‘Will never do a s**t manoeuvre’: World champ wants a clean fight, but there’s a template that might turn the tide


It was a desperate time for the reigning MotoGP world champion, one that called for desperate measures.

On the verge of losing his crown in the final race of the year to a younger upstart, the champ had one more card to play. Speed alone wasn’t enough. It was a circumstance that called for tactics, cunning, and a little bit of bastardry.

Francesco Bagnaia in 2024? No, Jorge Lorenzo in 2013.

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While Lorenzo’s season-ending race in his quest to deny a rapid rookie named Marc Marquez the title 11 years ago didn’t pay off, it was one of the three-time champion Spaniard’s most breathtaking performances – and might provide the template for Bagnaia to prevent Jorge Martin denying him a hat-trick of championships at this weekend’s season-ending Grand Prix of Barcelona.

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To execute it, Bagnaia needs more than a little luck, and has to display a ruthlessness and willingness to bend his moral stance while not breaking any rules. It’s a tightrope, but one that can be traversed.

Would he try it? Would it work? Would it even matter? All questions we don’t yet know the answer to, and all questions Lorenzo faced in Valencia 11 years ago.

Ultimately, Lorenzo failed. But it was the not trying that he couldn’t live with. It remains to be seen if Bagnaia feels the same.

Bagnaia was defiant in Malaysia, but will need more to unseat Martin in the Barcelona finale. (Photo by MOHD RASFAN / AFP)Source: AFP

LORENZO’S MASTERCLASS OF CONTROL

Lorenzo arrived in Valencia in 2013 knowing the score. The Yamaha man was 13 points behind Honda’s Marquez with 25 points to play for, meaning Marquez only had to finish inside the top four to become the youngest premier-class world champion in MotoGP history.

It appeared inevitable, given just four riders – Lorenzo and Marquez, and their respective teammates Valentino Rossi and Dani Pedrosa – had won races all year, and Marquez had finished on the podium 15 times in 17 previous starts.

Lorenzo’s only chance was to hope more of their rivals could get between him and Marquez on track, rough up the admittedly nervous rookie, and put him in a position to drop the ball. What eventuated was one of the most fascinating races MotoGP has ever seen.

Marquez qualified on pole for the 30-lap race, but Lorenzo bullied his way by on lap one and then took the lead from Pedrosa on the next lap. In prime position to play the game his way, Lorenzo then dramatically slowed the pace to keep the rest of the field in the frame. Marquez’s pole time (1min 30.237secs) gave way to Lorenzo setting pedestrian lap times in the mid 1:32s. It was a race that was being run at, comparatively speaking, walking pace.

Lap after lap, the top half-dozen riders ran nose to tail. Marquez’s teammate Pedrosa, sensing Lorenzo’s tactics, pushed his way past into the lead on numerous occasions, only for Lorenzo to up his aggression to immediately reclaim first, and again drop anchor to slow the peloton.

PIT TALK PODCAST: In the latest episode of ‘Pit Talk’, Renita Vermeulen and Matt Clayton look back at a dramatic Malaysian Grand Prix and THAT battle between Francesco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin, why Bagnaia can’t get the help he needs to defend his world title, and how Jack Miller emerged unscathed from a terrifying first-lap crash at Sepang.

For nine laps, the gap from first to second was never more than two-tenths of a second. Marquez was surrounded by rivals left and right as his two compatriots played cat and mouse.

Contact was a matter of if, not when. Marquez briefly took the lead after Lorenzo and Pedrosa came to blows at turn two on lap 10, the latter falling to fifth. Lorenzo tested how keen Marquez was for a fight by launching an immediate counter-attack, which Marquez wanted no part of.

Lorenzo, sensing that the pack wasn’t fast enough to keep up, immediately switched tactics and upped his pace to tempt Marquez into chasing him for a win he didn’t need, but one where adrenaline might overrule common sense. On lap 12, Lorenzo immediately went 0.8secs faster than he had all race and cleared off. Marquez didn’t take the bait as Lorenzo’s lead ballooned to three seconds. Pedrosa made it back to second, but Marquez had Rossi and the rest well behind.

Lorenzo played with the pack for one of most famous victories in Valencia 11 years ago. (Photo by Mirco Lazzari gp/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images

Lorenzo eventually took victory by 3.9secs from Pedrosa, with Marquez seven seconds behind in third, enough to take the title. He’d lost the battle, but won the war. And Lorenzo had made his point.

The Yamaha star eventually reclaimed the title in 2015, but of his 47 premier-class wins, few were better than Valencia 2013 for its compete control of the best riders in the world.

“We had to try to see what happened,” Lorenzo said of his tactics. “I have no regrets. The other riders were too slow to stay with the group … I was taking so many risks, especially with Dani. When I saw the others were too far behind, I decided to win this race and get away.”

Marquez – the world champion at just 20 years of age – was elated, relieved, and exhausted.

“In the first few laps I was nervous and stiff on the bike,” he said.

“It was difficult to stay in third position, something inside me was saying ‘you need to fight’ but I was clever, I understood the championship was more important than one race.

“It was maybe the longest race in my career.”

Marquez took the 2013 crown as a 20-year-old, but Lorenzo made him earn it. (Photo by Mirco Lazzari gp/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images

THE TASK FACING BAGNAIA

The maths were rough enough for Lorenzo coming into the 2013 title-decider, but Bagnaia’s task this weekend in Barcelona is statistically steeper.

Lorenzo needed 14 points more than Marquez with a maximum of 25 available 11 years ago; Bagnaia needs to outscore Martin by 24 with 37 on offer, the extra points coming from MotoGP’s sprint race format that was introduced last year.

Making up that many points on a routine race weekend seems impossible without a change of approach. Bagnaia has comfortably held sway over Martin in Grands Prix this year (10 wins to three), but Martin has won seven sprints to Bagnaia’s six.

The key number to explain Martin’s series lead is his three non-finishes to Bagnaia’s eight, while 30 podiums from 38 starts (compared to Bagnaia’s 25) shows that consistency and avoiding costly errors have been more important than outright speed.

Ever since Martin reclaimed the championship lead after Bagnaia crashed with Alex Marquez as they were disputing third place at round 12 in Aragon – a coming-together Bagnaia still can’t let go months later – Martin’s lead has never grown to more than the 25 points for a Grand Prix victory, but never dipped below the difference between first and second in a Sunday main race.

Martin’s championship advantage, rounds 12-19

After Aragon: 23 points

San Marino: 7 points

Emilia-Romagna: 24 points

Indonesia: 21 points

Japan: 10 points

Australia: 20 points

Thailand: 17 points

Malaysia: 24 points

In the past seven rounds, Martin has outscored Bagnaia by precisely one point, showing the enormity of the world champion’s task this weekend in Catalunya.

Bagnaia has often been fast, occasionally fallen off, and sometimes had to settle for second-best on weekends where Martin has held the upper hand.

And, until now, he’s fought fair. It hasn’t been enough.

There’s been precious little between Bagnaia and Martin since September, which is bad news for the reigning champion. (Photo by MOHD RASFAN / AFP)Source: AFP

WOULD BAGNAIA FOLLOW LORENZO’S LEAD – AND WOULD IT EVEN WORK?

Based on recent evidence, it appears unlikely that there’s a rider/bike combination that could hang with Martin and Bagnaia on their class-leading Ducati GP24 machines in Barcelona this weekend.

The title protagonists fought a thrilling duel last time out in Malaysia – on a day where Martin could have won the title, he and Bagnaia swapped places 11 times in the first three laps before Bagnaia ran away to win – but the rest were nowhere to be seen.

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Gresini Ducati rider Marc Marquez had a front-row seat for the no-holds-barred battle up front in third place on his year-old Ducati GP23, but was struck that Bagnaia and Martin were pulling away even as they fought ferociously ahead of him – and then crashed out seven laps in trying to match their pace.

Bagnaia’s teammate Enea Bastianini, on the same GP24 ridden by the frontrunners, rounded out the Sepang podium in third, but was 10.4secs behind after just 19 laps. Over 22secs separated Bagnaia from 10th-placed Augusto Fernandez (KTM), meaning Martin could cruise home to second place and only cede five points to Bagnaia on a day where the Italian wrapped up a landmark 10th victory in one season.

“I’m not this type of guy,” Bagnaia replied when asked if he considered slowing the pace up front to bring more rivals into contention.

“If I was [to slow the pace] I would not be happy because it’s something that is out of my mind. I think it’s not fair, we have to win it in a fair way.”

Bagnaia needs the chasing pack to join him and Martin up front in Barcelona. (Photo by MOHD RASFAN / AFP)Source: AFP

Short of Martin being the architect of his own demise this weekend – something the error-prone Spaniard of 2023 could almost be counted on doing – it’s hard to imagine a world where Bagnaia can make up enough points in two days to make it matter in a championship where Martin’s lead has been effectively frozen since September.

And then there’s the question of whether Bagnaia could live with himself if, for one weekend, he had to delve into the dark arts of Machiavellian tactics as a means to an end. Two rounds ago in Thailand, Bagnaia said “I will never do a s**t manoeuvre … I will always be clean like I’ve always been and try to win that way,” in his fight with Martin, and nothing in Malaysia the next weekend suggested that would change.

“For me it’s very easy, because I’m not the type of guy who wants to be rude outside of the track, I don’t need to be rude inside of the track or to be aggressive, pushing out, being the one who don’t respect my rivals,” he said.

“If Jorge starts to do it, I will change. But Jorge is more or less the same as me, so surely respect is the main thing and it will always be this way from my point of view. I don’t understand why we need to be enemies outside of the track, don’t speak to each other … I prefer it like this.”

Martin – who was teammates to Bagnaia in his first two world championship seasons in the entry-level Moto3 category nine years ago – appreciated the sentiment.

“We [have] known each other since 2015,” Martin said.

“We were really close friends in the past … now we no longer have that relationship, but we are good to each other.

“It’s no sense to [be enemies]. We can fight, you saw on Sunday [in Malaysia] it’s an amazing battle for history.

“Thanks to Pecco [Bagnaia] because even if we were so aggressive, both of us, there’s always this respect. We don’t want to race to destroy the other’s race … we want to win, both of us.

“If it’s like this in the future, for me it will be perfect. I hope it will be like this always.”



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