Two Back at the Turn: Márquez Is Coming
Marc Márquez completed a perfect weekend at Motegi with victory in the Japanese Grand Prix, passing championship leader Jorge Martin on lap 11 before taking the chequered flag 1.363 seconds clear of the Aprilia.
Martin finished second. Marco Bezzecchi survived a quite ridiculous late charge from Enea Bastianini to take third by 0.078 seconds.
And so, after 16 Grands Prix, the World Championship looks like this.
Marc Márquez: 331.
Two points.
We'll come back to those.
Because what do MotoGP and golf have in common?
On the face of it, almost nothing.
One involves launching a 300-horsepower motorcycle towards a corner at 200mph with your elbow scraping the floor. The other involves spending four hours walking around an immaculately maintained field dressed like you're about to open a regional branch of an accountancy firm.
But we're in Japan, where golf has long occupied that peculiar territory somewhere between elite sport, social institution and outdoor boardroom.
There are birdies here too.
And, if you're patient, the occasional eagle.
Remember the eagle. We'll come back to him.
There is another connection.
Red.
Tiger Woods made Sunday red famous. Red shirt, black trousers, final round. Sunday Tiger.
There were essentially two unpleasant ways to encounter him.
You could have that flash of red somewhere behind you, gradually getting larger as numbers disappeared from your lead.
Or you could look at the leaderboard and discover he'd already got past you, the little red figure disappearing into the distance.
Either way, you were probably in trouble.
MotoGP has one of those too.
Marc Márquez comes ready-made in Sunday red.
And Jorge Martin experienced both versions at Motegi.
On Saturday, Márquez got ahead and disappeared.
On Sunday, Martin made the start.
After Saturday's tyre problems had left Michelin with rather more homework than anyone wanted on a Saturday night, the recommended hard rear was fitted across the grid. Twenty-four laps on a tyre hardly anybody had seriously wanted to race beforehand represented something of a journey into the unknown.
Martin didn't appear particularly bothered.
He launched perfectly from pole and led Márquez through the opening exchanges, with Bezzecchi settling into third. Behind them, Alex Márquez began serving the two long-lap penalties he'd acquired for Saturday's enthusiastic interpretation of Turn 3.
By lap five, Martin and Marc were separated by four tenths.
By lap ten, they'd dropped Bezzecchi.
Martin was riding beautifully.
The problem was the red thing behind him.
It wasn't attacking wildly. It wasn't showing him a wheel at every corner. It was just there.
Then, on lap 11, Márquez decided he'd seen enough.
He attacked at Turn 9, planted the Ducati on the apex and took the lead.
No drama. No elbows. No desperate lunge.
Marc simply decided that was where he wanted to be.
So he went there.
For a while, Martin appeared to have an answer. Márquez initially stretched the advantage towards eight tenths, but Martin began nibbling away again.
A tenth here.
A fraction there.
Then Marc noticed.
On lap 18, Márquez produced a 1:43.291.
Fastest lap of the race.
Thank you for your enquiry.
There it was again.
Sunday red.
Except Martin was no longer watching it grow larger in his mirrors.
He was watching it disappear up the road.
Márquez controlled the remaining laps to complete the Motegi double, take his sixth Grand Prix victory of the season and the 79th premier-class win of his career.
Martin was excellent.
That's important.
The temptation when momentum shifts this dramatically is to decide that one rider has suddenly become brilliant while the other has forgotten how to operate a motorcycle.
Martin hasn't.
He took pole. He led the opening ten laps. He kept Márquez under pressure. Afterwards, he reckoned he'd ridden almost perfectly.
That's possibly the most ominous bit.
Jorge Martin was very, very good.
Marc Márquez beat him anyway.
Behind them, Bezzecchi looked relatively secure in third until Enea Bastianini apparently glanced at a clock and realised there was a MotoGP race going on.
The Tech3 rider suddenly became the fastest man in Japan.
Fastest lap.
Then another.
Then another.
Then another.
Four consecutive fastest laps as he demolished Bezzecchi's advantage and arrived on the Aprilia's rear wheel just as everyone was preparing to go home.
Where this pace had been for the previous 20 laps remains one of Motegi's more intriguing mysteries.
Bezzecchi held him off.
By 0.078 seconds.
After a deeply emotional weekend for the Italian, it was a deserved podium and an important one. Bastianini had to settle for fourth after producing a closing sequence which suggested he'd spent most of the afternoon carefully preserving a tyre before discovering, slightly late, that he needn't have bothered.
And that, essentially, was Motegi.
Marc first.
Martin second.
Bez third.
Perfectly straightforward.
Except the championship isn't.
Which brings us back to golf.
Tiger Woods didn't become Tiger Woods because he never missed a three-footer.
He missed plenty.
Part of what separates sportsmen operating at this level is what happens next.
Miss the putt. Make double. Walk to the next tee.
The rest of us make double at the first and are still explaining on the 14th that we'd actually be playing rather nicely if it weren't for that unfortunate business three hours ago.
Elite sportsmen don't have that luxury.
There are no mulligans in elite sport.
No breakfast balls. No do-overs. Nobody lets you put the bike back on the grid because, in hindsight, you rather wish you'd approached Turn 1 differently.
The shot has gone.
Hit the next one.
Which is why Jorge Martin won't be sitting in his motorhome torturing himself over Hungary.
Marco Bezzecchi won't be mentally reconstructing every Sprint crash or wondering what Misano might have looked like had he stayed upright.
Nor should they.
Those races have gone.
There isn't a column in the championship table marked points I really should have had.
There are no pictures on a scorecard.
Martin 333.
Márquez 331.
That's the card.
Unfortunately for Martin and Bezzecchi, journalists and supporters aren't elite sportsmen.
We absolutely adore a what-if.
And there are plenty.
Martin's opening-lap mistake in Hungary took himself and his own teammate out of the race. There have been crashes and opportunities missed elsewhere. Bezzecchi has accumulated a few Saturdays he'd probably rather not frame and hang in the downstairs toilet. At Misano, Bez crashed from the lead.
Marc won.
None of this makes either Aprilia rider careless.
They're racing motorcycles at speeds where the rest of us would be searching desperately for a brake pedal despite not having one.
Martin is a World Champion. Bezzecchi has been outstanding. Both have produced some magnificent racing this season.
And neither will waste useful mental energy trying to recover points from races that ended months ago.
But we can look at the arithmetic.
And the arithmetic is extraordinary.
Seven rounds ago, Marc Márquez was 102 points behind the championship leader.
Tonight he is two.
One hundred points.
Gone.
Or, more accurately, Márquez has taken them back.
That's an important distinction.
Because nobody has gifted Marc Márquez his six Grand Prix victories this season. Nobody rode his Ducati for him when he needed to recover from his own difficult weekends. Nobody made the pass on Martin at Turn 9 today except Marc.
Aprilia merely left the door open occasionally.
Unfortunately, the bloke walking past outside was Marc Márquez.
And that's the other half of elite sporting psychology.
The great ones don't dwell on their own mistakes.
They don't tend to spend much time feeling sorry about yours either.
Tiger in his pomp could be three shots behind on Sunday afternoon and somehow make the bloke leading feel like the one in trouble.
The red shirt would appear.
The galleries would start moving.
A roar would go up three holes behind you.
You'd look at the leaderboard.
Two back.
Then one.
Then level.
And suddenly the four-footer you'd been knocking in without thinking all week looked approximately the length of the Tokyo Metro.
Seven rounds ago, Márquez wasn't looming anywhere.
He was 102 points away.
Then the red dot started getting larger.
And larger.
And larger.
Martin still leads this World Championship.
That matters.
He's on 333 points. Márquez has 331. There are six rounds remaining and an enormous number of points still on the table.
Bezzecchi isn't mathematically finished either, although at 49 points behind his teammate he could certainly do with something happening fairly soon.
Nobody at Aprilia needs a mulligan.
They don't exist anyway.
They need the next shot.
A few birdies would be useful.
An eagle or two wouldn't hurt.
Which finally brings us back to ours.
Japan is home to the Steller's sea eagle, known locally as the o-washi. One of the largest eagles on Earth, it can have a wingspan approaching two and a half metres.
Magnificent thing.
Japan even designates it a Natural Monument.
Aprilia might want to see if they can get a couple through customs for Lombok.
Because Martin and Bezzecchi don't need to look backwards. That's our indulgence, not theirs.
They need Indonesia.
Then Australia.
Then the next corner, the next braking marker and the next opportunity.
Martin needs to keep doing what he's doing and somehow find that final fraction Márquez had today.
Bezzecchi needs victories and perhaps a little assistance from the two men ahead.
They're both more than capable of it.
But Marc Márquez was 102 points back.
Now he's two.
He's just completed a perfect weekend in Japan and beaten Jorge Martin on an afternoon when Martin felt he'd ridden almost perfectly himself.
Sunday red has been getting larger in Martin's championship mirrors for quite some time.
At Motegi, Martin finally got it in front of him.
That wasn't much more enjoyable.
Marc Márquez is two back at the turn.
And he's coming.
A few more weekends like this and Aprilia won't be needing eagles.
They'll be needing snookers.
