With just one round remaining in the 2023 MotoGP season, it doesn’t look good for Jorge Martín. And he knows it.
“Hopefully I can fight for championships in the future, but today I feel a big loss because it’s really difficult [to win the championship] now,” the Prima Pramac Ducati rider, who sits second in the world championship standings, told members of the media after Sunday’s Grand Prix of Qatar.
Martín and title rival Pecco Bagnaia of Lenovo Ducati experienced a remarkable turn of fortunes throughout the weekend’s events just outside of Doha. Martín won Saturday’s Sprint while Bagnaia finished a distant fifth, which cut the latter’s championship lead to just seven points. In Sunday’s grand prix, though, Bagnaia finished second and Martín dropped to a scarcely believable 10th, watching helplessly as his title deficit ballooned to 21 points.
How can they explain such wild swings in form? According to both, it was the tires.
MotoGP, like so many of the world’s preeminent championships, is a spec-tire series. Michelin produces tires for the whole grid, specially formulated to suit the conditions of each circuit on the calendar, and then the International Road-Racing Teams Association randomly assigns each race’s allotment to every rider. This practice eliminates the possibility of any rider gaining a performance advantage.
Bagnaia explained his disappointing Saturday by suggesting that his tires delivered significantly less performance than any set he’d tried throughout the weekend. His misfortune allowed Martín to close the gap, only for Martín’s Sunday set of tires to behave as though they were 30 laps old, he said. Their testimony suggests each received dud Michelins in the desert.
“It’s a pity that a championship like this, after such a great season … I feel like [Michelin] stole it from me, because I think I could [win the championship] before this race,” Martín said. “Now it’s really difficult.”
The man from Madrid struck a more conciliatory tone on Thursday.
“Maybe I spoke a bit too much after the race,” he said at the pre-race news conference from Valencia. “I’m a really impulsive person.”
“For the moment, we have no indication [of anything wrong with Martín’s tire] but we will look at the data that we get…
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