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

MotoGP

Everything happened at Aragon: Sunday’s MotoGP race was the metronome versus the magician, Enea Bastianini ending Pecco Bagnaia’s winning streak, while title leader Fabio Quartararo crashed out in a collision that also ended Marc Márquez’s comeback

Enea Bastianini on the Aragon podium celebrating victory in the 2022 MotoGP round

Bastianini celebrates his first win since Le Mans in May, Bagnaia his first defeat since Sachsenring in June and Espargaró his first podium since Mugello in May

Gresini Racing

Mat Oxley

I would have paid good money for Dorna to have attached a heart-rate monitor to Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali on Sunday. Two weeks ago, interviewed immediately after the Misano race, Domenicali opined that Enea Bastianini’s attempted last-lap attack on championship leader and factory Ducati man Pecco Bagnaia was “too risky”.

On that occasion Bastianini tried to sling his Desmosedici GP21 past Bagnaia’s GP22 but at the last moment thought better of it, his bike kicking this way and that as he fought to maintain control. You can imagine the scenes in the Ducati garage if Bastianini had taken out Bagnaia, especially because the pair will be factory team-mates from next year.

Therefore you might have expected Bastianini to follow Bagnaia at a safe distance yesterday, protecting his countryman’s championship advantages, and giving his bosses a comfortable Sunday afternoon’s entertainment. Especially following the dramatic lap-one exit of championship leader Fabio Quartararo, the second time this year the Frenchman has been taken out by another rider.

A victory bonus is always MUCH bigger than a podium bonus

But that’s not Enea ‘Push like a bastard’ Bastianini’s style, is it?

They always say that the first rider you must beat is your team-mate and that maxim held true yesterday because, since the ink was dried on Bastianini’s factory contract, he is in effect Bagnaia’s team-mate so he’s already working to establish himself as the top man in the factory garage. Plus Bastianini just wanted to win, because that’s what he is programmed to do. Plus a victory bonus – from your team and your various other sponsors – is always MUCH bigger than a podium bonus. Six figures bigger.

Enea Bastianini follows Pecco Bagnaia in the 2022 MotoGP Aragon race

Bastianini closes for the kill on Bagnaia. The youngster still has a shot at the championship

Ducati

Both times he closed up on Bagnaia’s rear wheel to make a pass – on lap eight and in the final few laps – Domenicali’s heart rate must’ve been on the rev-limiter and the same for the main men in the factory garage: chief engineer Gigi Dall’Igna, sporting director Paolo Ciabatti and team manager Davide Tardozzi, who didn’t look too impressed that an indie rider had beaten his factory rider, even though it gave Ducati its third consecutive constructors’ world championship.

Of course, Bagnaia had known that 20 points would be very nearly as good as 25 ever since he had seen Quartararo’s scary exit as the Ducati rider passed one of Aragon’s big screens during the first lap. He wanted to win, but there was no need to get desperate about it, especially after he had a few front-end warnings during the final laps, as Bastianini closed for the kill.

Bastianini’s fourth victory of the year – to Bagnaia’s six and Quartararo’s three – moved him to within 48 points of the championship lead, with five races and 125 points remaining. Surely too steep a hill to climb but worth having a go anyway, so he won’t yield to Bagnaia next Sunday at Motegi, nor the week after at Buriram in Thailand.

“Enea has a mathematical chance of winning the title, so why not try?” says his veteran personal manager Carlo Pernat, who previously managed Max Biaggi, Loris Capirossi, Andrea Iannone and others. “Strange things happen in racing, like today with Quartararo. Pecco is so strong that it will very, very difficult to better him on points but at this moment Enea has something more inside when it comes to overtaking.

“For me, Pecco is a Biaggi, a better Biaggi, while Enea is similar to Casey Stoner. He’s so fast and he can make the kind of overtakes that Casey used to make – very difficult but very clear – and other people cannot make these overtakes.”

Ducati team celebration after winning gthe 2022 MotoGP constructors championship

Ducati celebrates a hat-trick of constructors titles – note absence of engineer Dall’Igna, too busy creating his next tech tricks

Ducati

“His overtakes at Aragon were beautiful, but the overtake at Misano was so difficult. After that race I replied to Domenicali on Italian TV. If I had been Domenicali I would only have said this, ‘Amazing race, we finished first and second with our 2023 factory riders and thanks to Luca Marini for overtaking Quartararo’. Nothing more.

“Maybe at the final two races, depending on the points ranking, Enea will think about Bagnaia and the championship, but at the next races, no. The opposite! The goal now is to get as many points as possible. Forty-eight points is maybe an impossible gap, but why not dream? Why not?! So if Enea can win, he will try to win 100%.

“This is also good for the fans who watch the races. Overtaking is beautiful and fun to watch. Otherwise the fans won’t enjoy MotoGP and they will be sleeping. We need this kind of racing.”

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By Mat Oxley

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.

Marc Marquez gets his elbow down cornering at MotoGP Aragon in 2022

Marquez’s comeback proved he’s lost none of his speed but it all went wrong for him just three corners after the start

Honda

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.

Fabio Quartararo in purple sunglasses at MotoGP Aragon round in 2022

Title-leader Quartararo always knew Aragon would be difficult on the Yamaha, but it turned out way, way worse than that

Yamaha

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.

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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.