MotoGP title fight: It's better to be the hunter than the hunted

But this situation is very serious. If MotoGP wants to maintain its credibility and its appeal to fans, the championship needs to fix this tire pressure problem very soon.

This requires Michelin to introduce its new front slick next year and not in 2026. The French company is not solely responsible for this delay. MotoGP gave Michelin just 30 minutes to test the new tire with the entire grid during the recent tests at Misano. Thirty minutes?! How much can Michelin engineers learn in 30 minutes? It's ridiculous.

There should have been at least two full-day tests with the front tire to speed up its development because that is literally the biggest headache for the championship at the moment. It is also terribly unfair to drivers, teams, engineers and manufacturers. And I'm not sure the people in charge understand that.

If Pirelli wants to try out a new tire in Formula 1, the championship requires free practice sessions in races where the use of that tire is mandatory. This wealth of experience provides a lot of data and feedback so that improvements can be made quickly. It's probably too late to get MotoGP's new front line ready for 2025, but it should have happened sooner. So don't just blame Michelin for this shocking mess.

Bagnaia's ride to third place in Mandalika on Sunday after winning the sprint was great. The world champion got off to a bad start – his GP24 slipped off the grid – and took ages to get past his VR46 colleagues Franky Morbidelli and Marco Bezzecchi, whose GP23 has slightly more corner exit traction than the GP24. Eventually he made it past Bezzecchi and his push past Morbidelli into third place was great and a typically cleverly thought out overtaking maneuver from the MotoGP professor.

Bagnaia made the passing lane at the exit of flowing Turns 8 and 9. He doesn't normally use his rear ride height gauge there, but this time he did and it was like a Formula 1 driver turning on DRS.

“It all depended on my exit from those corners,” he explained. “When I got out with more angle, it was pointless to use the device because it can make wheel spin worse, but this time I got out super well, so it was a good help.”

Those extra three points could mean a lot as the championship enters its final stages.

Two more good things happened to Bagnaia in Sunday's race: two of his three title rivals failed to finish, so the title fight is now a direct duel: him against Martin, just like last year.

It took just 13 minutes to eliminate Bastianini and Márquez from the (almost mathematical) title fight. First, Márquez's engine broke down. The motorcycle caught fire almost immediately, indicating that a connecting rod along with a few liters of oil had passed through the crankcase and ignited at the exhaust pipes. His GP23 was badly damaged by the flames as the marshals were not equipped with the correct fire extinguishers.

A few laps after Márquez, Bastianini was also on fire, but in a different way. In the first few laps, the Emilia-Romagna GP winner had fallen from second to fifth place because his brand new rear tire was so grippy that it was pushing the front tire, which kept buckling. Once his front/rear grip balanced out a bit, everything changed.

Like his teammate Bagnaia, it took him a while to get past Bezzecchi and Morbidelli, but when he was in third place with ten laps to go, he began to falter from 2.9 seconds to 1.5 seconds in just four laps at Acosta. On lap 20 he set the fastest lap of the race and on the very next lap he was behind and lost the lead in turn 1. A similar decline to Bagnaia seven days earlier.

Neither Bastianini nor Márquez seemed particularly bothered that they had lost their chances of winning the title. Márquez entered 2024 with different goals, with his eyes more focused on the 2025 championship. And in Mandalika his hopes of another great result were dashed by two crashes in Q2 qualifying – the third weekend in a row that he had crashed in Q2.

“I'm sad, but my goal has already been achieved,” said Márquez, who won his first races since 2022 at the Aragon and San Marino GPs last month. “After that, my next goal was to find consistency in the races – I managed that in the last few races. The next step is to improve qualifying – I will be highly concentrated in the next races and consistently be in the top three rows, that is my next goal.”

So Márquez is all about 2025, while Martin and Bagnaia are all about 2024. Four more races outside Europe, from Motegi, where rain is forecast, to the most likely freezing Phillip Island, to scorching hot Thailand and finally back to autumn Valencia. A lot can happen.