The three factors that crowned MotoGP’s newest champion at Misano

The last time Marc Marquez and Pol Espargaro occupied the first two spots of a grand prix podium was the 2012 Australian Moto2 race. Fabio Quartararo was just 13 years old at the time. When Honda duo Marquez and Espargaro finally shared the podium together again after a 1-2 finish in last Sunday’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, 22-year-old Quartararo became the 2021 MotoGP world champion.

Two years ago, after Marquez beat rookie Quartararo to victory at Misano, the eight-time world champion marked the Frenchman – once hailed as ‘the next Marquez’ when he entered grand prix racing in 2015 – out as a MotoGP title contender.

It’s fitting, then, that Quartararo would finally realise that prediction at the very same venue, after a crash on lap 23 of 27 for long-time race leader and sole title rival Francesco Bagnaia propelled the Yamaha rider to his – and France’s – first premier class title.

On paper the result looked a formality coming into the weekend. Quartararo had taken a 52-point lead at the Circuit of the Americas when he beat Bagnaia to second, and simply needed three more points than his Ducati rival to seal the deal. Quartararo had options, whereas Bagnaia’s only plan was “win or gravel”.

It turned out to be the latter for the Ducati rider, but for the first 22 laps Bagnaia was on course to extend Quartararo’s wait as he worked his way up from a MotoGP career-worst 15th on the grid to what was set to be a maximum of fourth following a late tumble for KTM’s Miguel Oliveira. Quartararo did finish fourth in the end, after Avintia’s Enea Bastianini barged through for a second Misano podium on the final lap, but it was immaterial.

However, while the odds were very much stacked against Bagnaia, ultimately three crucial factors ensured Sunday 24 October would forever be etched into the history books as ‘El Diablo’s’ coronation day.

World Champion Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing celebrates

Photo by: MotoGP

Ducati’s tyre gamble and Quartararo’s safer bet

While the Adriatic coast proved a welcome trip for the paddock in mid-September for the San Marino GP, its return for the Emilia Romagna round was very much in the throes of the change of season. Wet weather and cool air permeated much of the weekend’s running, with Sunday’s race dry-but-cold.

Therefore, eyebrows were raised when the Michelin tyre sheet shared to the world’s MotoGP media showed both poleman Bagnaia and second-placed team-mate Jack Miller making a late change to the hard front tyre, while the rest of the field went for the medium or soft. Miller said the late change wasn’t anything dramatic as running the hard was always part of the plan, but did concede it came with risks.

“We went a little bit left-field and went with the hard front,” Miller, who crashed at Turn 15 on lap four while running second, said after the race. “It felt like a masterstroke, the feeling was good. Already around 1 o’clock it looked fantastic, it looked like it was going to be a great idea.

“But then as we were on the grid the clouds started to come in and the track temperature was sort of borderline. I’d done it [used the hard front] in the test, but it wasn’t quite warm enough, I guess you could say.”

"The tyre choice was, I think, good because this was the only one that was helping me on the braking and the medium for me was worse than the soft" Francesco Bagnaia

Miller hadn’t been given any team orders for Sunday’s race, but said on Saturday his approach would be one of “common sense”. As a result, as Bagnaia, Miller and eventual race winner Marc Marquez ran line astern in the first laps, Miller wasn’t putting his Desmosedici up the inside of his team-mate. He believes he was perhaps just a touch earlier on the brakes into the Quercia left-hander as he cautiously orbited Bagnaia, and this ultimately cooled down the left side of his hard front by the time he got to the circuit’s next left at Turn 15.

Ducati was somewhat forced into the choice. Bagnaia didn’t feel comfortable on the medium front, with Miller noting there was a lot of locking on that tyre for the GP21s – something evidenced by Pramac rider Jorge Martin’s crash at Turn 1 on lap 13 while running the medium.

Bagnaia felt the soft, despite the cooler temperatures, was too on the limit in terms of drop-off. So the hard front was a gamble, but one that had legitimate merits in making. However, Bagnaia would be slapped by the cruel hand of fate at Turn 15 on lap 23 just as he’d broken away from Marquez by almost a second – the Italian also believing he may have been just a trifle too cautious at Quercia on that lap.

Francesco Bagnaia, Ducati Team

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

“The tyre choice was, I think, good because this was the only one that was helping me on the braking and the medium for me was worse than the soft,” Bagnaia explained after the demise of his title hopes. “Soft was already on the limit yesterday [Saturday] and this morning, so the hard was the correct choice.

“The only thing with that [tyre is] you just need to push every single lap like hell, to get the tyre hot, so this lap maybe I braked a little early in Turn 8.”

Intriguingly, Quartararo was of the mind to follow the Ducati factory duo in picking the hard front and is convinced he would have been able to finish on the podium with that. Given the only riders using the hard front both crashed, and Quartararo had to work his way through the pack – something that tends to overheat Yamaha front tyres and in general can fluctuate lap times because of where other riders are braking – Quartararo could well have suffered the same fate.

“We choose the safe, let’s say great tyres, but for us the hard [front] would have been much better and I think the podium would have been there with the hard,” Quartararo said later on Sunday. “But I had no more stability when I was behind all the group, I couldn’t overtake. I’m really happy about my race, even if I would not have won the championship, because it was a really great experience that I had that we would finish in P4.”

Of course, had Quartararo crashed and Bagnaia done the same, the championship would still have gone to the Yamaha rider. But had Quartararo crashed before Bagnaia, the Ducati rider could have gone into a conservation mode, conceded defeat to Marquez but safely navigate his way to second while being much more cautious of his hard front.

Had that happened and the championship rolled onto Portugal, Quartararo would have been in a stronger position to seal the deal – but the jeopardy would have also been heightened.

Francesco Bagnaia, Ducati Team, crash

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Quartararo’s approach was conditioned by his worst MotoGP qualifying

The 2021 world champion came into the Misano weekend insisting that his approach would not change and that the Emilia Romagna GP would simply be viewed as just another race.

That was typical of Quartararo’s approach all season, but he had no real choice than to focus fully on his race pace after tricky conditions on Saturday morning sent him into Q1 for just the second time in MotoGP and ultimately meant he would qualify 15th.

With Bagnaia on pole, Quartararo was well aware what that would likely mean for his hopes of winning the championship on Sunday. All he could do was focus on coming through the pack and taking the best result possible – getting his elbows out instead of wobbling around trying to hold onto one or two points.

"Just before starting the race, I was with [my friend] Tom in the office. I was feeling nervous, I was feeling stressed and he said ‘Just think about the last three races you had last year’" Fabio Quartararo

“Starting from P15, if Pecco wins it’s only one point [I would take from the race],” the Yamaha rider explained. “So, I needed to give my best. My goal today was to [get] close to 10 points if Pecco wins, because we expected him to win.

“I [would have] finished P4 if he didn’t crash, so [it] was exactly 10 points. We would have been 37 points [ahead of] him and Portimao would have been a great opportunity, but it happened today. I said on Saturday we must take one thing out of our brain, to be world champion today. If Pecco didn’t make a mistake we will not be world champion, but he made a mistake.”

After finishing second at the San Marino GP when he chased down Bagnaia, Quartararo at the time revealed he came close to crashing a few times during that charge - but it was being on that knife-edge where he enjoyed riding the most.

That killer instinct reared its head again when he picked his way through the field last Sunday to end up behind Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro on lap 19, before scything through him with a brave raid up the inside of the fast Curvone right-hander. It was this approach that perfectly encapsulated the final key factory that won him the world title on Sunday.

Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Revisiting old nightmares

Quartararo’s 2020 title charge, when he was a factory-backed Petronas SRT rider, crumbled miserably in the final six races. He went from leading the championship to ending it down in eighth, and admitted he simply wanted to get to the end of the season by that point with no care for his race results.

More often than not, he cut a furious figure and it only compounded his woes. Quartararo has been candid this year about the work he did over the winter with a sports psychologist in helping him to deal with that anger. The benefits this has provided him have been clear to see across the 2021 campaign.

When he finished fifth in the Qatar GP riding – as he described it – like an amateur when then-team-mate Maverick Vinales won, he struck back the following week with victory in the Doha GP. He silenced doubters when arm-pump woes robbed him of a certain win at Jerez by finishing third at the next round at Le Mans in the wet.

After a track limits penalty followed by another one for a rider equipment infringement dropped him to sixth at Barcelona, he won next time out at Assen. He did the same when he was only seventh at the flag-to-flag Austrian GP, and was second at the San Marino GP when he struggled to eighth with a tyre issue the week before at Aragon.

“I think this year I never really got angry,” Quartararo said last Sunday. “Last year I remember in Valencia the bike was not working at all, and I arrived to the box and I was not shouting, but telling my crew chief, ‘No, it’s not turning, I can’t brake, I can’t accelerate’.

“But then my crew chief said, ‘Ok, now you are angry, but you need to tell me what is going on because if we need to improve something we can improve the braking, the turning, the exit’. So, I say ‘OK, this is true’, so I needed to think. And when you are angry you can’t describe what are your problems.”

It was reflecting on those difficult moments last season ahead of Sunday’s title-decider that Quartararo believes ultimately helped him to win the championship.

Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

“Just before starting the race, I was with [my friend] Tom in the office,” he revealed. “I was feeling nervous, I was feeling stressed and he said ‘Just think about the last three races you had last year’.

“They were a total disaster, I just wanted to finish the championship whatever the position was, and today I started the race that made me world champion. And I think all the things that happened last year helped me a lot to win the title today.”

Yamaha has gone through a lot of difficult times since it last won the MotoGP title in 2015 with Jorge Lorenzo, and in many ways that strife ran alongside that of Quartararo’s as the hype that surrounded his grand prix debut in 2015 ultimately derailed his early career.

And while Sunday’s result was largely conditioned by three factors, Quartararo’s season as a whole was shaped by countless others. But ultimately, Quartararo is the 2021 world champion because he combined all of those elements to become the world-beater he was always destined to be.

World Champion Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images