Martín suddenly has mountain to climb to claim MotoGP crown

With just one round remaining in the 2023 MotoGP season, it doesn’t look good for Jorge Martín. And he knows it.

“Hopefully I can fight for championships in the future, but today I feel a big loss because it’s really difficult [to win the championship] now,” the Prima Pramac Ducati rider, who sits second in the world championship standings, told members of the media after Sunday’s Grand Prix of Qatar.

Martín and title rival Pecco Bagnaia of Lenovo Ducati experienced a remarkable turn of fortunes throughout the weekend’s events just outside of Doha. Martín won Saturday’s Sprint while Bagnaia finished a distant fifth, which cut the latter’s championship lead to just seven points. In Sunday’s grand prix, though, Bagnaia finished second and Martín dropped to a scarcely believable 10th, watching helplessly as his title deficit ballooned to 21 points.

How can they explain such wild swings in form? According to both, it was the tires.

MotoGP, like so many of the world’s preeminent championships, is a spec-tire series. Michelin produces tires for the whole grid, specially formulated to suit the conditions of each circuit on the calendar, and then the International Road-Racing Teams Association randomly assigns each race’s allotment to every rider. This practice eliminates the possibility of any rider gaining a performance advantage.

Bagnaia explained his disappointing Saturday by suggesting that his tires delivered significantly less performance than any set he’d tried throughout the weekend. His misfortune allowed Martín to close the gap, only for Martín’s Sunday set of tires to behave as though they were 30 laps old, he said. Their testimony suggests each received dud Michelins in the desert.

“It’s a pity that a championship like this, after such a great season … I feel like [Michelin] stole it from me, because I think I could [win the championship] before this race,” Martín said. “Now it’s really difficult.”

The man from Madrid struck a more conciliatory tone on Thursday.

“Maybe I spoke a bit too much after the race,” he said at the pre-race news conference from Valencia. “I’m a really impulsive person.”

“For the moment, we have no indication [of anything wrong with Martín’s tire] but we will look at the data that we get from the team,” Piero Taramasso, two-wheel manager of Michelin motorsport, was quoted as saying by Crash.net. “As soon as we have some news, we will make Jorge, Pramac and everybody aware of what happened.”

Red Bull KTM’s Jack Miller explained to MotoMatters that he, too, experienced inconsistent performance from his tires over the weekend. The likelihood of at least three riders in three different teams all receiving dud Michelins seems remote, and the extremely abrasive surface of the freshly repaved Lusail Circuit can’t be ruled out as a culprit for the tires’ uneven grip either.

Regardless of what led to Martín’s misfortune in Qatar, the reality is that his quest to become world champion has become a whole lot more difficult. Just how much more difficult? Even if Martín wins both the Sprint and the grand prix, Bagnaia will be crowned champion with fifth-place finishes in both events.

Bagnaia’s average finish in Sprint races is 3.6, and his average finish in grands prix is 2.6 (with three retirements). So long as he stays on the bike, the numbers suggest the title is his for the taking.

“The hopes are to try to win the championship on Saturday, but if I see that the risk is too high, I will take whatever result it is and then try [again] on Sunday,” Bagnaia said on Thursday. “We are in a better situation compared to Jorge, but 21 points are never enough to be calm.”

And yet, tires still might play an outsize role in determining who is crowned champion in 2023.

The series has a minimum tire pressure, a regulation that had gone unenforced until Round 9 of 20 at Silverstone. In some cases, lower pressures can allow for a more malleable tire, increasing the area that makes contact with the asphalt and enhancing grip, but go too low and the increasingly deformed rubber threatens to tear itself apart.

The first time a rider is found to have tires under the minimum pressure for more than half the race he is given a warning, and a second offense incurs a three-second penalty. Both Bagnaia and Martín have a warning, so if either is found under pressure in Valencia, a time penalty awaits.

Three seconds might seem like a light punishment, but when considering how bunched together the MotoGP field is, adding that amount to a rider’s time could have dramatic consequences. Since the rule went into effect in August, the average time separating the podium places (where the points drop from 25 for first to 16 for third) is just 3.18 seconds.

In MotoGP, anything can happen.

Sunday’s grand prix winner, Fabio Di Giannantonio, has outscored everyone on the grid bar the two title contenders throughout the past six rounds. He already has lost his ride at Gresini Ducati for next season, and barring a dramatically late turn of events, will be unemployed in 2024.

If Di Giannantonio doesn’t taste victory in Valencia, 2023 will be the first season in MotoGP’s 74-year history in which no rider has won back-to-back races over the course of a single campaign.

There have already been eight different grand prix winners this year, second only to 2020’s nine. Five of those race winners ride for independent teams, the most in the series’ 22-year modern era.

Martín has secured pole in Valencia in each of the past two seasons. He has six podium finishes in nine career races across all classes at the circuit. What better venue, then, to overturn his 21-point deficit?

“It’s a track that I really enjoy,” he said on Thursday. “I am always fast, I always have great pace … so I’m confident it’s a track where we can win both [the Sprint and the grand prix], but the problem is that even winning both of them is maybe not enough, so let’s see what happens.”

Martín may have a mountain to climb, but if ever there was a year for him to make the seemingly impossible a reality, it’s this stranger-than-fiction 2023.