Aragon MotoGP: ‘Bagnaia is a better Biaggi, Bastianini is like Stoner’

Bastianini’s winning move on Bagnaia, at Turn 7, was the first last-lap overtake since Aragon last year, which suggests MotoGP is slipping back into 800s territory, when the racing became more like Formula 1 cars. Bastianini told us that he had to be clever during the race, trying not to stay too close to Bagnaia for too long, otherwise his front tyre would’ve overheated. So he had to bide his time and judge his attack perfectly.

The 20-race championship moves into its final quarter at Motegi next week. Quartararo will arrive there still aching from his terrifying crash, when he tagged the rear of Marc Márquez’s Honda, after the six-time champ rolled off the throttle to save a slide. Quartararo was very lucky not be run over by following machines.

The reigning world champion’s zero-points haul takes Bagnaia to within just ten points of the championship lead, with Aragon third-place finisher Aleix Espargaró a further seven back – just 17 points covering the first three.

Bagnaia, with 120 points from the last five races to Quartararo’s 39, looks like the championship favourite, especially because the next two tracks might’ve been designed for the Desmosedici: lots of straight-line acceleration from slow corners and lost of straight-line braking into slow corners.

On the other hand, Yamaha may see a glimmer of hope in the fact that MotoGP has not raced at the next four tracks – Motegi, Buriram, Phillip Island and Sepang – since 2019, when the Desmosedici was a very different machine, beset with its age-old demons, while the basic concept of Yamaha’s YZR-M1 has hardly changed. The same goes for Aprilia’s 90-degree V4 RS-GP, which is an entirely different machine to the 2019 narrow-angle V4 RS-GP.

Ducati and Aprilia might therefore have to work harder to adapt their latest motorcycles to those tracks. But maybe not, because the RS-GP and especially the Desmosedici are the most neutral machines in MotoGP right now, so they work well pretty much everywhere, which means their engineers and mechanics should be able remove their bikes from the flight cases and have them dialled in nice and quickly.

In theory, at least. Motegi will be extra tricky, because there’s no Friday morning practice, since Dorna can’t get the freight to the track in time. No doubt many paddock people will be keeping anxious eyes on flight-track apps this week, watching the progress of MotoGP’s Jumbo 747 freighters as they lumber eastward. And what if they are late, as they were in Argentina?

Espargaró isn’t out of the title hunt, but he hasn’t won a race since early April. His biggest strength so far has been his consistency – he’s the only rider in the championship top ten to have scored at every race – but he’ll need to step it up if he’s to trouble the two riders in front of him.

The 33-year-old made several big mistakes last weekend. Espargaró and the Aprilia always go well at Aragon, where the ability of both bike and rider to brake aggressively with lean angle – something you have to do frequently around the sweeping, undulating track – made him super-confident of a strong result. Perhaps he thought he could fight for the win and get some points back on Bagnaia.

He admitted after the race that he had been over-confident going into the weekend. That’s usually when things go wrong and indeed they did – two crashes on Friday put him in a hole and he had to work hard to regain confidence.

Starting from the second row, surrounded by Ducatis, he was never with the leaders but at least he was able to snatch third from KTM’s Brad Binder, who took advantage of the track’s low-grip surface to score his best result since the season-opening Qatar GP.

Of course, the biggest story of the weekend might have been the return of six-time MotoGP king Marc Márquez, who had been out of racing since May but was straight back on the pace, skidding and sliding his way to eighth fastest on Friday, just three-tenths off the top. However, he ruined his Saturday with a crash in FP3, which contributed to his lowly fifth-row start. No matter, by the first corner of the race he had gone from 13th to sixth. Then he got sideways at Turn 3 and Quartararo hit him.

Márquez’s shapeshifter was damaged by the collision and when he engaged the device exiting Turn 7 it partially locked the rear wheel, sending him wide, where he collided with Takaaki Nakagami, sending the Japanese flying.

Honda will be hoping that Aragon was some kind of nadir before the race at its home track next Sunday.