The penultimate round of the 2022 MotoGP championship series was held at Sepang earlier today where Ducati’s Pecco Bagnaia had his first opportunity to clinch the title. Bagnaia won the race and came close to securing the championship, but with Fabio Quartararo (Yamaha) finishing in third today, Bagnaia was denied the title by two points. If Quartararo wins the final race at Valencia in two weeks, Bagnaia need only finish in 14th position, or better, to secure the title.
Finishing second today was Enea Bastianini (Ducati) who raced Bagnaia hard, and actually passed him with a few laps remaining. Bagnaia ultimately took the lead for good and Bastianini had to settle for second place.
Quartararo is the only rider with a mathematical possibility of beating Bagnaia in the final round. For full results of today’s race, take a look here. You can find additional details on the MotoGP site.
you got your yakuza, your bratva, you’ve even got doze guys on sigma iota 2, but NOBODY does it like the italians.
Well, they havnt done it for 15 years, so with 8 bikes on the grid this year, ya think they might have a chance?
It was bugging me that Ducati has become so dominant this year, and has so many riders on the grid between the factory and satellite teams. But then I thought about how they haven’t won the Championship in 15 years. FIFTEEN YEARS ! They’re due, and well deserved. Let them enjoy their hard-fought and rightly-earned victory after all this time.
Championship considerations made this race more tense than the on-track action – just one or two passes for the lead doesn’t usually make for an exciting race but this was fun! Pecco and El Diablo certainly remedied their qualifying performances and rose to the occasion. Glad the championship goes down to Valencia.
It’s quite funny how Ducati has become what we would expect from Honda. Ducati has developed a bike that only Stoner could ride to a bike that even its satellite teams are winning on. That’s good but… Remember when Honda thought it was the bike and not the rider? Do we see that same thought now creeping into Ducati’s garage? That’s bad.
Pecco deserves the title, 7 race wins now.
Sure he’s on the best bike but that’s part of racing.
There are 7 others on Ducatis who didn’t better Fabio to this point.
Fabio was happy with the test of the 2023 motor so I hope next year is different.
What Suzuki/Rins did previous race should embarrass Yamaha.
Jorge got caught in a sudden gust of gravity. The beast got neutered by the mucky-mucks. FQ rode the wheels off his Yammie but it don’t look good. I hope a bunch of spoilers make Ducati bosses crap their pants in the final. It’s more and more a Ducati race of “champions” I enjoyed MM interview, he sounds like an actual human bean.
The beast got beaten, plain and simple. I thought FQ was pretty amazing, it just wasn’t enough to reach the leaders. Less passing and action this race but when you look at the finishing times, these are all close races especially when you compare to 10 years ago when many positions finished the length of a straightaway apart.
How cool would it have been to see Martin blow everyone away? Great storyline right there. Crashing out of a growing lead? The line between heroism and stupidity is narrow, indeed.
That happened while Bastaini raced closely with Pecco, without putting either in danger and securing 2nd place+points. The time when Ducati was trying to decide which to promote to the factory team seems very far in the rear view mirror now.
Aaaand next race Bags crashes out Q wins thanks by.
Or not,
There are enough Ducatis on the grid that they could all just parade behind Bagnaia, and he would score enough points to win it. He doesn’t need to push it .
But they won’t and he might. That’s racing.
I don’t think he’ll pull a Senna and run into Q on the first lap and take them both out either.
I wonder if, like Senna, they would let him get away with pulling a stunt like that. Car people are crazy. Motorcycle people are a bit more sportsman like. Or at least I would like to think that they are. Or were. They did pretty much ban two strokes from almost everything so they could pretend that four strokes are awesome. That it ended up killing the sport bike market is hilarious. Karma has a sense of humor. And karma, my friends, rides a two stroke.
capirossi knocked harada down at argentina in ’98.
The death of the sportbike market had absolutely nothing to do with the long-ago switch to four-strokes. Quite the opposite, in fact. Two-stroke streetbikes were basically nonexistent by the mid- to late-80s. Ditto, for two-stroke roadracing, other than at the World Championship Grand Prix level. Conversely, the sportbike market was at its zenith in the ’80s, ’90s, and even into the early 2000s. The hottest sales period in sportbike history was the heyday of the GSX-R, CBR, R, and ZX, which followed lockstep with four-stroke dominance in AMA/BSB/WSB, and, ultimately, MotoGP.
Here is what killed sportbike sales..
-The 2008 economic crash
-Monthly insurance costs for twenty-somethings exceeding the cost of the bike payment
-The Millennial and Gen X/Y/Z obsession with smartphones and virtual entertainment causing them to lose interest in anything real or participatory, especially dangerous, inconvenient, uncomfortable “Boomer” pursuits such as motorcycling
-Older motorcyclists, i.e., the only motorcyclists left in any real numbers, growing achy, brittle, and fat, moving on to ADVs, cruisers, touring bikes, standards, and SUVs, with no youthful crop of riders to replace them.
-The growing irrelevancy of the more affordable 600cc class of sportbikes, as every racing series either replaced them with something larger or did away with them entirely, creating a continuing upward spiral in size, power, complexity, and cost, until we reached the current point of absolute absurdity, with 200+-hp streetbikes that cost a small fortune to purchase and are far too expensive to insure, all while adding obscene levels of overly-complicated electronics that no one ever wanted or needed.
Sportbike sales were at their peak back when the sportbike world was largely ruled by relatively affordable, simple, approachable four-strokes like the SV650, CBR600, and, for the muscle heads, GSX-R750 and GSX-R1000, ZX-7, CBR900, and R1.
These days, it’s nothing but wildly expensive Euro bikes, most of which are so complex and powerful that the manufacturers feel no one can ride these two-wheeled Ferraris and Teslas without the help of a slew of electronic nannies.
None of this can be blamed on four-strokes. Had two-strokes survived the cut and made it this far, they too would have suffered from all the same maladies that plague the current sportbike and roadracing worlds.
It wasn’t the death of two stroke street bikes. It was the death of AMA superbike and the crippling of WSB due to the insane budgets for MotoGP.
MotoGP may have risen in popularity a little. But road racing in general caved in big time. Look no further than right here. This site used to cover AMA, WSB and GP.
What was that time period you were on about? The time before 2002, the year of infamy.
A similar thing happened with motocross. Race team budgets doubled overnight, then rose even more. They cut the number of riders per team and the pay for those riders.
But two stroke dirt bikes last forever and KTM and Yamaha never stopped making them. Beta and Sherco popped up with two strokes of their own. Gas Gas did too before KTM bought them. Dirt biking stumbled. But it didn’t fall like the sport bike market did.
It’s easy to blame bad things on the kids. But the kids still ride dirt bikes. The AMA still has a thriving motocross series. Go figure.