until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
At the halfway point in the 2020 MotoGP title race, four riders are separated by four points at the top, with each looking a credible title contender.
This has been made possible by Marc Marquez’s injury but also by the fact each of the four has left points on the table, in what has been a rollercoaster of a championship battle.
And while the duel isn’t limited to the four leading riders – with another four within a single race win of the points lead – chances are good the quartet in question includes the rider who will celebrate their first-ever MotoGP title at the end of the season.
Below, we’ve made the cases for and against each of their candidacies, as well as analysed their respective track records at four of the five venues that remain in the 2020 calendar – with the exception of Algarve, which is a newcomer to the schedule and will stage the season finale.
Andrea Dovizioso
Ducati, 1st – 84 points
Average grid position: 10.0
Average finish: 5.9
Retirements: 0
Team-mate: Danilo Petrucci, 53 points behind
The case for
Andrea Dovizioso’s 222 MotoGP starts are 74 more than his three main title rivals have accumulated combined. His 15 wins are five more than their wins combined. He also finished runner-up in the championship for the last three years running.
Experience clearly doesn’t make you faster over one lap in MotoGP, but a race distance is a different story. There’s a reason why Valentino Rossi reliably scores close to Maverick Vinales despite having less pace, and equally there’s a reason why Dovizioso keeps finishing in the top two in the standings despite not being one of the outright fastest riders in the championship.
Dovizioso is clever, he’s methodical and he’s very reliable. The last time he crashed in a race by himself was 2018 at Motegi. He’s simply a superb MotoGP rider.
The case against
He also has no business leading this championship right now, going by current form, and is as well aware of that as anybody.
“Apart from Austria and Jerez 1, I was never really strong and fast like in the past,” Dovizioso said of his season so far at Barcelona. “So a bit surprised to be leading the championship, but at the end it’s been a crazy championship because everybody’s struggling, every race somebody’s struggling.
“It looks like the season starts now, more or less, because everybody is very close, and unfortunately my feeling with the bike is not the best. I think what we have to change is clear from a few races [back], but it’s very difficult for me in this moment to change that.”
Dovizioso’s been hamstrung by the 2020 Michelin tyre specification, and the change he references is one of braking style, because “the way I braked doesn’t work anymore”.
“I’m trying to change but it’s not instinctive, so it’s very difficult to make the perfect move, the perfect approach to braking, and that affects everything. It’s the first thing you do in the corner and still I’m not that good in that point, it’s clear it’s the point where I have to be better.”
The result is that he’s simply not fast enough – struggling to clear Q1, struggling to make his way up the order, struggling to assert himself among his fellow Ducatis. The contrast between himself and his likely 2020 works team replacement Francesco Bagnaia at Misano was striking.
Track record
Of the four familiar tracks MotoGP will be racing it in the rest of 2020, Dovizioso has won at Barcelona and Valencia, but that’s a bit misleading. His win at the former was more down to tyre wear, while the latter was a wet race. Yes, Barcelona is a fairly happy hunting ground for Ducati as of late and his 2019 Valencia showing was respectable, but the other two tracks should in theory suit the Desmosedici better.
Aragon has that long back straight, and while Ducati hasn’t won there since the Casey Stoner days, that’s mostly down to Marquez being an Aragon master. Le Mans isn’t a track that sticks out as an obvious Ducati favourite on paper, but its results there have been reliably superb, and its riders finished 2-3-4 behind Marquez there last year, with Dovizioso in second.
Fabio Quartararo
Petronas Yamaha, 2nd – 83 points
Average grid position: 3.1
Average finish: 5.7
Retirements: 1
Team-mate: Franco Morbidelli, 19 points behind
The case for
The best argument for a Fabio Quartararo title in 2020 is 2019, the year in which – despite finishing fifth – he basically emerged as heir apparent to Marc Marquez and established himself as MotoGP’s pre-eminent qualifier.
The Quartararo who was only narrowly beaten to victory by Marquez on the last lap in both Misano and Thailand was very much the Quartararo we saw at Jerez, as he capitalised on Marquez’s errors and subsequent absence to deliver two comfortable wins.
It hasn’t looked fantastic for the Petronas SRT Yamaha rider since, but he remains rapid over one lap and his race pace is normally up there with the best of them. For a relative newcomer, he’s also decently reliable when it comes to staying on the bike, having crashed out from just three races in his premier-class career so far and very rarely hitting the deck in other sessions.
Arguably, his direct rivals haven’t done enough to capitalise on his dip in form – so if he comes back to Jerez-spec Quartararo or anywhere near that, perhaps aided by a “confidential” upgrade that had been planned for Barcelona, the title race is as good as over.
The case against
At no point in 2020 has Quartararo gained position on the opening lap, and the only time he escaped losing places on the first tour was the second Jerez race. On every other occasion, he dropped down the order – and often by more than one or two places (unless you count the restart in Austria, which is not very representative because he lined up 20th).
Given that the Yamaha M1 bike isn’t the MotoGP machine you’d want if you needed to overtake some riders, that’s less than ideal. And while the Yamaha is not a great starter relative to its opposition, Quartararo himself clearly isn’t the standout in the M1 camp when it comes to launching off the grid.
Quartararo can show all the FP4 and qualifying pace he wants, but if he reliably ends up sixth or lower after the opening lap, that’s just not good enough.
Beyond that, it’s also obvious that he’s in a bit of a spiral and putting pressure on himself. His angry reaction to losing a podium finish at Misano for a track limits violation was perfectly understandable – yet it does feel like he previously found it easier to shrug off setbacks like that.
Track record
Quartararo was on pole on two of 2020’s remaining tracks last year, second in another and would’ve likely been on the front row at Le Mans too if qualifying there hadn’t been wet.
Races have been more of a mixed bag – while he was excellent at Valencia in leading Marquez for several laps and ultimately arriving at the finish a second behind the victorious Honda rider, he was outside the podium at Le Mans and Aragon, and his Barcelona runner-up finish to Marquez was more down to Jorge Lorenzo taking out three frontrunners ahead of him.
At the same time, Barcelona was the venue for that pivotal 2018 Moto2 weekend, where he took his first win in nearly four years to transformed himself from a wasted prodigy to a sudden contender for a MotoGP graduation.
Maverick Vinales
Yamaha, 3rd – 83 points
Average grid position: 2.4
Average finish: 5.8
Retirements: 1
Team-mate: Valentino Rossi, 25 points behind
The case for
In the final eight races of 2019, during that stretch when he and Quartararo formed an (admittedly lopsided) ‘big three’ with Marquez, Vinales was the rider who scored the second-most points behind the runaway champion. And it was not the first time during his MotoGP career that he looked like a strong candidate to be the newest premier-class champion.
Vinales is often referred to as MotoGP’s ‘testing world champion’, somewhat derisively, but that reflects an underlying truth that he is as quick as anybody when he’s comfortable, not just over one lap but over a race distance as we regularly witness in FP4.
But boy is he good over one lap. If Quartararo had the claim to being MotoGP’s best qualifier seemingly sown up last year, Vinales has emphatically struck back in 2020, with a field-high three poles so far.
The case against
The big Achilles’ heel of Vinales’ Yamaha tenure so far has been making the bike work when it’s full of fuel – whether it be getting off the line or keeping up pace in the early laps. Neither of those look as big a problem in 2020 as they did before, but if Vinales’ opening-lap figures make for prettier reading than Quartararo’s, it is certainly not by much.
But the important thing is that Vinales’ form is still deeply erratic and full of false dawns, and that the weekend execution under crew chief Esteban Garcia seems not all that much better than under his predecessor Roman Forcada. Take the wrong Brembo brakes spec choice in Austria, and the seemingly wrong choice of rear tyre in the first Misano race – those were mistakes none of his Yamaha peers replicated, and they represented points left on the table.
“We will try to be smart, we will try to be consistent, which is the most important, and to keep building and growing. For us the consistency is very important,” said Vinales at Barcelona – but consistency isn’t something he’s excelled at during his time at Yamaha so far. And while the Misano win is a timely band-aid, it hasn’t completely banished the nagging thought that the kind of results Vinales and Yamaha are both capable of by themselves they’ll never achieve together.
Track record
Vinales’ record at Barcelona in MotoGP is pretty awful – only one front row start (that in his Suzuki days, during that surprise 1-2 led by team-mate Aleix Espargaro) and no finishes within 10 seconds of the race winner. That latter stat should’ve probably changed last year, but Lorenzo’s bowling alley-style crash meant it did not.
But he describes Le Mans, Aragon and Valencia as “tracks that I love”, and he’s been on pole at all three – although only converted that pole at Le Mans in 2017, and hasn’t stood on the podium at the other two.
Joan Mir
Suzuki, 4th – 80 points
Average grid position: 8.1
Average finish: 3.2
Retirements: 2
Team-mate: Alex Rins, 36 points behind
The case for
How can a rider who hasn’t won a MotoGP race yet be considered the favourite for the MotoGP title? Well, in Joan Mir’s case, it’s because he really should’ve already won one – if not for the red flag in Austria – and would be leading the championship now had he done so.
Mir also left points on the table by crashing out in the Jerez opener, and by being wiped out in Iker Lecuona’s fall at Brno. He hasn’t necessarily been disproportionately unlucky, but what he has been is reliably capable of scoring good points. Where Quartararo’s worst finish of the season is 13th, Vinales’ is 14th and Dovizioso’s is 11th, Mir’s is fifth.
Suzuki looked like the big loser when the COVID-revised 2020 MotoGP calendar dropped its strongest tracks, but the new GSX-RR is so good that it hasn’t really mattered. Having upgraded its top speed to a more competitive level, it was capable of victory at a power track like the Red Bull Ring, which really said all there is to know about how good of a machine it is.
And while Alex Rins’ injury has maybe flattered Mir a bit when it comes to the intra-team dynamic, Mir’s advantage over Rins has only become more emphatic with time, and Suzuki would be wise to throw its full weight behind him in the title battle.
The case against
He’s the least experienced rider of the four, and still clearly a little bit raw. The Jerez crash was his error, and while he was blameless in the Brno exit, it was a consequence of getting ‘beaten up’ by Petrucci in the early laps.
And that was a consequence of his and Suzuki’s questionable qualifying form. Mir has been on the front row once, which is a big accomplishment on the GSX-RR, but he has also been on the fourth row four times. He converted an eighth and an 11th on the starting grid into two podiums at Misano, but that trick won’t work everywhere, especially if Quartararo and Vinales are lining up out front every weekend.
“I think our qualifying is not as bad as in Misano, we can improve, but to be always fighting for victory we need something more. We need to start in the first or second row, to gain a bit more consistency,” Mir summed up at Barcelona.
But that’s only half the battle – aside from the Red Bull Ring, he hasn’t really looked like the obvious favourite at the other three venues in 2020 so far, and you get the feeling that a Vinales or a Quartararo operating at their peak are still a little bit faster overall.
Track record
Mir missed a couple of races through injury in 2020 but did race at the four upcoming tracks, which can only be a plus. He did quite well at Barcelona and Valencia, but not so well at Le Mans (even though that’s a track that should probably favour Suzuki) and Aragon.
He has past Moto3 wins at Le Mans, Barcelona and Aragon, and two podiums in Valencia, so none of them count among his bogey tracks.
