How MotoGP's wildest season unearthed a new superstar

The way to describe MotoGP in 2020 would be to compare it to a Rammstein concert. It was full of fireworks, shocks and ridiculous action, and left you in a constant state of bewilderment in its breathless 14-round run from 19 July at Jerez to 22 November at the Algarve Circuit. That it happened at all is testament to the dedication Dorna Sports' CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta has to his series.

Just a week before the originally scheduled opener in Qatar, the season was put on hold as the horror of the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world. A schedule centred on Europe was eventually finalised, and numerous cost measures for 2020 and 2021 were put in place to ensure the series' survival. MotoGP's independent teams, as well as all squads in Moto2 and Moto3, received financial support from the championship during lockdown.

When MotoGP came out of the frying pan and into the fire at Jerez, it was business as usual. Honda had endured a tumultuous winter with its 2020 RC213V, as the new-for-this-season Michelin rear tyre construction threw it - and more notably Ducati - a real curveball. Honda also had problems with its new aero package in testing, and had only discovered this on the final day of the Qatar test.

Honda basically came into 2020 with a bike not that far removed from its previous year's challenger, a machine that LCR's Takaaki Nakagami would ride. But reigning champion Marc Marquez was in fine fettle, fully recovered from an off-season shoulder operation that would have left him only 70% fit for the planned Qatar opener.

Though denied pole by the rapid-when-there's-grip Yamahas of Fabio Quartararo and Maverick Vinales, Marquez was set for total domination of the Spanish GP before he lost the front of his Honda at the Turn 4 left-hander and slid into the gravel in the early stages. He stayed mounted and rejoined 16th, going on to stage what very nearly was one of the greatest comebacks of all time.

Then he crashed at Turn 3 on lap 22. It was a moment that blew the championship wide open and would ultimately spell the end of Marquez's season. He had surgery on a broken right humerus, with a view to coming back for round three at Brno.

Back-to-back non-scores would have made his hopes of MotoGP title number seven hard, but not impossible. But Marquez is a relentless force and, having felt up to it following surgery and given the go-ahead from doctors, he tried to come back just a few days later at the Andalusian GP, the second Jerez event.

He would abort it after qualifying, his arm in a bad way. The effort exerted to get to that point was valiant, but foolish. He'd damaged the plate inserted in his arm during the operation and would need a second operation ahead of Brno. Honda held out hope of a return at some point, but recovery was slower than anticipated and he wouldn't be seen on track again in 2020.

PLUS: The true Marquez blunder that caused lasting damage

Quartararo on the Petronas SRT M1 won the opening two rounds at Jerez, doing what he'd promised in his debut season and stepping up to the plate in Marquez's absence. But all wasn't well within the Yamaha camp. During the season opener, Valentino Rossi and Vinales lost engines from their allocation of five due to mechanical issues. Franco Morbidelli on the sister SRT M1 was denied a maiden podium when his engine cried enough late in the Andalusian GP.

Not only were Yamaha's engines unreliable, but they were slow too, with M1 riders regularly at the bottom of the speed-trap figures

From that point, Yamaha reduced revs in its engines to preserve mileage. But that wasn't the end of the story. The problems from the first Jerez weekend were traced to a fault in the valves. It transpired ahead of the European GP in November that Yamaha had used non-homologated valves in its batch of eight engines for the first round, which made them illegal, forcing it to withdraw two engines from each rider's allocation. Yamaha was also docked constructor and team points for what it insists was "an internal oversight" and a misinterpretation of the regulations.

Not only were Yamaha's engines unreliable, but they were slow too, with M1 riders regularly at the bottom of the speed-trap figures. On top of that, the 2020 Yamaha proved incredibly inconsistent, the traditional M1 problem in the Michelin era of a lack of rear grip rearing its head again. Yamaha won more races (seven) than any other manufacturer, but came up short in the championship. And it seemed Quartararo's hopes of title glory were doomed from the start.

"Actually, [from] my first laps with the 2020 bike in really dry conditions - the 2020 bike changed a lot from last year - I didn't really feel like the bike was mine," Quartararo said at Valencia in November as his championship challenge crumbled with crashes in both outings at the Ricardo Tormo circuit. "When the bike is directly good from FP1, we make small changes and everything is perfect. But when you start and it's difficult, you are lost."

At Brno for round three, the Yamaha's inconsistency was apparent for the first time, with Quartararo down in seventh and Vinales 14th. Morbidelli, on the 'A-spec' bike - essentially last year's model - was second, and this would become a common theme as the season wore on.

But, for that afternoon at Brno, nobody was a match for KTM and Brad Binder. The rookie stormed to a famous first win for himself and the team by 5.3 seconds, fulfilling KTM's claims that it would win inside its first five years in the premier class.

As it turned out, 2020 would be a banner year for the Austrian marque, with Pol Espargaro registering five podiums across the campaign and Tech3's Miguel Oliveira claiming two wins, pipping Espargaro and the Pramac Ducati of Jack Miller at the last corner of a thrilling Styrian GP, and dominating on home soil in the Portuguese finale.

Binder and Oliveira added their names to the list of nine winners across the campaign alongside Quartararo, Vinales, Morbidelli, Andrea Dovizioso, Danilo Petrucci, Alex Rins and Joan Mir. The last time so many riders won in a single season was 2016, when MotoGP's radical rule introduction and Michelin's tyres shook up the order.

Despite his Brno woes, Quartararo held on to the championship lead. But his results only rebounded in rounds seven and eight at the Emilia Romagna and Catalan GPs. He was fourth at Misano (having been demoted from third for a track-limits violation on the last lap) and clung on to his third win of the season at Barcelona.

Consistency eluded most title challengers. Dovizioso, the man who'd offered Marquez his stiffest championship opposition in recent years, was one of the riders - along with team-mate Petrucci - hit hardest by the change of construction in the rear tyre. The added grip from the rubber stopped Dovizioso from adopting his normal riding style on the Ducati. He took third at the Spanish GP opener and won the fourth round, the Austrian GP, but never finished on the podium again.

Team-mate Petrucci took victory in the wet race at Le Mans, but it was Pramac's Miller who was the most consistently competitive Ducati runner in 2020, with four podiums - and likely a few more, had he not been hit with some rotten luck.

After the Brno race, Suzuki's pre-season hopes of a title challenge appeared battered. Mir had registered two retirements from the first three rounds, while Rins was suffering the after-effects of a broken and dislocated shoulder from the Spanish GP.

Much was made all year about the legitimacy of a championship won without Marquez. As grand prix legend Wayne Rainey told Autosport in July: "The only way you can be champion is [by being] the guy with the most points at the end of the championship.
Each and every race counts, and especially in a sporting season like this odd one, you have to be there every single race." And Marquez himself brushed away any suggestions that his absence would devalue the championship.

It's not unreasonable to suggest that Marquez, even with a few races off, would have thrived in 2020. His domination of the 2019 campaign came about through devastating consistency, with the Honda rider finishing all but one race inside the top two. So, if consistency is a Marquez strength needed to win a championship, you can easily argue that Mir 'did a Marquez'.

That Mir's season ended in the Portugal finale with an early retirement owing to a technical issue just a week after his championship heroics just about summed up 2020

The Suzuki rider climbed onto the MotoGP podium for the first time at August's Austrian GP in second place. Denied victory in the second Red Bull Ring race when a red flag caused by Vinales's brake-failure-induced crash left him fourth at the restart, Mir rallied and stood on the podium at the following three rounds. By the end of September he'd come from rank title outsider to a firm favourite.

PLUS: How Mir became Suzuki's humble MotoGP hero

His first wet race at Le Mans halted his rostrum run - Mir was unable to fend off Quartararo and Vinales on the last lap and ended up 11th. But with the Yamaha pair directly ahead and Dovizioso not capitalising in fourth, while Rins and Morbidelli both crashed out, the championship points spread remained paper-thin.

Quartararo lost the lead in the standings briefly after crashing out of the San Marino race at Misano, Dovizioso edging ahead. But the Frenchman was back in control after the Barcelona encounter. When Quartararo finished a career-worst 18th at the Aragon GP due to a front-tyre-pressure issue, Mir moved six points ahead of him thanks to finishing third in a race won by team-mate Rins.

Another third at the Teruel round extended that advantage to 14. The final blow came at the European GP. Amid a terrible weekend for Yamaha, with its Jerez engine transgression coming to light, members of the team forced into isolation due to COVID-19, Vinales having to start from the pitlane due to exceeding his engine allocation and a lap-one crash for Quartararo, Mir finally broke through to score his first MotoGP victory.

Now 37 points clear in the championship, ahead of Rins and Quartararo, Mir sealed the title at the second Valencia race - which he called a "nightmare" - with a safe seventh following another crash for Quartararo and a fourth-place finish for Rins. At the scene six years earlier where Suzuki made a troubled return to MotoGP as a wildcard, the small-but-incredibly-well-run operation had a world champion again for the first time since 2000.

And it was brought to Suzuki by a rider it signed straight out of Moto2 for 2019, Mir just the sixth Suzuki rider in history to win the premier class title and only the fourth Spaniard. That his season ended in the Portugal finale with an early retirement owing to a technical issue just a week after his championship heroics just about summed up 2020.

Suzuki couldn't quite take a clean sweep of titles. With Rins struggling in the final round to 15th, Pramac's Miller took second - trailing home hero Oliveira on the Tech3 KTM - to seal the constructors' title for Ducati. It was a fitting prologue to Ducati's new future, with Miller and Francesco Bagnaia stepping up to replace Dovizioso and Petrucci at the factory squad in 2021.

Dovizioso's souring relationship with Ducati forced him to quit the team without a back-up plan. Bereft of options beyond keeping the door open for a 2022 return, Dovizioso will take a sabbatical. But scoring just two podiums all year and not being the one to win the world championship in Marquez's absence, having been his nearest rival for the past three years, has seriously damaged his stock.

That he kept in the title hunt for as long as he did despite his woes with the 2020 Michelin tyre was admirable. But with the new generation fighting for the championship and winning the lion's share of races in 2020, it's hard to see how a 34-year-old Dovizioso fits into any manufacturer's future equations.

Yamaha has some serious soul-searching to do over the winter. Morbidelli's form on the older bike was very nearly enough to win him the championship. Three times a winner in 2020, he ended the year just 13 points behind Mir. That's the amount of points scored for a fourth-place finish in MotoGP, which was the position he was running in at the Andalusian race when his engine broke late on.

Quartararo's decline continued after he lost the points lead to Mir, the SRT rider never reaching the top six again in the final six rounds and ending up eighth in the points. Vinales fared little better, taking sixth in the standings at the end of what he branded the "worst" season of his career. Rossi's final year as a factory Yamaha team rider was similarly difficult, a two-race layoff after catching COVID-19 coming between a run of four DNFs in the second half of the season.

All three 2020 M1 riders cut critical figures at the end of the year, highlighting what needs to be done to the bike over the winter. As well as looking at his bike for ideas, the trio may need to learn a thing or two from a much-improved Morbidelli.

This season proved that MotoGP's radical regulation shake-up in 2016 designed to make the grid ultra-competitive has worked

Honda capped off 2020 without a win for the first time since it returned to MotoGP full time back in 1982. The absence of Marquez forced HRC into throwing more at the RC213V, with a mid-season upturn in form following a handful of updates, and a general better understanding of how to ride it allowed rookie Alex Marquez to claim back-to-back podiums at Le Mans and Motorland Aragon.

It wasn't enough to secure him rookie of the year honours, with KTM rider Binder taking that title. But any suggestions that Marquez would be left to reside in his elder brother's shadow were firmly swept aside as the 2019 Moto2 champion demonstrated the world class quality that had earned him his MotoGP promotion.

MotoGP bid farewell to Cal Crutchlow as a full-time racer at the end of an injury-hit campaign. On his return to Yamaha next year to be its test rider, perhaps he holds the key to transforming its fortunes. Meanwhile, incoming Honda man Pol Espargaro ended his KTM tenure with fifth in the standings as he gets set for the biggest challenge of his MotoGP career in 2021.

PLUS: Why Espargaro faces Marquez with no fear at Honda

In the end, 15 different riders took to the podium steps in 2020 on a mix of factory-spec and year-old machinery, with five new race winners being crowned. But none of this was a direct result of COVID or an absent Marquez. This season proved that MotoGP's radical regulation shake-up in 2016 designed to make the grid ultra-competitive has worked.

Without it, Suzuki likely wouldn't have come back to MotoGP, and one of grand prix racing's most exciting talents may never have been given the golden opportunity to fulfil a lifelong dream just two years into his MotoGP career...