Rennie Scaysbrook | March 9, 2022
Cycle News Lowside
COLUMN
One For The Record Books
Is it just me, or did the 2022 MotoGP season roll around quicker than ever? It seems only last week we were farewelling Mr. Rossi after 84 years, or whatever it was, of MotoGP racing. Fast forward four months and last weekend, Rossi became a father to little Giulietta, the new season of MotoGP had a decidedly fresh flavor to it with Enea Bastianini pulling one of the greatest rides in recent memory to take his first MotoGP win.
While many were surprised by Bastianini’s victory, the fact that he put a two-year-old Ducati on the podium twice last year should give a fair indication that it really wasn’t very far off. Casual observers will note these podiums came at his home track of Misano, a venue he’s ridden more laps around than he’s had hot dinners, but he still hunted down some big names (including one on a factory Ducati) to do it.
Preseason testing gave another indication of Bastianini’s speed as he topped the Malaysian test at Sepang, just edging out Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro, who had one of the best tests of his lengthy MotoGP career on the Aprilia.
The eye of The Beast. Bastianini firmly announced his arrival at Qatar.
He continued this with second on the grid at Qatar, 0.147 seconds behind pole-sitter Jorge Martin, and after a sluggish start, began to march his way inexorably forward to take a commanding victory after Pol Espargaro ran off track mere seconds after losing the lead.
A quick look at the times when compared to last year shows the breadth of Bastianini’s progress. In his first race in MotoGP in Qatar, the then current Moto2 World Champion finished a very credible 10th on debut, finishing 9.2 seconds down on race winner Maverick Vinales, who clocked an overall race time of 42:28.663 on his factory Yamaha.
In 2022, Bastianini not only won the race by running a 15.465 seconds faster race time than Vinales did last year at 42:13.198, but he improved by a whopping 24.753 seconds overall compared to his 10th-place finish the year prior.
There’re a few reasons for this. The first and most obvious is Bastianini now has arguably the most sorted motorcycle on the grid in the Ducati Desmosedici GP21, the same motorcycle that propelled Pecco Bagnaia to four wins in the closing stages of the 2021 season and Jack Miller to two wins in the early part of the year.
While the two factory riders had to use both the Malaysian and Indonesian tests (as well as this race in Qatar) as fact-finding missions for their new and somewhat wayward GP22s, all Bastianini had to do was put fuel in his bike and go ride, according to lead Ducati rider Pecco Bagnaia.
The factory team was beset with engine dilemmas in the tests and in Qatar, to the point where they took the step to change the homologated engine specification to a mix of last year’s engine and this new year’s engine for the season ahead due to the new motor being too aggressive on the first touch of the throttle. This predominately came from Bagnaia, and with the rules stating there can be only one engine spec per factory team, Miller was required to follow suit. The remaining GP22 machines of Jorge Martin, Johann Zarco and Luca Marini all used the 2022-spec motor.
But this doesn’t affect Bastianini who has a GP21 that was described by Bagnaia at the end of the 2021 season as “perfect,” and a bike I bet the preseason championship favorite wishes he was on now.
A hallmark of Bastianini’s style is that he’s exceptionally good at looking after his tires, keeping the rear in especially good condition for the final quarter of the race. His race was incredibly consistent, with lap two to lap 17 of 22 all within the 1:54-second bracket and never varying by more than 0.4 seconds, except for when he put the hammer down on lap 17 and dropped the fastest lap of the race at 1:54.338—all on a medium tire that was well and truly past its best.
He was admittedly lucky Brad Binder didn’t turn the wick up just that little bit more on the last lap, as the South African’s final circuit was 0.8 seconds faster than Bastianini’s, with the margin of victory being 0.3 seconds. If there was one more lap…
Another aspect of Bastianini’s Qatar dominance comes from within the garage. The Gresini team has been revised for 2022, having parted with Aprilia to be back where it all started as a satellite operation responsible for its own destiny with customer Ducati machines. And in Bastianini’s corner this year—as he was when in the now gone Avintia Esponsarama squad—is crew chief Alberto Giribuola, who was Andrea Dovizioso’s tech guru and the man behind Andrea’s 2017, 2018 and 2019 title challenges, which included back-to-back Qatar wins in 2018 and 2019.
Thus, Bastianini has a man in his corner who knows how to get the most out of a Desmosedici better than almost anyone, and with the reduced stress of not being “a test rider,” as Bagnaia so eloquently put it following his disastrous season start, the 24-year-old from Rimini nicknamed The Beast can simply get on track and just twist the noise tube.
Perhaps it’s too early to call Bastianini a full season title challenger, but his form in Qatar suggests otherwise. One thing’s for sure, Jack Miller, who went out of the Qatar race through no fault of his own when his bike forgot how to be a bike and instead was a malfunctioning computer, will want to log lots of podiums to keep his ride in the coming races. I have a feeling there’s nothing Ducati would like more than two title protagonists from the home country in the garage together.
Either way, if the rest of the year is anything like round one, we’re in for a hell of a MotoGP season in 2022. CN
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