Five things we learned from the 2024 MotoGP Indonesian Grand Prix

Jorge Martin put in a commanding performance to win the 2024 MotoGP Indonesian Grand Prix and maintain a championship lead over Francesco Bagnaia.

The Pramac rider topped qualifying with a lap record and should have done the double at Mandalika had he not crashed out of the lead of the sprint race.

This allowed Francesco Bagnaia to take an important sprint win to halve his championship deficit to Martin - though it rose again to 21 points in the grand prix as he could do no more than third as Martin took his third Sunday victory of the season.

The championship remains tight at the top but Martin is emerging as the favourite.

Both Enea Bastianini and Marc Marquez have all but dropped out of contention following DNFs on Sunday.

Elsewhere, Pedro Acosta survived a tyre pressure farce to hold onto a well-earned second in the grand prix, while Johann Zarco shone for Honda to give the Japanese marque its best weekend of the year.

Here are the five main talking points from the Indonesian GP.

1 - Martin’s ghostbusting strengthens his title credentials

Jorge Martin didn’t need any reminders about his crash out of a commanding lead of the 2023 Indonesian GP. But when he tumbled out of the lead of the sprint last Saturday on the first lap, a comparison was hard not to make.

The Pramac rider, who brilliantly took pole with a new lap record, blamed his sprint fall on the asphalt at Turn 16. Francesco Bagnaia behind him felt Martin was pushing very hard into the turn and would have taken a four-second lead had made it out the other side.

No matter, it piled pressure on Martin as Bagnaia recovered from a bad Friday to win the sprint and cut the Pramac rider’s championship lead down to 12 points.

In the grand prix, Martin led from start to finish but admitted that he had “ghosts on my mind” every time he went through Turn 16 and Turn 11. Keeping his concentration, he resisted reasonable attention from Pedro Acosta to eventually win by 1.4 seconds (though his lead was 2.5s before he backed off on the last lap).

With Bagnaia recovering to third, helped by team-mate Enea Bastianini crashing out late on, Martin’s lead is now 21 points. That he’s lost just three points from where he began the weekend via a sprint crash gifting his chief title rival the win speaks to the consistency Martin has shown throughout 2024 so far.

And while it remains tight at the top between Martin and Bagnaia with five rounds to go, the former surmounted a major mental hurdle at Mandalika for his first grand prix win since Le Mans. Now firmly in the part of the season Martin was extremely competitive in last year, he is strengthening his case as favourite for the championship.

2 - Why this is a “championship of mistakes”

Across the first 15 rounds of the 2024 MotoGP season, the top two in the title battle - Martin and Bagnaia - have registered 11 non-scores between them across sprints and grands prix.

Bagnaia is leading the way in this table with seven DNFs for the year, two more than his number of non-scores in 2022 and 2023 when he won both of his championships. All but one of Martin’s non-scores this year have come while he has been leading races.

To his credit, though, Martin’s crash out of the sprint in Indonesian was his first since tumbling out of the lead of the German GP in July. Bagnaia, in that time, has failed to finish three times. And in the first half of the season, Martin’s crashes were pinpointed as being down to him running something on his Ducati related to braking that the rest weren’t.

After the Mandalika sprint, Bagnaia called 2024 a “championship of mistakes” and basically put the blame for this on the super grippy Michelin rear tyre.

“I have an idea, which has arrived from the performance of the tyres,” Bagnaia explained. “The rear tyres have taken an enormous step in front, but we are braking so hard because the rear is also helping a lot in the braking.

“But the front has more issues because we are entering much faster in all of the corners. So, the performance that Michelin has improved this season is incredible. All the season, all the circuits we improved the pace a lot. But when you are at this limit it is easy to have a crash. So, it’s super important for the championship but we have to be focused.”

Ducati may already have a solution for this problem, Bagnaia revealed at Mandalika, but it’s not ready yet.

“I will ask for what I tried in the [Misano] test,” he said in response to a question about 2025. “It was super good. What we tried in the test was helping a lot. Unluckily I can’t use it right now, because it could be a good help, but they are not ready to give it to all the GP24s. So I can’t use it. It’s a new chassis and I think it will help all of us.”

3 - Latest stewards farce making MotoGP look stupid

Literally a week had passed between one furore of stewarding and the next. And once again it centres on transparency.

After the Indonesian GP, Pedro Acosta, Takaaki Nakagami and Brad Binder were noted for potential tyre pressure infringements. Usually when this message arrives it’s a slam dunk penalty, which would have demoted Acosta 16s and out of the podium places.

It took until well after the press conference for a verdict to come through, and Acosta escaped punishment. This was chalked down to a damaged wheel rim leading to the drop in pressure that was flagged by the sensor.

But Binder and Nakagami’s decision was to be delayed until Motegi, meaning at least four days would have to pass before there was final confirmation of the results. The stewards’ notes initially said: “Due to the nature of the post-race technical checks, the results will be published at the next event.”

Then, around 45 minutes later, the checks were somehow completed and Nakagami was given a penalty while Binder’s data cleared him of any infraction. Yet, when pressed for an explanation by the media on Sunday, there wasn’t one.

Still, there has been no explanation as to why the stewards thought the checks on Binder and Nakagami would take so long as to delay the finalising of results for another few days, nor what the U-turn was - other than, according to a representative from Dorna, that the checks took less time than anticipated.

The tyre pressure rule isn’t a popular one to begin with given how much of a negative impact it has had on the racing spectacle. But this latest episode and the continued lack of transparency has done nothing to ease the erosion of trust in the FIM stewards, and has actively harmed the image of MotoGP to boot.

4 - Zarco shines for Honda as steps forward continue

Johann Zarco rightly earned the highest ranking in Crash.net's rider rankings on Sunday. The LCR rider was nothing short of brilliant on the updated RC213V at Mandalika. Narrowly missing Q2 directly on Friday, he made it out Q1 on Saturday, qualified seventh, finish eighth in the sprint and ninth in the grand prix.

It marked Honda’s first sprint/GP points double of the season. But Zarco wasn’t just HRC’s leading light - he was a cut above the rest of its stable all weekend.

Zarco explained in Indonesia that the steps Honda had taken with its bike since the Misano test, which included the major aero update, were evident at the Emilia Romagna GP. But because grip was high and everyone was so dialled in at Misano, Honda wasn’t quite able to show its gains.

Finding improvements in turning and braking, Zarco was able to gather important data on Honda’s rivals having been able to run with them at the fringes of the top 10 in both races.

This clearly exposed the traction weakness that has long-blighted the Honda, and Zarco is convinced that another good weekend at Motegi will confirm that what he saw at Mandalika is in fact Honda’s new base.

5 - 2025 calendar revealed, but question marks remain

Ahead of the Indonesian Grand Prix, MotoGP finally got its full provisional schedule for the 2025 season.

Once again slated as a 22-round calendar, the new schedule has taken on quite a different look to previous years. This was already going to be the case when Thailand was announced several weeks ago as being the season-opener.

Portugal remains after signing a new two-year deal, courtesy of the efforts of Miguel Oliveira to keep MotoGP coming to his country. That will form a back-to-back with Valencia at the end of the season in November.

But the biggest difference for 2025 is the absence of triple-headers, which will ease pressure on teams and riders compared to previous years.

However, whether we actually get 22 rounds is the big question. Argentina has been included, but sky high poverty rates under the current government in the country makes the return of the Rio Hondo race hard to envisage. The Argentina GP relies on public funding, and the lack of it as part of austerity measures in the country led to the 2024 edition being cancelled.

The return of the Hungarian GP at the new Balaton Park track has also raised doubts. The circuit needs a lot of work, and MotoGP’s previous recent attempts to stage races in Hungary haven’t exactly gone well.

Oddly, the Indian GP has been listed as a reserve event for 2025 despite the fact it was canned from the 2024 calendar and now not featuring next year as a scheduled event.

Given all of the calendar problems of recent years, you can understand why the paddock is taking a sceptical approach to the provisional 2025 listing.