Why this is motorsport's top performer of 2016

After winning at Aragon last month, and then last Thursday before the Japanese Grand Prix, Marc Marquez was dismissive of the notion that he would wrap up a third MotoGP title at Motegi. He even did his best to not talk about it as his title.

The odds on him winning it were down to a minuscule 1/50, and based on what we had seen from Marquez in the opening 14 grands prix, he was not going to drop it. Wrapping it up at Motegi was an outside possibility at best, but that it all came together is nothing less than Marquez deserves.

To close it out with three races to spare, in a domain as evenly-matched as MotoGP, against the likes of Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo and in a year as disruptive as 2016 has been, is about as impressive as it gets.

It's nearly 100 days since I wrote this, before the German Grand Prix. It was, basically, about how Marquez was stealing a title either Yamaha rider should have been winning.

All of that still stands, but Marquez has kept on getting better and better. Heading to Germany, after eight races he was 24 points clear at the top of the championship. Six races later, that advantage was 52 points. One race later, after Motegi, it is an unassailable 77.

Has there been anyone more impressive in motorsport in 2016? I'd argue not.

Let's look around, and I present the following as considerations, rather than slights on the individuals involved. Brad Binder wrapped up the Moto3 title one race earlier than Marquez did the MotoGP, but was very much the experienced guy at the front of the field.

In Formula 1, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton have been flawed, with wheel-to-wheel combat and starts respectively. Perhaps Max Verstappen has been the top performer there, without the pressure of fighting for a title and expectation Marquez has faced.

Sebastien Buemi in the 2015/16 Formula E season had some stray moments. Simon Pagenaud dominated IndyCar but Penske team-mate and primary challenger Will Power gave him a headstart after missing the first race due to illness.

Sebastien Ogier has won a fourth World Rally Championship, but the WRC has definitely had stronger and more competitive days.

Other suggestions are welcomed on a postcard, but I'm pretty sure Marquez will have them all covered.

Let's look at what he's done since that pre-German GP assessment. He mastered that wet-dry race with an inspired call to ignore the intermediate tyres and then the skill to make the slicks work on a narrow dry line and win.

That afternoon did include a rare in-race error, running wide and through the gravel early on in the wet, but he was able to rejoin, and actually double his championship lead as the Yamahas floundered. Brno was weather-affected, too, and Marquez was a very composed third, despite being on the less-suitable tyre compounds.

MotoGP hit a strangely-wet European summer. Across four races, the three at Assen, the Sachsenring and Brno were weather-affected. Marquez scored 61 points from a maximum of 75 available at those races. Rossi scored 28, having crashed out of the Dutch TT and then made a hash of the German bike swap. Lorenzo could only manage seven, as he battled low-grip demons.

Brno was one of four successive grands prix in which Rossi beat Marquez, but Marquez never finished more than two places behind, keeping the points losses minimal. More importantly, he struck a balance between keeping his cool with the more-conservative mental approach he has adopted this year and not going into his shell. His battle with Rossi at Silverstone for second was a supreme example of hard-but-fair racing by both riders.

It was interesting to hear Marquez talk about pressure as much as he did after winning the title last Sunday. He said this was really the first year he feels like he's faced it, which stacks up given he won the title as a rookie, then blitzed his title defence.

Last year did not go to plan - those mistakes when over-riding the Honda prompted his new mindset - so eyes were on Marquez to see how he would respond. Oh, and there was that whole 'Rossi thing' this time last year.

On the flipside, Honda's issues were well-documented, so expectations were relatively muted, compared to the Yamaha pair. Until Marquez started winning races and leading the championship, at least...

I'm sure I wasn't alone in expecting Rossi and/or Lorenzo to at some stage really click into gear, and start winning races to make Marquez's life difficult. Or that at some stage, that Marquez would have that bad race like the ones that stymied the Yamaha riders' charges.

Surely Marquez was not immune to expecting a counterattack. At every race he went to, members of the media would ask about the gap. His plan of attack. His expectations. He offered before the Czech GP that he reckoned he would need two more wins to shore up his title tilt.

It was an interesting thing to put on the record, if he was feeling pressure. He then didn't win any of the next four grands prix, and only finished on the podium once - it was that run of finishing behind Rossi - and Marquez admitted after Motegi that he felt "a little bit nervous" during that time.

His tune had changed a little bit by the time we got to Aragon, where he said that he'd feel comfortable without taking any more wins.

Marquez later said that he had targeted Aragon as a weekend to get back on the top step, and he was peerless there. Even with an early mistake in the race, he blitzed it. And at Motegi, any pressure Marquez was feeling was squarely turned back onto his pursuers.

Lorenzo led early but couldn't go with Marquez when he got ahead, and by the time Rossi got into second place two laps later, Marquez was skipping away. Rossi will have known he had to beat Marquez to stay in the title fight, and he crashed a little over a lap later.

"Maybe Valentino trying to catch me," Marquez said post-race. "I was pushing, but in the end Valentino did the correct strategy. It's like me last year, if you want to have a small chance to win the title, he needed to win races, so he was pushing at the limit to catch me and overtake me."

When Lorenzo crashed five laps from home, Marquez's fifth victory of the 2016 season became enough to seal the title. The 23-year-old now has three from four attempts in MotoGP. Including his 125cc and Moto2 titles, he has won five championships this decade.

That's actually a bit ludicrous in a form of motorsport so reliant on pure human ability. Marquez has that in spades.

Look at his raw pace. Look at his uncanny ability to throw his Honda at a corner under braking, with the front and rear basically behaving like two different motorcycles, and still get to the other end of the turn.

Sure, he's overstepped that mark this year. Nobody on the grid has been immune to the nature of Michelin's front tyre, which has an almost-binary point of no return when you hit and then exceed the limit.

Marquez has managed to defy physics with some of his saves this year, when he has hit that limit. And, generally, he's found it before 2pm on a Sunday, so his list of errors in races this year is pretty limited.

I'd count four off the top of my head: the aforementioned Sachsenring and Aragon moments, overshooting Stowe while trying to pass Cal Crutchlow for second at Silverstone and a fall at Le Mans. The latter was the most serious, he found the gravel trap and left his bike, but was able to remount and get going again, bringing his battered RC213V home in 13th place to bag three championship points.

Such has been his year since, he probably could've left his Honda in the gravel and taken the rest of the afternoon off. But it maintains a perfect record of being the only rider across the three classes to score points in every grand prix so far this season. Rossi has had four non-scores, Lorenzo the same plus another race in which he scored just one point.

"I crashed many times in practice, and I tried to find limit in practice and think in the race where was the limit and keep my position," Marquez surmised.

But to think that Marquez has only won the title based on Rossi and Lorenzo falling off the road is silly. If the Yamaha was a bit more forgiving on the front end, especially in cooler conditions, it would really have only delayed things by a couple of races. Marquez would have still got the job done.

This year's change to the control electronics has plagued Honda for the bulk of the season, after being late to the party. It has gradually made up ground coming from a long way back on acceleration, and Marquez says winglets have played a role in that. It was "big winglets" that he felt would help, and pushed Honda to introduce them during the Brno weekend.

If Marquez didn't win the championship this year, given the Honda's deficits, we would have all considered it a valiant effort, against Rossi or Lorenzo on the well-rounded Yamaha. But there was a lot about this campaign that mirrors the efforts of another Spaniard, Fernando Alonso dragging uncompetitive Ferraris into F1 title contention in 2010 and '12, against Red Bull.

Both were giantkillers. Alonso came close, Marquez eventually got that bit of extra help in the second half of the campaign, when he'd already broken the back it.

The truth of where the Honda really sits this year is somewhere between Marquez and his team-mate Dani Pedrosa sit in the championship. Pedrosa won two of the last four races in 2015, and had been tipped to shine with the new Michelins, but that combined with the Honda's acceleration difficulties has made his life torrid, even before he broke his collarbone at Motegi.

Pedrosa is a massively experienced and talented rider, you don't finish second in the championship three times and win 29 MotoGP races otherwise, but he's looked a long way off Marquez this year.

It took Pedrosa until the wet September Saturday at Silverstone to outqualify Marquez for the first and, so far, only time. Pedrosa won at Aragon, but the only other race he's finished ahead of Marquez was Le Mans. Excluding Motegi, Pedrosa has scored points only amounting to 62.5% of Marquez's haul.

Another sign of Marquez's intelligence and maturity came from his 'I'm world champion' press conference. When discussing the new Michelin tyres, he said he learned a lot about the front during his battle with Rossi for the win at Barcelona.

"In that race I started to understand a little bit, I saw a few things behind Valentino," he said. "That was the first race I followed him for many laps and Valentino knows Michelin tyres a lot because he rode on them for many years.

"I saw a few things and said, 'OK, I will try to improve them'. The next races were all in wet conditions, but I started to understand the front tyre and now I try to use it in a different way."

That was a pretty full-on scrap, against his arch rival, but Marquez seemingly still had the mental capacity to absorb and comprehend what Rossi was doing with his Yamaha, and pick things up. And that helped take his game to another level.

That is what Marquez has done this year. What we already knew about Marquez meant it was going to be foolish to rule him out for race wins, no matter how dire Honda's winter had been.

The title was to be a whole other game. But Marquez has done it, with three races to go.

He has won more races than anyone else. Raced hard but picked his battles. Avoided careless and costly errors. Learned and improved and pushed his team.

Marquez has put together about as complete a season as you will ever see.