Francesco Bagnaia ensured the MotoGP season will go down to a final-round showdown, Ducati’s reigning world champion emerging triumphant from a ferocious fight with championship leader Jorge Martin to win the Malaysian Grand Prix on Sunday.
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Bagnaia, who crashed from second place in Saturday’s sprint race at Sepang as Martin won to increase the Spaniard’s series lead to 29 points, won his 10th Grand Prix this season by 3.141 seconds over Martin, with Martin now taking a 24-point lead into the final round with a maximum of 37 points available.
The penultimate Grand Prix of the season was red-flagged on the first lap after a scary crash involving Australia’s Jack Miller, who was taken to the circuit’s medical centre by ambulance after the KTM rider’s head hit the rear wheel of Fabio Quartararo’s Yamaha as he fell in the middle of the pack in turn two.
Miller’s KTM teammate Brad Binder appeared to lose a piece of bodywork and checked up and hit Quartararo, who in turn hit Miller, all three riders sent tumbling from their machinery.
Miller was miraculously cleared of injury and was able to return to his pit box on foot but wasn’t able to take the race restart after a 20-minute delay, while Binder was forced to sit out with a shoulder injury.
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The restarted race exploded into life when Bagnaia, who needed to finish at least second if Martin won the force the title fight into a decider, and Martin swapped positions repeatedly in the first three laps, with Bagnaia finally breaking away on lap five by seven-tenths of a second and not putting a foot wrong thereafter to cruise to victory.
“Managing the heat was the easiest part today,” said Bagnaia, whose eight non-finishes to Martin’s three are proving the difference in this year’s standings.
“Jorge was very aggressive and he knew he had to let me behind, but our pace was too good. Like always in the race on Sunday I can attack, I can be more and more aggressive. We just need to understand why on Saturdays [in sprint races] I’m struggling to do the same. It’s the 10th victory of the season and we are doing an incredible job … I just have to improve a bit on Saturdays.”
“Thanks to Pecco [Bagnaia], because he’s making this challenge more and more difficult,” Martin said after his 30th podium finish in 38 starts this year.
“I wanted to win and I wanted to be on the lead, but for sure Pecco had another strategy. He was quite aggressive, I was also, and we were making a good show for the first few laps. But then as soon as he overtook me, it was impossible to fight. I tried to put some more pressure, but I almost crashed.”
Bagnaia’s teammate Enea Bastianini took a distant third place, 10.484secs adrift, to draw within one point of third place in the world championship standings of Ducati’s Marc Marquez, who ran third behind Bagnaia and Martin in the early laps before crashing on lap seven, eventually remounting to finish 12th.
The final round of the season looks set to be held in Barcelona on November 15-17 after the scheduled Valencia Grand Prix was cancelled earlier this week due to heavy flooding in the region, with a year’s worth (400mm) of rain falling in just an eight-hour period on Wednesday.
In the lead-up to Sunday’s Grand Prix, MotoGP promoter Dorna said the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, site of round six of the season in May, has been approached to host the final round of the year and the one-day post-season test on November 19 that was scheduled for Valencia. Confirmation is expected in the next 24-48 hours, Dorna chief sporting officer Carlos Ezpeleta said.
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