Francesco Bagnaia is pleased that he is being replaced as MotoGP world champion by Jorge Martin, of all people, and lists why it was not enough for him this time
18 victories in the course of the 2024 MotoGP season, eleven of them in Grands Prix on Sundays and seven in Sprints on Saturdays: And yet Francesco Bagnaia lost the battle for the world title to Jorge Martin this year.
The fact that it is Jorge Martin who replaces him as MotoGP world champion is something that “Pecco” Bagnaia can live with very well. After all, the two have known each other for many years. They were once teammates in the Moto3 World Championship and also spent a lot of time together away from the track. The mutual respect has remained to this day.
“I’m happy that it’s Jorge who has won this title,” says Bagnaia, adding: ”He’s a great guy with a great family. We know each other very well. They deserve this title. Jorge has had a fantastic season in which he has been extremely consistent. He understood the situation better than me here and there. I have the utmost respect. It was a fair fight that was just fun.”
While Ducati factory rider Bagnaia won 18 of the 20 race weekends in the 2024 season, as mentioned, Pramac-Ducati rider Martin finished second no fewer than 16 times. In addition, Martin notched up ten victories, three of them in Grands Prix, and seven in Sprints. The points difference between the two in the final MotoGP standings in 2024 is ten points.
“Jorge realized this year that sometimes it’s better to take a second place. He did a fantastic job and deserves the title,” Bagnaia emphasizes, pointing out, “Jorge was the more consistent, I was the stronger one. I dominated completely, but that wasn’t enough.”
Bagnaia underpins his own dominance this season with numbers: ”Although I scored eight zeroes this season, I collected more championship points than last year without eight zeroes. Almost completely dominating the races wasn’t enough. For next year, I’ll have to learn from some situations this season and try to do better.”
Bagnaia recognizes a key moment immediately after the season finale in Barcelona, and a few others that contributed to the fact that, after winning the MotoGP titles in the 2022 (against Fabio Quartararo) and 2023 (against Jorge Martin) seasons, he “only” managed to take the runner-up title this year, in 2024.
“After the crash in Malaysia [in the sprint], it was clear to me that it would be complicated. 29 points was a lot. Winning all the races since then was the maximum I could do. But Jorge was simply more consistent,” the Ducati factory rider emphasizes again.
As for Bagnaia, of his eight retirements this season, “three were due to strange situations,” as he says, listing them: “The first was the situation with Marc Marquez in Portimao, the second was with Brad Binder in Jerez and the third was with Alex Marquez in Aragon.”
“Yes, in all three cases, I was taken out of the race by other drivers. But all three were situations that I could have avoided myself,” says Bagnaia, recalling all three incidents in detail, starting with the crash with Marc Marquez in the Portuguese Grand Prix in March.
“In the duel with Marc, I could perhaps have waited a bit. That’s easy to say now, of course. When I’m racing, I naturally want to get as far forward as possible. But maybe I should try to optimize that for next year.”
“In the situation with Alex Marquez,” Bagnaia thinks of the Aragon Grand Prix at the beginning of September, ”I was four-tenths of a second faster. But I didn’t wait. When he came off the line, I thought it was my moment. But he touched me and caused me to crash.”
“And it was the same with Brad,” Bagnaia recalls the collision with Brad Binder in the sprint of the Spanish weekend in April in Jerez. But the three collisions with other drivers were not Bagnaia’s only zeros this season.
“The others were more difficult to understand and analyze,” he says, referring to his individual crashes in the Barcelona sprint in May, in the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in September in Misano and not least in the Sepang sprint two weeks ago. ‘In these three cases, I always crashed because I slowed down,’ Bagnaia still puzzles.
