Bagnaia isn’t wrong. This year’s average winning pace is more than half a second faster than last season’s, an unheard-of year-on-year improvement. Saturday’s Sepang sprint was nine-tenths per lap faster than last year’s! Winner Martin attributed this “100%” to Michelin’s new-for-2024 compounds, but the title duellists are the only riders that can use these tyres to the maximum.

Michelin’s latest tyres are super-sticky but they’re also super-tricky – this is quite normal when rubber technicians increase grip so dramatically. One reason Bagnaia, especially, has crashed out of so many races is because usually when you have a lot more grip the limit becomes narrower, so when you reach that limit the grip doesn’t disappear so gradually. And when lean angles are way past 60 degrees it becomes more and more difficult to save a crash. Aero downforce only exacerbates this issue.

Bagnaia has won ten GPs to Martin’s three, but he’s also crashed out of seven races to Martin’s three. That’s the championship difference, right there.

Bagnaia’s stunning wet-weather Thai GP victory the previous weekend had put him 17 points behind Martin, with four races to go, so he was still very much in the hunt.

His Sepang sprint tumble at the dead-slow Turn 9 hairpin wasn’t the decisive moment of the championship, because it was only one of his seven tumbles, but with only three races remaining he was now 29 points down and that was almost certainly too high a mountain to climb.

The latest crash, while chasing leader Martin, was a strange one. Turn 9 has been resurfaced multiple times, most recently with a small patch of asphalt near the apex.

“At first I was a bit too aggressive at Turn 9, so the front was moving too much,” explained Bagnaia. “The lap after I said, ‘I’ll enter more calmly’, and I crashed. It’s something that can happen. I wasn’t taking risks over the limits, but I crashed.”

Of course, some might say, why didn’t Bagnaia miss the bump? But that’s a bit like Eddie Lawson’s comment after Freddie Spencer hit a straw bale on the inside of the corner (imagine that!) at Rijeka, Yugoslavia, during their duel for the 1984 MotoGP title. Spencer ripped ligaments in his leg when he clipped the bale at around 100mph. After the race the always laconic Lawson opined, “There was always the option of missing the bale”.

In Sunday’s GP Martin came very, very close to crashing at Turn 9, on lap 16 of 19. At three-quarters distance he had reduced Bagnaia’s advantage from 2.2 seconds to 1.5. And, perhaps madly, he smelt victory and started pushing harder again.

“When Marc crashed I relaxed too much – okay second is enough. Then I saw I’d closed the gap to Pecco. I saw him struggling and going wide. Then at Corner 9 I had a moment and that was enough. It was too risky for me to keep attacking.”

Martin says the biggest thing he’s learned this year is to be calmer and more focused. However, he has also admitted that relaxing can be his worst enemy.

“When I breathe, when I try to relax, I become more nervous and everything becomes more difficult,” he said after Saturday’s sprint. “Today I was nervous in the morning, so I said to Gino [Borsoi, Pramac Ducati team manager] that I will go for it. It’s the only way – if I am 100% focused I give my best.”

This makes perfect sense: just focus on one thing – going absolutely as fast as you can. As soon as you start thinking about other things – the points situations, what your rivals might do and so on, you are multitasking, which means you’re not concentrating on the most important thing of all – wringing the neck of your 300-horsepower, 225mph MotoGP bike.

Bagnaia’s Sepang sprint disaster was the story of his season. Four of his crashes – Jerez, Catalunya, Silverstone and Sepang – have happened in sprints. Meanwhile Martin has won seven of the short races to Bagnaia’s six.

“We have to understand what to do better in the sprints,” said Bagnaia. “Because every time I’m missing something in the sprints. I can’t attack like I do in the long races. We will try to understand and improve for next year.”

What could be the problem? Some people say Bagnaia needs Saturday’s data to do better on Sunday, but this is nonsense, because all riders use their sprint data to elevate their performance in the GP. Sprints are basically FP4 sessions with points and better data, because it’s race data, not race-simulation data.

All the manufacturers use different fuel tanks for sprints – no point putting 12 litres of fuel in a 22-litre tank. So the different tanks and different fuel loads change the motorcycle’s centre of mass, which is a vital part of the machine’s dynamics. Most likely Bagnaia and his engineers will spend a lot of time during off-season tests using sprint tanks and fuel loads, because he’s basically lost this year’s championship due to below-par sprint performances.

His Sunday victory was his tenth GP win of 2024 and only five other racers in three quarters of a century of world-championship racing have won ten or more premier-class GPs in a season: Giacomo Agostini, Mick Doohan, Márquez, Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner. Not a bad gang of which to be a member.

Of course, Bagnaia could have played plenty of games with Martin on Sunday. He could have slowed down the pace, bringing Márquez into the battle and maybe even Bastianini. This is considered normal racecraft, but it’s not his style.

“I’m a clean guy, a true sportsman, I don’t like that kind of thing,” he said.

Many fans bemoan the fact that there’s no aggro between Bagnaia and Martin. Their duel for glory has none of the Rossi versus Jorge Lorenzo, Marquez versus Lorenzo, Kevin Schwantz versus Wayne Rainey, Barry Sheene versus ‘King’ Kenny Roberts, Ago versus Phil Read edge to it.

“I’m not the type of guy that wants to be rude outside the track,” explained Bagnaia. “And I don’t need to be rude on track either, or be aggressive, pushing the other guy out. I’m not the guy that doesn’t respect my rivals. I’ve never been like this and I will never be. Maybe if Jorge starts something I will change but Jorge is more or less like me.”

Up to a point.

Last year I interviewed Martin and he told me: “I guess I have a really killer mentality. What I’ve learned over the years in MotoGP is that people here aren’t your friends. I don’t need to be friends with Pecco, Marc, [Marco] Bezzecchi or with anyone – I just want to beat them.”

But every situation is different. And being enemies is stressful and takes a lot of energy, especially today, with wall-to-wall media coverage and millions of people hurling insults on social media. That’s why so many riders seem to be a bit boring now – because anything they say will be blown up into a media/social media earthquake, wasting their time and energy. So it’s better to say nothing.

Martin feels the same about Bagnaia. The pair were Mahindra Moto3 team-mates in 2015, when Bagnaia was 14th and rookie Martin 17th.

“We’ve known each other since 2015. We were really close in the past. Now we are good with each other. We can fight and have amazing battles, like today. We both enjoyed that. If it’s like this in the future it will be perfect.”

Martin was lucky when Márquez lost the front and crashed at Turn 15 on lap seven. From that moment on he knew he was safe in second place, because Bastianini was never on it all weekend, unhappy with his GP24’s front tyre moving around on corner entry.

“I was a VIP spectator – I enjoyed it a lot”

Márquez had loved watching the leaders battling it out in the first laps.

“I was a VIP spectator – I enjoyed it a lot,” he said.

But as usual he was fighting an unequal battle aboard his Ducati GP23 – the GP24s use the Michelin rear better and the latest ride-height devices lower the rear end further to decrease wheelies exiting corners and increase top speed. Thus Márquez was losing a lot of time on Sepang’s two main straights, just like at Buriram, and once again, just like Buriram, he overdid it trying to stay in the game.

Bagnaia rode the fastest lap of the race, Martin two-tenths down, Márquez three-tenths down and third-placed Bastianini a massive six-tenths down and ten seconds back at the flag. Further proof of the mighty level the top two have reached.

Alex Márquez finished fourth, less than two seconds behind Bastianini, his best Sunday result since his podium in July’s German GP.

The best non-Ducati was, of course, Pedro Acosta, who raced with KTM’s front fender aero for the first time.

“It puts different forces into the front tyre,” explained the rookie, who said the aero gave him fewer problems with the front tyre locking on the brakes and losing the front diving into corners.

Acosta’s result moves him into fifth in the championship, the top non-Ducati, while fellow KTM rider Brad Binder slips to sixth. Binder was unable to take the restart after injuring a shoulder in the pile-up, which also prevented Jack Miller from racing. Neither were seriously hurt in the accident.

Yamaha had its first double top ten of the year, with Fabio Quartararo a brilliant sixth and Álex Rins a further four seconds back in eighth. Further proof that the company is making steady forward steps with its YZR-M1. The biggest change for Quartararo last weekend was loosening up the electronics, taking away some traction control to give him more control with his throttle hand, though this, of course, makes highside crashes more likely.

The finale of MotoGP’s 76th season will now take place at Catalunya-Barcelona on 17th November, due to the devastating weather event that last week wreaked havoc in the Valencia region.

The Valencia-based Aspar Moto2/Moto3 team has set up a GoFundMe fundraiser to help the relief effort. Click to donate.