Can Pecco Bagnaia really blame Alex Marquez clash for his title deficit?

With three rounds left in the 2024 MotoGP season, Jorge Martin leads Francesco Bagnaia by 20 points in the standings after the Australian Gran Prix.

Bagnaia has won more races than Martin on Sundays, with eight victories putting the former on a par with the likes of Marc Marquez, Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo for achieving something similar in a single season.

Martin has only won three grands prix, and yet is 20 points clear in the championship. A big factor behind this is the seven DNFs that Bagnaia has registered in the 2024 campaign.

Bagnaia is no stranger to overcoming a high rate of non-scores to win titles. In 2022, he came from 91 points back at the halfway mark to beat a struggling Fabio Quartararo on the Yamaha having suffered five non-scores. In 2023, he tallied up the same number of pointless races but still came out on top against Martin.

Seven is a new high for Bagnaia and it’s come against a rival in Martin whose consistency has propped up relatively slender haul of three GP wins.

Both riders have six sprint wins between them in 2024, while Martin has taken 13 podiums on Saturdays. Bagnaia’s eight wins on a Sunday is a stunning mark relative to three for Martin, but both are level on 13 podiums in total each.

Martin has had four non-scores in 2024, albeit two have come while leading grands prix and a third when he was leading the sprint in Indonesia.

Unforced errors or Alex Marquez's fault?

After finishing a distant third at the Australian GP, Bagnaia commented on the up-and-down nature of his championship and highlighted his Aragon tangle with Alex Marquez as being the incident that is hanging heavy over his tilt right now.

“We are continuing recovering, losing, recovering, losing. Our performance is fairly balanced,” he said. “Unluckily the contact that made me crash with Alex Marquez is the fact that is right now weighing more on the championship.”

That incident came as the pair were debating third place, with Bagnaia the quicker of the two and with time enough left to get a move safely done. That was 16 points that went missing that day, while Martin was able to swell his championship lead from three points after the sprint to 23. Had Bagnaia finished in third, the gap between them would have been seven.

Certainly, it was a costly tangle. But is it really the incident holding Bagnaia back?

Just two rounds later Bagnaia would suffer another non-score. Having won the Emilia Romagna GP sprint to reduce Martin’s lead to four points, he crashed while trying to make up ground in third after an odd tyre issue dropped him out of the victory fight in the first half of the grand prix.

Had he just banked third place, Bagnaia would have left Misano eight points behind Martin instead of 24. At Indonesia, with Martin only scoring 25 points for his grand prix win and Bagnaia taking 28 for the weekend, the gap between them would be just five. And after a clean sweep in Japan, with Martin scoring 26, Bagnaia would take a six-point lead in the standings.

With Martin outscoring Bagnaia by 10 points in Indonesia, he’d retake the lead in the championship by only by four points instead of 20.

If you add the (at minimum) six points Bagnaia lost when he crashed out of third in the Silverstone sprint and the 12 that went walking when he fell from the lead of the Barcelona sprint, you then have a championship advantage of 14 for the Italian.

The Alex Marquez collision at Aragon proved contentious at the time, with Bagnaia initially saying the Gresini rider deliberately crashed with him. The world champion later backtracked on this and apologised for his words.

And while there is no doubt that the points lost there have had an effect on his championship hopes, it’s not the incident that has done the most damage to his points situation.

Unfortunately for Bagnaia, the most costly non-scores have come by his own hand and that is something he now had to quickly come to terms with in order to reverse the momentum Martin has taken in the title race.