Is rubbing racing? Bastianini's brutal move divides opinion

MotoGP

Enea Bastianini’s winning Misano move was MotoGP’s first last-lap overtake of 2024 but was it too much or just enough? And how come Pecco Bagnaia has crashed out of twice as many races as Jorge Martin?

Bastianini Martin Misano

Bastianini dives past Martin on the last lap – moments later the pair collided and ran off the track. Officials saw no problem but some riders and fans did

Dorna/MotoGP

Mat Oxley

‘King’ Kenny Roberts is one of the greatest motorcycle racers of all time: huge talent, fiercely intelligent, unmatched technical knowhow and happy to do evil things to his rivals, as and when required.

Here’s the three-time MotoGP champion talking about racing dirt track in the USA, before he came to grands prix and showed Europe how to ride.

“One time going through a turn I felt this guy’s clutch lever on my right foot, so I just gassed it and flipped him off,” Roberts told me a while back. “He came over afterwards and wanted to know why I’d knocked him down, and I said, ‘Well, the reason I knocked you down is that you put your clutch lever on my foot’, so he started shouting that I’d knocked him down and I said, ‘Yeah, and next time you do that I’ll knock you down again’.

“You know, it’s just one of those things – if anyone does something like that to you, well, sorry…”

And here’s five-time MotoGP king Mick Doohan, who was run off the track in sixth gear by two rivals, once at Phillip Island in 1990 and once at Shah Alam, Malaysia, in 1996. (I won’t mention names because it will only reawaken old arguments.)

“Intimidation is what it’s all about,” says Doohan. “If you do that kind of stuff enough, it gets to the point where people know as soon as they see you: ‘I may as well shut down now because it’s not like he’s going to do me any favours’.”

That’s motorcycle racing – it’s a brutal game.

Enea Bastianini’s controversial last-lap, winning pass on Jorge Martin at Misano on Sunday was a brutal move, but riders have been bumping into each other forever.

Like 2006 MotoGP champ Nicky Hayden liked to say, “Rubbin’ is racin’!”.

Bastianini and Martin ground effect bike

Both Bastianini and Martin raced with Ducati’s new ground-effect accoutrements, while Bagnaia didn’t. Did this make the difference? Nope

Ducati

And like four-times 250cc world champion Max Biaggi once said, “This is motorcycle racing, not classical dancing”.

What’s most important is that Bastianini’s move wasn’t dangerous – it was a bump more than a barge and it happened at the dead-slow Turn 4, not at the 140mph Turn 11, which would’ve been 100% different. And although he wouldn’t have hit the apex if Martin hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have run off the track but for the pair getting tangled, so he didn’t reach the paint through maniacal momentum.

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And if some people think that’s not the point, does MotoGP need to move towards automatically punishing riders who collide with rivals while they’re overtaking? I hope not, because overtaking in MotoGP is already too difficult. Indeed this was MotoGP’s first last-lap overtake of 2024, so I don’t think riders should be made to ask for a written invitation to make a pass.

“This is the only way to overtake with these bikes,” said Marc Márquez, who nonetheless thought Bastianini should’ve been dropped to second as punishment.

Martin, of course, is already plotting his revenge, because, like Roberts told us, that’s how top bike racers work.

“I guess if next time I need to do it, it should be with no consequence,” said the Spaniard, who goes into this weekend’s Indonesian GP – round 15 of 20 – with a 24-point lead over Pecco Bagnaia, who crashed out again on Sunday.

So Martin takes the decision of the Misano stewards as a green light to bumping his way past whoever is in his way during the last six weekends of the 2024 championship. And this most likely means his number-one championship rival Bagnaia, not Bastianini, who simply doesn’t have the consistency to be in the title fight.

Bastianini and Martin

“It was the only way to attack,” said Bastianini. Martin’s calmness in parc fermé was impressive

Dorna/MotoGP

Martin’s words give me strong vibes of the 2015 Dutch TT, where Valentino Rossi collided with Márquez while making a pass at the final chicane on the last lap. The move gave Rossi the win. Afterwards Márquez said he had learned a lot from Rossi’s passing manoeuvre, just like Martin says he’s learned from Bastianini’s.

The secret of course is not to overstep the mark (no pun intended).

Perhaps the incident wouldn’t even have happened if Bagnaia’s rear tyre had worked throughout the race, leaving his fellow Ducati riders fighting for the honour of being first loser.

The reigning world champion took the lead moments after the start and briefly looked like he would clear off into the distance. But then he had a shake here, a slide there. He didn’t have rear traction.

Bagnaia went backwards at such a rate that it looked like he might even lose third place to Márquez. Finally his rear tyre warmed to the task and suddenly he was the fastest man on track, smashing the lap record and hauling in the leaders.

His counter-attack was super-impressive and super-brave. He could have settled for third, but he’s in the title fight with Martin, so every point counts. In six laps he closed the gap to Martin from 3.3 seconds to 2.1 seconds, then he locked the front tyre entering the tricky Turn 8 left and went down in a heap.

Just like there’s a thin line between acceptable overtakes and unacceptable overtakes, there’s also a thin line between hero and zero. One moment Bagnaia was the former, the next the latter, just like Martin two weeks earlier.

Misano MotoGP

Bagnaia led the first three laps from Martin and Bastianini, then went backwards

Dorna/MotoGP

Bagnaia was angry about his rear tyre issue.

“The rear tyre started to work after 15 laps – I don’t think this has happened to anyone before,” he said. “I was pushing very hard but I was being very careful on the brakes because from the start I had a lot of front locking. I locked the front while I was straight. Everything was quite strange today.”

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Bagnaia has now crashed out of six races this year: at Portimao, Jerez, Barcelona, Silverstone, Aragon and Misano.

This latest mistake swung the championship advantage back to Martin, who, perhaps surprisingly, has crashed out of half as many races, at Jerez, Mugello and Sachsenring.

Why so many crashes from Bagnaia?

When riders are racing for a tenth here and a tenth there, they must routinely ask too much of the tyres, otherwise they’ll be out of the fight. Therefore the fastest riders are teetering on the brink. The results seem to support that theory: this year the pack is more spread out than before, suggesting that the riders at the front are pushing the outer limits like never before.

Sure, Ducati’s Desmosedici GP24 gives Martin, Bagnaia and Bastianini an advantage, but exploiting that advantage is fraught with risk.

Michelin’s super-grippy 2024 rear slick is part of that highwire balancing act. It has so much grip that it unbalances the motorcycle, because if one tyre has much more grip than the other then it takes load (and therefore grip) away from the less grippy tyre. This may have exacerbated the front-locking issue.

If you’ve ever locked the front tyre on a motorcycle you will understand that it’s a very scary thing. Current MotoGP riders lock the front tyre all the time, from 200mph and more, so they’re always just a fraction of extra pressure on the brake lever away from disaster.

Perhaps Bagnaia needs to use the front geometry setting that Martin adopted at the British GP, following his last race crash at Sachsenring.

“This has lost me a bit of performance [really?!] but I don’t have these crazy crashes anymore,” said Martin on Sunday.

Acosta leads the second wave of bikes in Misano MotoGP

Acosta leads the next wave, from Marc Marquez. Eventually the pace proved too much for the brilliant rookie

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Bagnaia is far from out of the game – 24 points isn’t a huge disadvantage when there are 222 points up for grabs. But apart from the mathematics, the gap could be a problem for him, because he knows he can’t afford to make any more mistakes. And when you know that you absolutely must not do anything wrong it can affect your riding. You become a prisoner to your own ambition, which adds to the stress, which makes mistakes more likely.

And yet Bagnaia usually gets better under pressure. Will that remain the case over MotoGP’s final six weekends?

We call it the f**king black hole!

The Italian’s 100th MotoGP race may have ended badly, but Misano Two gave his employer its 100th premier-class victory, 21 years after its first, when Loris Capirossi and the very first iteration of Ducati’s Desmosedici defeated Rossi’s Honda RC211V at Barcelona-Catalunya.

But perhaps it’s more revealing to remember the Desmosedici’s ancient failures than its ancient successes to fully understand the immensity of Ducati’s first century of MotoGP wins.

A decade or so ago the desmo V4 was the joke of the MotoGP paddock – an evil thing, feared even by the world’s fastest riders.

Hayden spent five grim, painful years trying to adapt to the Desmosedici after winning the title with Honda.

“Every time I feel good, I crash,” said the American in 2010. “You’re feeling good and you think, ‘Wow, I can go faster’, and then you’re down, with no warning.”

And there’s nothing racers hate more than that.

Rossi’s two grim years on the bike were punctuated by frequent zero-warning crashes – his accident rate more than doubled when he moved from Yamaha to Ducati in 2011.

Of course, Rossi had a fine phrase to describe that sickening moment when you lose the front and it feels like ground is opening up beneath you.

“We call it the f**king black hole!” he said.

An unstoppable force- Ducati took its 100th MotoGP victory and its fifth consecutive constructors title on Sunday

An unstoppable force- Ducati took its 100th MotoGP victory and its fifth consecutive constructors title on Sunday

Dorna/MotoGP

Ducati’s efforts to dig itself out of that hole have been remarkable. Since Gigi Dall’Igna joined the company at the end of 2013 the Desmosedici has turned into an unstoppable force, at the same time transforming MotoGP into a very different championship, for better or for worse.

Radical new technology was Dall’Igna’s answer to Ducati’s MotoGP nightmare.

“Because when your riders arrive 30 seconds behind the winner you have to take risks, you cannot be conservative,” he says.

Downforce aerodynamics was Dall’Igna’s first radical tech, for a very obvious reason that no one else had considered.

“If you look at the data you can easily understand that wheelies are one of the main problems in MotoGP, so if you want to improve your lap times you have to do something in order to reduce wheelies,” he adds. “At some tracks like Jerez the horsepower of the engine means nothing, but with wings you can start to use the power.

“I’d been convinced since the beginning of my career in motorcycle racing that aerodynamics was something that hadn’t been developed enough. But I didn’t have the competence to develop my ideas in a proper way, because it’s very complicated, absolutely more complicated than car aerodynamics. So when I started work for Ducati I thought this was something we need to push forward in order to win again.”

Dall’Igna’s willingness to travel down new roads of technical development has left the rest of the grid scrambling to keep up. And no one knows when or if the others will catch up. Look at KTM riders Pedro Acosta and Brad Binder, who both ended up on the ground trying to stay with the Ducatis on Sunday, making Maverick Viñales the top non-Ducati finisher in sixth, averaging almost six tenths a lap slower than the winner.

Ducati team boss

Ducati’s Desmosedici was a MotoGP paddock joke until Dall’Igna arrived and used radical technology to transform the machine

Ducati

The Ducati uses the Michelin rear better than any other bike, because, especially since Michelin became spec tyre supplier in 2015, the bike has always prioritised rear grip

Bastianini’s controversial Misano victory also gave the company its fifth consecutive constructors’ championship. In three quarters of a century of world championship racing only three other manufacturers have won five in a row – MV Agusta in the 1960s, Suzuki in the 1970s and Honda in the 1990s.

Sunday also gave Ducati its tenth podium lockout of the year, something that’s never been done before. Historic domination.

But Ducati still has a very, very long way to match Honda and Yamaha, however deep the hole in which the Japanese manufacturers currently find themselves.

Last season Ducati moved past Suzuki into fourth place in the all-time constructors GP winners’ league. To reach the all-time podium and pass third-placed MV Agusta it needs another 40 victories.

Bettering Honda and Yamaha will take a while longer, because Honda leads the way on 313 wins, with Yamaha on 245.

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