The title battle between Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martín will be the main attraction for the remainder of the 2024 MotoGP season. After the Japanese Grand Prix, the Spaniard is still leading the World Championship, but with only 10 points ahead of the Italian, who put in a superb performance at Motegi.
The reigning champion achieved two impressive victories, showing a pace that is difficult to match and taking advantage of Pedro Acosta’s crash in Saturday’s Sprint and the fact that the driver from San Sebastián de los Reyes was forced to recover after qualifying in eleventh position in due to a crash in Q2.
His performance in Japan, as he chases his third consecutive premier class title, once again drew praise from his team, Ducati, from the paddock itself and from the commentators following the championship on television. On Spanish TV, they are lucky enough to be able to take advantage of the knowledge of a legend like Dani Pedrosa, who took the opportunity to offer a very interesting vision of how Bagnaia plans races.
In Japan, the Turin driver set the type of race he likes best and for which he orients the set-up of his Desmosedici GP: looking for a great start – something he struggled to do in Aragon and Misano -, staying in front , if possible in the lead, as he did on Sunday, and gain a sufficient margin to play with in the rest of the race.
On Sunday, it didn’t take Martin long to reach second place, but by then Bagnaia already had more than a second ahead, which he was able to manage. The Spaniard tried to get closer halfway through the race and at the end, but Bagnaia didn’t lose control of the situation: he pushed when he needed to and achieved his eighth victory in a long race of 2024.
Pedrosa understood that Martin could not do more starting from the fourth row of the grid, but underlined that the main key to keeping up with Valentino Rossi’s protégé is not to make him face the races in this way: “Watching these races, throughout the ‘year, it’s very easy to speak from my position. It’s clear that we can’t let Pecco have his race,” began the number 26. “In this case, Martin couldn’t have done better, because starting eleventh he wouldn’t have. could have done better. But throughout the season we have seen a Bagnaia who manages to do this race, who gets that one second gap and who is comfortable like that.”
“He keeps a constant pace, he has a very well-prepared bike to do it, to manage the tyres. And then the race becomes a little more static, where the gaps have already been created at the beginning. As you can see, everyone rides at the same In some laps someone recovers a tenth of a second, in others they lose a tenth of a second, the race is already over”, he continued.
Dani Pedrosa, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing
Thus, the Spanish veteran underlined the importance for Bagnaia of being able to gain a certain margin over his opponents. Which opens the doors for him to manage and achieve a great pace. Indeed, with 9 laps to go, the TV production showed his run, and it was impressive, running almost always in the high 1’44”. In this way, he offered a key commentary for his contenders.
“From the fifth lap onwards, Pecco’s lap times are all within three tenths of a second. He doesn’t make a mistake in any corner, in any lap. This is why I say that one of the strategies if you want to fight against Pecco Bagnaia is that to bother him,” he said.
For Pedrosa, the most important thing against Pecco is to get him out of this comfort zone, and he cited his future Ducati teammate Marc Marquez as an example of this, for whom it could be of vital importance when they face each other on the track in 2025: “You have to find a way to get him out of this area in which he is so concentrated, to create some problems for him. That’s where a Marc Marquez is strongest. Because if he’s on your wheel, he manages to annoy you and prevent you from making the your race. In this case, Pecco is able to do his race and therefore it is very difficult to beat him”, he added.
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