The odds were heavily stacked in his favour, but rather than them lightening his load, Bagnaia felt their full weight for three days at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo.
There wasn’t a single moment of the Valencia Grand Prix weekend at which the presumptive world champion looked truly comfortable. He did his best to maintain an air of calm, but his on-track performance was a glimpse of the roiling turmoil beneath the surface.
He only just scraped through free practice 0.059 ahead of the Q2 cut-off time.
He turned that into eighth on the grid — lacklustre not just for being four places behind Fabio Quartararo but for being considerably behind his dry-weather average qualifying of 3.5 since the mid-season break, his crash in Malaysia excluded.
It was still a long way away from the conditions that would have seen the title lost, but the window of possibility had opened a little wider.
There was so much riding on Bagnaia’s performance.
It wasn’t just a personal success; he was racing for a historic second Ducati championship, for the VR46 riding academy, for his entire country — massive weight for his sleight 25-year-old frame.
“I was feeling it,” he said. “I was feeling this weight on my shoulders to give back this title to my team; to the manufacturer, to Ducati; and to Italy.
“It wasn’t easy in that moment.
“But then I spoke with Vale (Rossi), and he said to me, ‘You have to be proud to have this possibility. Not everyone can have the same feeling. It’s true that you feel the pressure, you feel anxiety, you feel fear, but you have to be proud of it, you have to be happy to have it and try to enjoy it’.
“I tried to do that, and today it didn’t work!”
But maybe it was just enough, because he made the aggressive start he needed to avoid slipping out of the points. A conservative ride — not helped by a missing wing after a duel with Quartararo — saw him move backwards through the 40-minute grand prix to take the flag ninth and only fractionally ahead of Franco Morbidelli.
However, Jack Miller, Maverick Viñales and Marc Márquez all retired, as did the potentially competitive Johann Zarco and Aleix Espargaró, laying bear how close he would’ve come to finishing 15th in a race featuring less attrition.
But it was enough.
“It took a lot to finish the race. But I’m very proud of my team, of myself, of what we did, because it’s incredible,” he said.
“When I passed the finish line I just saw the pit board that I was the world champion, and from that moment everything was lighter, more nice. Everything was incredible. My emotion is incredible at this moment.
“I saw many faces crying. And it was incredible. I was crying too. It was an amazing victory.”
BAGNAIA MAKES HISTORY
Bagnaia’s victory margin over Quartararo was 17 points, completing a 108-point turnaround from his German Grand Prix nadir, where a crash dumped him to 91 points off the lead and seemingly out of title contention.
It’s the biggest comeback in motorcycle racing history and surely one of sport’s all-time great recoveries.
But he ends the season not only fairly comfortably ahead of Quartararo and commandingly ahead of the field but also with a formidable set of records.
His seven wins is more than anyone else managed to collect this season, while his five poles and three fastest laps are the equal most of any rider this season.
They’re clear title-winning numbers, which he converted to end 15 years of suffering for Ducati.
It had been 5524 days since Casey Stoner won Ducati’s first and, until this weekend, only riders championship at the Japanese Grand Prix in 2007. While the Italian marque had since collected a trio of constructors championships, including its fourth just this year, being unable to power another rider to the top of the title had been a stick in Bologna’s craw.
Bagnaia finally ended that pain, completing the triple crown of titles in the process.
He’s also the first Italian rider to win the title since 2009, when Valentino Rossi won the last of his seven premier-class crowns. That one of Rossi’s protégés has taken that baton speaks to the potential for a dynasty that lasts long beyond the racing career of Valentino himself.
This is also the first time in exactly 50 years than an Italian rider has won the title on an Italian bike, the last being Giacomo Agostini on his MV Agusta in 1972, and the first time in 48 years that a European rider won the title on a European bike after Phil Read’s 1974 triumph on the same bike.
SUZUKI SUPERB IN FINAL RACE
Bagnaia took the spoils of championship triumph, but Álex Rins won the race at a canter to send of Suzuki in style.
Rins rocketed from fifth on the grid to take the lead on the first lap, and he never looked back from there, with a burst of sizzling speed in the second half of the race creating just enough of a gap to ensure the charging Brad Binder ran out of laps to catch him at the end of the race.
It was the perfect way to end the final season for the Japanese brand in the premier class following its still baffling decision to withdraw from the sport — a decision it made while leading the teams championship.
It precipitated a run of shocking form by both riders, with Rins and Joan Mir having made their MotoGP debuts for Suzuki, but both were determined to end on a high, and it was Álex, unencumbered by the injuries that colours Joan’s final months of the season, who made the most of the goodwill.
“This weekend many emotions came to my body, to my mind, so I tried to keep it aside because … the concentration was so difficult,” he said. “But then on the grid I was saying bye-bye to the mechanics and I was crying. All the emotions came to me.
“At a certain point I said, ‘Alex, come on, be focused, because you have a race!’
“It was amazing to finish the season like this,” he said. “I couldn’t do it better.”
It was Rins’s second win in three races, which put him up to seventh in the standings and rescued sixth for Suzuki in the teams championship.
But the celebrations will have a hard stop. On Tuesday Rins will start his career as an LCR rider, with Mir switch to Honda alongside Marc Márquez.
With Suzuki’s decision still difficult to process given the team’s potential, Rins said it would be difficult to digest the sudden change.
“Tomorrow I’m going to another box with a new chapter of my life,” he said. “I’m excited but at the same time I’m sad because [I’ve had] six seasons with Suzuki. We learnt a lot — we won together, we lost together, we cried together.
“So it’s going to be difficult. But it’s not in my hands.”
NO FAIRYTALE VICTORY FOR JACK, BUT KTM FUTURE IS BRIGHT
Jack Miller’s crash on lap 23 of 27 brought to a quiet end his Ducati career, and while two crashes from the last three races isn’t the high he was hoping to go out on, the pace he displayed throughout his late-season surge was a reminder of how good he can be when on form.
He was in a podium position for almost all of the race before crashing out shortly after he was mugged for position by future teammate Brad Binder, who was on one of his trademarked late-race recoveries from a poor qualifying result. He went on to finish a close second, just 0.396 seconds behind Rins.
Binder’s race pace all season has been superb, and it’s been highlighted by his KTM bike’s inability to secure lofty grid positions.
The South African had an average qualifying result of 11.7 this season but an average finishing position of 6.5.
It’s an impressive achievement in what turned out to be Binder’s first winless season since his maiden Moto2 campaign in 2017, and it’s underscored by teammate Miguel Oliveira finishing 39 points behind in the final reckoning despite collecting two victories.
Oliveira is outbound to RNF next year to make way for Miller, and though KTM’s potential in 2023 is unlikely to be at Ducati’s level, it’s promising to have had illustrated in the final race of the year that the Austrian bike has underlying pace.
And given Miller has talked about the excitement of working on a project bike in this next phase of his career, it will have been buoying upon reflection to see the RC16 so competitive late in the race.
APRILIA’S COLLAPSE IS COMPLETE
Aleix Espargaró targeted maintaining third in the riders championship as his goal for the season-ending race, but his afternoon didn’t last even three laps before an engine problem forced him into retirement.
Teammate Maverick Viñales fared no better, with brake problems dropping him to the back and into his garage just after half distance.
It was an ignominious end for a team that hoped to challenge for at least one championship this year — and for Espargaró, who led the riders table early in the campaign.
There had at least been glimmers of hope in qualifying. Viñales lined up sixth on the grid, though Espargaró was a less impressive 10th, which at least seemed to be a reversal of the team’s lack of performance through the Asian leg of the season. Aprilia had hoped it was just a lack of preparedness rather than a fundamental lack of pace that had caught it out late in the season, and it might still have cause to think that.
But it’ll be harder to reckon with Espargaró finishing fourth in the final standings behind Enea Bastianini, riding for Aprilia’s former partner team. It’ll be difficult to digest too that it finished behind Yamaha in the manufacturers standings and KTM in the teams standings, finishing third on both counts.
Espargaró, who the team has often described as its captain, attempted to see through the disappointment of the day to the positives of the season.
“I am proud of what we have achieved this year,” he said, per Speedweek. “Last year nobody expected me to get on the podium, but I did it. Nobody believed that I would get wins or pole positions this year, but I got a lot of podiums and fought for the title for a long time.
“I’m very proud because I didn’t make any mistakes. It is extremely difficult in 20 races.
“Sometimes you just can’t do it anymore.”
But the hardest part comes next: backing that up into a stronger 2023. That job starts on Tuesday in the post-season test, and 2023 will decide whether Aprilia bursting onto the scene in 2022 was for nothing.
QUARTARARO’S 2023 WARNING
Fabio Quartararo couldn’t set up the conditions in which title victory might have been possible, but there’s no doubt he went out this season at the absolute limit of his performance.
Quartararo struggling on his uncompetitive bike has been the story of the second half of the season. The M1 hit its performance ceiling early in the year, and the Frenchman had to try to bridge the gap between it and the powerful Ducati machine with his own talent.
He cam excruciatingly close to pulling it off, but some mistakes riding over the limit late in the campaign proved too costly to overcome.
“After the race was emotional,” he said, per Autosport. “I’m a fighter, a winner; I want to be in the first position.
“So of course the next 15 minutes after the race was tough.
“But it happens, it’s finished, we need to close the book and start a new chapter and it starts on Tuesday. So I’m really looking forward to doing that.”
And Quartararo has good reason to look forward to the post-season test beyond the chance to clean the taste of defeat from his mouth.
On Tuesday he’ll be trialling the 2023 bike, which he first sampled in Misano earlier this year. It comprises a new chassis and, importantly, a new engine.
The M1’s lack of power has been Quartararo’s principal bugbear this year, and he was glowing of Yamaha’s progresses after sampling its first 2023 prototype. He also praised the new chassis as an improvement.
Quartararo was racing at a championship-contending level this year on a bike that barely deserved podiums. If Yamaha can close the gap it left wide open this year, Quartararo will be a formidable force for Bagnaia to reckon with in 2023.
