Sepang MotoGP: Ducati’s embarrassment of riches

Who can forget Bastianini slicing past Bagnaia on the last lap to win at Aragon last month? Ducati’s management certainly couldn’t and here began some intense pitlane action that rivalled the on-track action.

Ducati Corse’s three wise men – general manager Gigi Dall’Igna, sporting director Paolo Ciabatti and factory team manager Davide Tardozzi – huddled together on the pit wall, discussing what they should do. Should they demand a Bagnaia win and ask the next door Gresini team to signal its rider to slow down?

No doubt, their hearts would’ve had an easier time if Bagnaia had been battling for the win with, say, Marc Márquez and Álex Rins. At least they could’ve played no part in the race – from lights out to chequered flag they’d have been innocent bystanders, not fully-involved big players.

I half expected a puff of red smoke to appear from atop the factory team’s pitwall Wendy house as they announced their selection of the winner.

Finally the three wise men decided there would be no factory orders – they’d just have to sweat it out and leave it up to the riders, hoping that the worst wouldn’t happen: a tangle of Desmosedicis.

Bagnaia was once again in Jorge Lorenzo mode – glass-smooth and unrattled – even though Bastianini wasn’t for giving up. After all, he’s already fighting to make himself the main man in the factory garage in 2023.

Bastianini was doing everything right. Swerving out of Bagnaia’s draft whenever he could, especially on the brakes, to get out of the lead Ducati’s oven-hot wake and give himself more air-braking.

But for once, the master of tyre life ran out of rear grip. “My traction wasn’t good, especially exiting slow corners and I lost some confidence,” Bastianini added. “I pushed really hard to overtake and I tried on the last lap but it was a little bit dangerous…”

With six corners to go they were side by side, centimetres apart, a bit like the last lap at Misano, where the Gresini rider nearly T-boned Bagnaia in his efforts to win the race.

“The difference between third and fourth in the championship is a considerable amount of money”

That Turn 9 attempt lost him vital metres, so he had no chance for a last-gasp lunge at the final hairpin, allowing Bagnaia to take the chequered flag by a quarter of a second.

Should Bastianini have given the championship leader an easier ride to those extra championship points? No, because he’s a professional motorcycle racer and huge amounts of money rested not only on that race but on the championship outcome.

We don’t know for sure what a win would earn Bastianini from Ducati, Red Bull, Alpinestars, KYT helmets and his personal sponsors, but it’s got to be something like half a million Euros. And a top-three championship finish would at least double that. Bastianini currently lies fourth overall, one point off third, so, like Bagnaia, he needs every point he can get.

“The difference between third and fourth in the championship is quite a considerable amount of money,” said Bagnaia’s team-mate Jack Miller, who came through from 21st to sixth on Sunday and stands fifth on points. “It goes from being zero to something good. Trust me, I got fourth last year and you get f**k all for it.”

If all this sounds a bit cash-obsessed, you need to know that pro racers don’t only race for kicks. They race to buy swanky mansions and rent private jets and also to hire surgeons and osteopaths to tend their buckled and broken bodies into their dotage. And Bastianini also needs to keep his irrepressible manager Carlo Pernat in fun tokens.

“The bonus is a lot of money, eh!” said Pernat. “If Enea had won the race he would be third in the championship, with four points more than Aleix [Espargaró], now he has one point less. If he loses third place, it’s a lot of money.”

Bagnaia goes into the Valencia finale next week surely on the cusp of ending Ducati’s decade and a half of hurt, since Casey Stoner won the 2007 riders title. He holds a 23-point advantage over Quartararo and Aprilia’s Espargaró, who on Sunday had his fourth grim result in a row, finishing tenth.

Thus all Bagnaia needs to secure the championship is to finish 14th, even if one of his rivals wins the race. Easy, no? In theory, yes. In reality, not really. Valencia could be cold and wet, which will make the track treacherous. Bagnaia won there last year, topping Ducati’s first-ever MotoGP podium lock-out, but on the other hand he crashed out the previous year.

“The problem is that when you are careful you can make mistakes,” he added on Sunday. “I hope to have less pressure, because I have crashed too much this year.”

Indeed – Bagnaia may have won seven races so far (equalling Stoner’s 2007 Ducati record) but he’s also crashed out of five.

At least he will have mentor Valentino Rossi at his side at Valencia. And imagine if just 12 months after Rossi retired at Valencia the first VR46 rider is crowned MotoGP king at Valencia . The story continues…

Quartararo will be in win-or-bust mode at the last race, because only victory will give him the (slenderest) chance of retaining his title.

“I will prepare like a crazy man!” he said. “Because I know my only possibility is to win and that’s my only objective.”

However, Valencia isn’t kind to Yamaha. The factory has only won a single race there in the Michelin era, largely because the layout has one fundamental flaw for the YZR-M1. The entry to the start/finish straight is super-slow, so riders have to click through all the gears before they hit the brakes for Turn 1 at around 206mph. Well, that’s the Ducati riders. The Yamaha riders will grab the brakes at around 199mph. Last year at Valencia four of the five slowest bikes were M1s…

Sepang wasn’t the end of Espargaró’s title hopes but it pretty much was. Aprilia’s superb season went awry as soon as the factory left Europe for the four flyaway races: Motegi, Buriram, Phillip Island and Sepang.

Espargaró and his engineers seemed confused by this downfall.

“We had zero grip from the beginning of the weekend,” said the Spaniard, who won Aprilia’s first MotoGP race in April to briefly lead the championship. “The last four races have been a nightmare.

“I’m very disappointed and sad but also very proud of everyone in Aprilia. What we did this year is an amazing history which will last forever. But the dream was too big for us…”

In fact, Aprilia’s dramatic turn down since MotoGP arrived in Asia is easy to understand. The last time Aprilia raced at these four tracks was pre-Covid, with the peaky, jittery, narrow-angle RS-GP. Therefore this was its first time at these venues with the very different 90-degree RS-GP, which transformed the factory’s fortunes. No other bike on the grid has changed as much as the Aprilia since 2019, so its engineers simply didn’t have the data to get up to speed like its rivals.

Ducati has also transformed its Desmosedici but over a longer period, from zero wins in 100 races between 2010 and 2016 to 12 victories from the last 19 races. From the worst bike on the grid – which scared the hell out of everyone, including Rossi – to the best bike on the grid, which everyone wants to ride because it’s so fast and friendly. All praise to Dall’Igna and his engineers.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Sepang is always a hell of a weekend. Just standing outside watching the action for more than a few minutes is more than most everyday people are prepared to handle.

Mechanics, who slave over burning-hot motorcycles in the suffocating heat and humidity of the pits call the event “the sweat Olympics”, so try to imagine what it’s like for the riders, sat aboard burning-hot motorcycles, clad in leathers, helmets and body armour, hearts pumping at 180 beats per minute, bracing their bodies against huge g-forces, while risking life and limb, duelling with rivals.

Yamaha test-rider Cal Crutchlow, who topped Friday’s wet FP2 session and finished the race in 12th, lapping only 1.2 seconds slower than Bagnaia, once swallowed a thermometer pill at Sepang to measure his core temperature.

His core quickly reached 40 degrees Celsius, which is hyperthermia or heatstroke territory, ‘a life-threatening medical emergency that requires immediate treatment – common symptoms include headache, confusion, and fatigue’.

“Our sport has the highest and fastest rate of core temperature in any sport in the world,” said the 36-year-old Briton. “Your body goes over 40 for the whole race here – by the first corner your core temperature is over 40 degrees and you’ve got 20 laps left! It’s over 30 degrees outside, you’re in a leather suit and you’re sat on a 1000cc motorcycle that’s burning you, with bikes all around you, blasting you with heat. People don’t understand.”

And Crutchlow and his rivals weren’t only getting blasted by the heat.

“I was in a six-rider group. At one point I was like, ‘F**k off and leave me alone – just let me finish the race and ride around happy! You’re getting blasted by bullets – when the other bikes throw rocks at you at 200 kays an hour they hurt. I was thinking, why am I not just riding alone at the back? But competitiveness gets the better of me.”

Crutchlow showed us some of the welts and bruises he had copped during the race, which reminded me of a story the late, great American racer Gene Romero told me.

During the late 1960s Romero was expecting to get drafted for the Vietnam war, which killed 58,000 Americans.

“One of my high-school buddies, a good, good friend called Dean Martin got drafted and told me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go there, keep racing’,” Romero told me a few years ago. “Dean was in Vietnam two months and he got killed there. I’ll never forget it, I put a little DM on my gas tank.

“I’d be on the road, going racing, and I’d call my mum, who’d say, ‘There’s a letter here for you, you’ve got to go to the draft board in LA’. I went eight or nine times and finally they didn’t take me.

“I wound up getting a 4F card [for medically unqualified] because I got badly busted up in a crash in 1967, which got me a deferment. Another time I went down I’d been racing at Ascot, which was a really fast clay [dirt] track. Down the back straightaway you got hit by these mud clods, which gave you these big red bruises that turned green and yellow. The guy at the draft board said, ‘What’s that?’. I said, ‘I don’t know, I woke up one morning and it just happened’. So I got another deferment.”

At least getting drafted into a war isn’t something today’s MotoGP riders need worry about.