At this stage of the film, MotoGP displays two parallel championships on the track. One is contested by the two untouchables of Ducati, Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martín, virtually tied after crossing the halfway point of the competition, with only five points between them. The other is for the rest of the riders, who try to grab the crumbs of their dominance by adding some podiums, taking advantage of their few mistakes and congratulating themselves for being more or less close to the protagonists of a fantastic endless duel in MotoGP. At the Austrian GP, the battle was won by the current world champion with some ease, who deployed his infallible metronome to overcome the resistance of the Spanish candidate, second, and start the final stretch of the season as the leader of the World Championship.
The Madrid-born rider’s resistance lasted 14 laps and a couple of flashes in the opening stretch of the race. The Pramac rider held on to the lead in the first corner, but on the first crossing of the finish line Bagnaia tore off the stickers and started to pull away. Martín tried to give them back and prevent him from retaining the lead, but the Italian responded immediately. The number one was able to devote himself to setting a devastating pace, so strong and confident that he even allowed himself the luxury of breaking the fastest lap of the circuit on the eighth lap while unsuccessfully trying, in several corners, to remove one of the protective plastics from the visor of his helmet.
“There are no excuses, I thought I had more to fight against Pecco, but halfway through the race he took six or seven tenths off me and from then on I felt more uncomfortable and had to give up ground,” admitted Martín in the parc fermé. “The pace we set together with Jorge was incredible. I tried to gradually gain time on him, because you never know what can happen at the end of the race,” celebrated Bagnaia, who gained more than three seconds on his great rival and more than seven on Enea Bastianini, his teammate in the official team of the Bologna brand. With this new full house, Ducati has now taken 17 podiums in MotoGP, equalling Honda’s historic record. At the Red Bull Ring, a track with a lot of braking and acceleration, conducive to the unstoppable Desmosedici, the Italian bikes have won nine races, more than at any other circuit.
Heading into the Aragon GP, Bagnaia has seven Sunday wins in eleven races, a figure that equals his best in a single season. Despite this devastating statistic, Martín’s strength on Saturdays has allowed him to get to within five points of the lead when last year he was 61 before his strong comeback at the end of the year, without any final prize in Valencia. In the last 20 Grand Prix, one of the two has always been on the podium with the only exception being the GP of the Americas at the beginning of the year, and both know that it will be crashes or other major errors that will determine the name of the next world champion. “We will always have to finish the races giving the best we can, that must be our mentality from now until the end of the season,” concluded the Italian, very satisfied, but never euphoric given the equality that reigns between them.
Marc Márquez misses a golden opportunity
In Spielberg, the race was a two-man affair. The third in contention, Marc Marquez, missed the race train before the race even started. The 93, on the front row of the grid after four months of difficult timed trials, was unable to activate the front start device on his Ducati and got stuck when the lights went out. In the middle of the pile-up, he collided with Franco Morbidelli while accelerating and was lucky to avoid a fall that would have been dangerous in the first corner. He dropped from third place to 14th and had to settle for another comeback operation. Patient but sharp-witted, the Catalan gave another recital of overtaking and managed to stay on the verge of the podium, although 13 seconds behind the winner.
On a track where he looked just one step behind the two untouchables of the championship, and where he was planning to try to go after them for that first victory in more than 1,000 days, bad luck and a technical failure, as the valve of his tyre also broke just a few minutes before the start of the race, spoiled his party again. His mechanics rushed to change his wheel, but all the hustle and bustle threw him off balance enough that he forgot to activate the start device in time. “So much hustle and bustle before the race doesn’t help, but I am self-critical and the mistake was mine,” he admitted. “I’m very happy. Everything happened, but even so it was my best qualifying, my best warm-up and my best training in general,” he added. The disappointment left his hypothetical approach to the totems of the grid up in the air, although that didn’t take away his smile.
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