Jorge Martin is on fire – even in the rain

There’s definitely tension building between Martin and Bagnaia. At the end of the sprint, Martin fist-bumped with runner-up Brad Binder on the cooldown lap, but moments later when he rode past Bagnaia he didn’t even look at him. On the podium they exchanged a cold handshake, Martin averting Bagnaia’s gaze. None of the matey hugs and kisses we’ve become used to.

Martin has got Bagnaia in his crosshairs and there will be no mercy.

After Sunday’s race Bagnaia suggested in the post-race media conference that he would’ve had a chance of winning if the red flags hadn’t come out.

“I was trying not to have too much consumption of the rear tyre,” he said. “But it was useless because of the red flag. The red flag was good, but we lost a possibility.”

If there’s one thing race winners really don’t like hearing, it’s someone they’ve just beaten suggesting the story might have been different, if…

Both men rode remarkable, very nearly perfect races in treacherous conditions. Motegi is horrible in the wet — iffy grip and spray hanging in the air, making it difficult for riders to see where they’re going. So they were risking to the maximum.

Martin used some unusual lines to gain the advantage. He took some risky v-lines, braking into corners with lean angle, so he could get his bike stood up quicker.

“I had really good exit drive and good electronics,” he said.

Bagnaia never gave up his pursuit, just metres behind, lap after lap.

“It was difficult — I was pushing in the corner entries but Jorge was using much more tyre,” he said. “I was controlling the throttle to not use too much rear tyre, gaining lap by lap without pushing too much.”

Their races were short of perfection because of one mistake each.

Martin locked his front tyre attacking Turn 3 for the third time, ran off track and dropped from first to eighth. Many riders would’ve panicked at that, tried too hard to get back to the front and made more mistakes. But Martin remained ice cool.

“Having good exit drive I was able to overtake them all,” he added.

Bagnaia’s mistake — or it could’ve been a bike glitch — came immediately after the bike change at the end of the first lap, as riders accelerated out of pitlane.

“I got stuck with the pit limiter,” he explained.

In an instant he had Martin, Marc Márquez, Aleix Espargaró and Jack Miller come past. But Bagnaia didn’t panic either. He soon passed all of them, except Martin.

The three podium men had good reason to be 100% delighted with what they’d done: firstly, surviving the race, which was red-flagged when conditions became too dangerous, secondly, making the podium.

This was especially true of Márquez, because this was his first top-three of the year. In fact it was the first time he’d finished a 2023 GP race in the top six!

If Bagnaia did indeed have bad luck with his pit limiter on Sunday, Martin had some massive luck before the start of the previous day’s sprint race.

A sensor malfunctioned on his bike while he waited on the grid, which had Dall’Igna and MotoGP technical officer Danny Aldridge come over to take a look.

“Marc has decided to leave Honda for an unofficial Ducati”

We don’t know which sensor went AWOL (perhaps it was a TPMS?), but Martin wouldn’t have been able to start the race without it. Luckily the sensor came back to life, just before the warm-up lap.

No doubt Bagnaia wasn’t happy at losing another five points to Martin but he was in a good enough mood in the media conference to drop a mischievous quip about the Márquez-to-Ducati story, which took an important turn over the weekend.

On Sunday, Ducati Corse general manager Gigi Dall’Igna became the first senior Ducati staffer to confirm that Márquez is leaving Honda to join Gresini Ducati, if he can get out of his Honda contract.

“Marc has decided to leave Honda for an unofficial Ducati,” Dall’Igna told Sky Italia TV. “I think there are a lot of things to do, because it’s a complicated contract to break. In the event that he wants to break it… But it seems to me that the declaration made is this. From our point of view it’s very pleasing.”

It’s very unusual for a MotoGP factory boss to make this kind of statement before a deal has been signed, sealed and delivered, so no doubt that there was an ulterior motive in the statement, to shake things up behind the scenes.

And what was Bagnaia’s quip in the media conference? Journalist Simon Patterson asked Márquez about his future, to which Márquez gave his usual non-committal reply.

“I have a clever mentality,” he said. “I know what needs to happen to go one way or the other, but we can say that today was a very romantic podium, so it was very nice.”

A few second later Bagnaia grinned and said, “Bye-bye Honda”.

Bagnaia and Márquez laughed, Martin grinned, his mind probably already on the next race at Mandalika, less than two weeks away.

Márquez’s ride was mightily impressive. He struggled in the early stages, when there wasn’t much water on the track, but the harder the rain fell, the faster he got, snatching the final podium place from third title-contender Marco Bezzecchi just moments before the red flags came out.

The six-time MotoGP king has spent most of this season racing well within himself, because there’s no point risking injury to finish ninth instead of tenth. But when he smells blood — like in some sprint races when he can abuse his rear tyre to run near the front, and in the pouring rain when he can do what the bike doesn’t want to do — he transforms from Márquez the prudent to Márquez the merciless. Like Clark Kent in a telephone box.

Asked if he can be competitive in the dry at the remaining six races his answer was as short as it gets.

“No,” he said. “At stop-and-go tracks [like Motegi] I can take risks in the brake points, turn and make a massive pick-up to have good acceleration. At Mandalika there are a few corners where we lose a lot. You can’t do anything, you just spin.”

And that of course is Ducati’s biggest advantage: the Desmosedici’s ability to transfer massive torque to the asphalt, in the wet and the dry, thanks to the engine’s gentle power delivery (the opposite of how it used to be) and Ducati’s mastery of the Magneti Marelli electronics.

Bezzecchi’s fifth place (behind Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaró) in the Motegi gloom, seven days after his astonishing runaway victory in the furnace of Buddh, lost him ground in the championship tussle. But he did well considering what had happened to him in qualifying. He took a heavy tumble at the start of Q2, got on his spare bike and went fourth quickest, just seven-hundredths off the front row. That was a heroic performance which tells us he’s far from given up the fight.

If Martin was the luckiest rider of the weekend, Johann Zarco was the unluckiest. The French Pramac rider crashed out of sixth place on lap 13, moments before the red flags came out (in fact it was probably his tumble that convinced Race Direction to stop the race) but even though the results were, as usual in these situations, taken back a lap, to lap 12, he was counted as a non-finisher. Why? Because he didn’t enter pitlane correctly as he pushed his smashed-up Ducati back to his garage after the race had been stopped. What an idiotic rule.

This year’s Japanese GP, like last year’s, was another embarrassment for the local manufacturers that once ruled the championship: just two bikes in the top ten: Márquez third and Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo tenth, running a second a lap off the winning pace.

Compare that to the previous Motegi race in 2019 (Covid kept MotoGP out of Japan in 2020 and 2021) when Márquez won, Quartararo was second and there were seven Japanese machines in the top eight.

Ducati has already won has won nine sprint/grand prix doubles this year, so at the next round it only needs to score five points to clinch its fourth consecutive constructors’ title, with five GPs remaining. That’s quite something.