What have been the best races for MotoGP’s 2024 title challengers?

The 2024 MotoGP World Championship will be decided this weekend at the Solidarity Grand Prix at Barcelona between Jorge Martin and Francesco Bagnaia.

After 19 rounds of racing in 2024, Martin leads the way by 24 points with 37 left on the table at the newly-rescheduled Barcelona finale following Valencia’s cancellation due to extreme flooding in the region.

Bagnaia has won 10 grands prix in 2024 compared to Martin’s three, but relentless consistency from the latter coupled with eight DNFs for the reigning champion has set up the decider we now have.

In the latest Crash MotoGP Podcast, the team discuss what they consider to be the best races for each of Martin and Bagnaia this season.

“For me, I think Bagnaia’s best win… there’s two in my head,” Crash’s Social Media Manager and podcast host Jordan Moreland begins.

“The one in Buriram, with the pressure he had to deliver under, he did it. But I also think back to the start of the year and that race with Marc Marquez at Jerez.

“I thought that was a little bit of a reminder that people maybe thought Bagnaia would get bullied by Marquez and he showed him he was willing to race hard with him, and everything that happened in Portimao, it was a great battle between those two.

“Overall, I think it will be Jerez for me for Bagnaia. For Jorge Martin, he’s only had three grand prix wins, but obviously a lot of sprint wins. There’s two again.

“The sprint win that he had at Misano, the first one, where he got an unbelievable start and he just controlled it.

“That was a fantastic marker to show that in this second half of the year he’s been quicker than Bagnaia, and that proved it to me.

“But also the one in Le Mans, it was the one he got the most emotional about, how he was able to hold off Bagnaia and Marquez. That was one of the standout races of the year.”

Crash Senior Journalist Lewis Duncan adds: “People are going to accuse me of recency bias, which is a term I really hate because you can only judge things based on what’s happened recently.

“I think, for Martin, for me that Indonesian Grand Prix win. He had this crash in the sprint that he didn’t really understand and it was at a track that a year ago that his championship challenge unravelled.

“He said himself he was really worried, there were lots of ghosts, anxiety about crashing again and he came through that.

“Pecco was really struggling and he capitalised on that after that tricky sprint situation. If he does win the championship, we’ll look at that as one of those key moments where there was total, undeniable proof of that mental resilience.

“For Pecco, I would say Sepang, that hard battle that he had to go for it after crashing out of the sprint.

“We haven’t, I don’t think, seen Pecco really with his back up against the wall at any point in the past three seasons until that point and he came out swinging.

“He gave as good as he got and then he cleared off into the distance.”

For Crash MotoGP Editor Peter McLaren, he says: “I think, for Pecco, Malaysia, it combines almost all the battling of Jerez with the pressure of Buriram - you must win.

“Even Marc Marquez the day before was saying ‘Pecco’s got to win tomorrow’ and he comes out in that Buriram race in the rain and does it.

“Malaysia was a sort of combination of those two situations where you have the battle tooth and nail at the start, and he had to win, and he got the job done.

“Martin, not many grand prix wins, but Indonesia also for me because it was the response.

“It was the mistake we didn’t expect, but immediately correcting it, and sort of stopping that crack of a mistake becoming a great, big cavern of disappearing points which we saw at Indonesia had begun the previous year.

“So, it was really important for him to really stamp his authority in that race.”