I was just struggling,” he said.
“We arrived here with a lot of motivation to bounce back the results … to win today is fantastic, to win yesterday was fantastic, we just missed the pole position.
“We are trying to do it [raise the level] but honestly, we won seven races and Jorge two, but we are just leading by five points.
“It’s clear that we have to improve the sprints because it’s where Jorge has done all of the difference, we have to be more precise like we have this weekend.”
THUMB INJURY NO EXCUSE FOR MARTIN
Setting a new circuit record and finishing second to Bagnaia twice when the Italian appeared unbeatable was a solid save for Martin, who rode the final two days in Austria with a heavily-bandaged left thumb courtesy of a fall he had in the shower of his trackside motorhome on Friday night that opened up a nasty gash.
Joking that the painkillers “in the butt” were more painful than his thumb after the race, the Spaniard – now winless since round five of the season at Le Mans in France in mid-May – wasn’t using his injury as the reason for being beaten by the world champion, Bagnaia opening up a gap of more than a second 14 laps into the 28-lap race before winning by 3.232secs.
“[The thumb] wasn’t a problem. For sure I have a lot of painkillers before the race, [but] it’s not an excuse,” he said, his thumb heavily packed in ice at the post-race press conference.
“One more thing that happened on the weekend, it’s not helping – but sometimes when you have pain in the body, you are even more focused.
“Overall, with everything that happened in the weekend, I have to be happy. I’m frustrated because I feel we are super strong and nothing is missing to win races, but still Pecco [Bagnaia] is doing that result. It’s just five points, it’s not important … the important thing is that I make a bad result and it’s a second [place]. My moment will come.”
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Martin agreed that Bagnaia’s pace on a heavy bike full of fuel at the start of races is a difference-maker in a head-to-head battle where there is precious little between them elsewhere.
“I think we need to change the strategy, because you can see he has really good confidence at the beginning of the race with a full [fuel] tank and he’s able to keep that first position,” Martin said.
“After three or four laps, if you are first you have 90 per cent of the win done.
“I think in terms of speed, it’s very difficult to see the difference. Yesterday in qualifying, we are making the difference. Pecco and me, we are a step in front of the rest. The difference was to lead into the first two laps. He understood it better than me.
“He’s not faster than me, I am not faster than him. But we need to work a bit more on the strategy and understand how to win races.”
‘CHAOS’ PROMPTS MARQUEZ CHARGE
From a front-row grid slot, Marc Marquez’s Austrian GP weekend – a crash from second in the sprint and fourth place in the Grand Prix – was underwhelming on paper, but the six-time world champion injected life into an otherwise soporific race on Sunday with a charge from 14th on lap one to score 13 points after incident after incident threatened to end his weekend early.
The drama for the Gresini Ducati rider came before the start of Sunday’s race when his mechanics discovered a broken valve when checking his bike’s tyre pressures, a scramble to replace his wheel rim meaning his tyres were cooler than optimal for the warm-up lap.
Desperately trying to get heat into his tyres, Marquez inadvertently disengaged his front ride-height device for the start of the race, and was slow off the line as his front wheel lifted into the air, contact with Ducati’s Franco Morbidelli at the first corner sending him off track and falling to 13th after one lap.
The Spaniard then gritted his teeth and tore through the pack back to fourth, but finished 13.727secs behind Bagnaia and 6.370secs adrift of Bastianini in third when he looked to have pace to push Martin for second place.
“Unlucky today,” was Marquez’s assessment of his race.
“Thirty minutes before the start when the mechanics go to check the tyre pressure, the valve broke … that chaos created everything.
“On the sighting lap I was concentrating to put more temperature on the front tyre, then on the last straight I braked and I engaged well the [front ride-height] device, but then I braked again and it disengaged.
“I was super calm in the first corner … and then I receive a big contact from the left side and then we went wide.
“From 13th place, we start step-by-step.”
Austria has historically been an outlier track for the 31-year-old – it’s the only circuit that’s been on the calendar for the entirety of his career where he’s never won – but Marquez felt the Spielberg weekend was one of his strongest this season despite dropping to 83 points behind Bagnaia’s championship lead.
“In [Catalunya] we finished second and second in the sprint race, but it was one of the worst weekends for us,” he reasoned.
“This weekend was one of the best, the feeling on the bike, the speed in practice, in warm-up, in qualifying. We were out with zero points yesterday and fourth place today, but I enjoyed a lot this weekend and it’s there.”
‘BIT ME ON THE ARSE’: MILLER SPILL MASKS PROGRESS
Jack Miller’s most convincing weekend of the season in Austria didn’t pay off with the points his speed suggested, with the Australian crashing out of sixth place on lap 11 of Sunday’s race at the Turn 2 chicane, remounting to come home in 19th place.
The KTM rider, whose bleak MotoGP future looks to have taken a turn with the announcement of an alliance with former team Pramac Racing as it switches to Yamaha for 2025 looking imminent, was outstanding on Saturday when he came through Q1 to qualify fifth, an equal season-best, and finished fifth in the 14-lap sprint for his best result since round two in Portugal in March.
Miller held fourth for the first seven laps on Sunday before being passed by KTM teammate Binder and Marco Bezzecchi (Ducati), and after light contact with Marquez at the chicane on lap 10 – the Spaniard’s arm brushed Miller’s rear tyre – the 29-year-old crashed at the same spot one lap later.
Miller explained the crash came from trying to preserve the life of his rear tyre on corner exits by pushing more on the entry to the turns, the right-left chicane early in the Red Bull Ring lap the primary place for spills on the 10-corner layout.
“Shame I made a mistake,” he said.
“When you’re there pushing at the pointy end, I was playing the long game but we didn’t get to show that today.
“That’s the risk you take when you’re sacrificing on the [corner] exits, you’ve got to push it a bit more on the entry and it bit me on the arse. I really felt confident I could fight for that P5 again today.
“I came in a little bit hot and the front started bouncing, I couldn’t do too much. After the crash I was able to put together a solid race, a lot of good laps considering the [damage to the] bike and finished strong, so I was left with that ‘what could have been?’ mentality. The pace was good and we managed to bring the tyres all the way until the end, I just wish I was there fighting with the boys I was around.”
Source Agencies
