Chapeau for Zarco, Bagnaia out-thinks Martin

“You try to keep the hope always there, but then you’re wondering, why don’t I have these moments the others have?” said the 33-year-old formarmer Moto2 champion, who’s been in MotoGP since 2017.

“At the last corner I had this feeling, okay, I know I’ll have good drive, but then you open the throttle and you feel you don’t have any power and you’re scared you’ll get passed at the line. Over the finish line there was no explosion of emotion. It was more of a calm feeling, ahh, it’s done.

“I was really happy to get the congratulations from many riders [on the slowdown lap], who opened their visors, so I could see they were happy for me and this brought me a very nice emotion.

“And winning in Phillip Island gives you a really nice feeling, because everyone loves the track, so you feel you are part of the big guys if you win here and this is a very nice feeling.”

The race wasn’t a typical Phillip Island brawl, until the final lap. Last year eight riders slugged it out for the win, chopping and changing at every other corner, all of them crossing the finish line covered by eight tenths of a second.

This time it was a race between a hare and four tortoises (relatively speaking), their different strategies finally converging a third of the way through the last lap.

The hare was Jorge Martin, desperate to make up for throwing away 25 points in Indonesia the previous weekend. The tortoises were Zarco, reigning champion and current points leader Pecco Bagnaia, the transformed Fabio Di Giannantonio and Brad Binder.

The difference in their strategies was simple: Martin was the only front-running rider to choose a soft rear slick, while everyone else went for the medium, because nowhere murders rear tyres like Phillip Island, with its numerous long, sweeping, throttle-on left-handers.

Martin’s gamble threw another twist into the championship battle that is somewhat reminiscent of the 2006 title fight, with more twists and turns than an LA canyon road.

His strategy was to use the soft tyre to break away from the pack and build enough of a lead, so that when the tyre lost grip, which it inevitably would, he would be able to use his super-smooth throttle technique to hold his advantage to the chequered flag.

There was plenty of method in his madness. If you’re in the lead pack at Phillip Island anything can happen — you can be first at one corner and sixth at the next — so why not get out front, where you’re in charge of your own destiny?

Some rivals called Martin’s tyre choice “insane”, but the gamble so very nearly paid off. He led 26 of the 27 laps and was only overcome by the tortoises with eight corners remaining.

Martin had taken the championship lead by winning the Indonesian sprint, but his crash the following day and his fifth-place finish at Phillip Island puts him a way behind Bagnaia with four sprints and four GP races to go.
So was Martin brave or stupid to go with the soft?

“Courage is knowing something might hurt and doing it anyway,” goes the saying. “Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.”

This kind of thing happens all the time in racing. It happened in last month’s Indian GP, where Martin was the only rider to choose the medium rear, not the soft. His gamble didn’t pay off that time either, but when you’re trying to attack, not defend, you take risks.

And sometimes apparently insane tyre choices can turn out to be the exact opposite.

It happened during the 2000 British GP, where Ralf Waldmann won the 250cc race. The German started on rain tyres while everyone else ran slicks. Halfway through the race he was wobbling around near the back. Then it started raining. Waldmann took the lead exiting the final corner, for his 20th and last GP win.

When journalists congratulated Waldi on his magical victory he shrugged off the praise. All he had to say was this, “The difference between idiot and hero is very small.”

If the race had been one lap shorter he would’ve been an idiot. If Saturday’s Australian GP had been one lap shorter Martin would’ve been a hero.

You only need to lead the race on one lap.

So why did Martin choose the soft rear?

During practice he used the medium more than the soft, so that doesn’t add up. But he used the soft more than the medium in Friday afternoon’s session, which accorded better to race conditions than the other sessions, so that does add up.

And track temperature during the race was 35°C, 8°C cooler than it had been on Friday, so that adds up too. And the fact that the Ducati puts its torque to the ground more smoothly and effectively than any other bike also adds up.

In the end, of course, none of that matters.

“I was really convinced the soft was the one,” said Martin. “I took the risk and it didn’t work by half a lap… I rode really smooth, trying to be super-clean on the tyres but finally it didn’t work.”

But later Martin suggested that maybe he’d been advised badly on tyre choice, so who knows what went on there?

“Seven laps to go was the moment I thought, ah, I’m in trouble, because they were catching 0.4 seconds a lap at that point. I was pushing a lot but I couldn’t accelerate, so I was pushing in braking and with corner speed.”

By half-distance Martin had opened a gap of 3.5 seconds but that was as good as it got and that wasn’t good enough. The gap remained steady for a few laps, then began to crumble and finally collapse.

All this time Zarco, Bagnaia, Di Giannantonio and Binder had been trying to keep themselves in the game — advancing, then retreating as they remembered they needed to baby their rear tyres.

And then they saw Martin coming back towards them.

“I was quite fast from the beginning and controlling the rear tyre well behind Pecco,” added Zarco. “Because I knew he would keep the pace to fight for the podium. I didn’t think about victory, but you never know. Jorge was controlling the soft very well, so I was amazed how he dropped in the last five laps. From there I began to understand there was a real possibility to catch something fantastic.”

Bagnaia had smelt blood even earlier. “At one moment I was a bit worried when I saw Jorge go away, but today it was very, very, very important to remain calm with the tyres. Then as soon as I saw that Jorge was stuck at the same gap, I said, okay we will catch him.”

As usual the reigning champ had started his weekend slowly and this is probably why he is champion and may well become champion again. Once again he failed to go directly through to Q2, which most riders and teams take as a very bad omen, but not Bagnaia.

“Doing all those laps on the medium rear on Friday helped, for sure,” he said. “We didn’t go into Q2 directly because we preferred to do more laps with the medium…”

In other words, Bagnaia simply out-thought Martin.

He was still thinking deeply when he passed Martin as they attacked Turn 4 for the final time, using the gap opened by Zarco.

“I tried to overtake Jorge as quickly as I could, because we were a group of three or four guys and I wanted to give the others the possibility to also overtake him [to take more points from Martin].”

The Italian and Spaniard are very different racers and look it too.

When you spot Bagnaia across the room you feel like you might have a nice chat with him about the origins of existentialism. When you see Martin you think, ‘Christ, this bloke is going to rip my off head and shit down my neck’ (to use Colin Edwards’ favourite phrase).

So which of them will win the 75th premier-class world championship?

27 points stand between them, with 148 still available, so the fight is far from over. Martin is the fastest motorcycle racer on Earth at the moment, but Bagnaia has regained the advantage by using his brain more than his balls.

“Things can change very quickly in the championship, we know that perfectly,” said Bagnaia. “I had a 62-point gap [after August’s Austrian GP] and I lost everything, so you have to be calm, precise and intelligent in every situation. Maybe from the outside it sometimes looks like we are struggling, then in the races we are always at the front. This is something remarkable.”

Martin says he will approach the final four races more calmly. Who knows whether this new tactic will work for him or not?

“For sure I won’t take any gambles from now on,” he said. “I think we’ll go with same tyres as my opponents and I’ll stick to that for rest of the season, at least.

“I’m the fastest rider but if I don’t make the right choices for the races it’s useless. I can still fight for the championship — it depends on me, so if I’m focused and if I don’t make mistakes I think I can still win a lot more races this year.”

Martin may have messed up last weekend, but he was also unlucky. A nasty weather front was due to hit Phillip Island on Sunday, so Dorna switched the main race to Saturday, moving the sprint to Sunday. There was little doubt who would win the sprint, but it never happened, because by late Sunday morning the weather was dangerously bad.

Martin was desperate for another chance to take points out of Bagnaia. “Hopefully we’ll have the sprint even if it’s snowing,” he laughed on Saturday.

Fifteen years ago Valentino Rossi was saying that Dorna needed to move the Phillip Island event to a different time of year, because the spring weather is too often too bad — dangerous for riders and horrible for fans. This really needs to happen now.