Theory that Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin won’t have huge advantage in Barcelona

MotoGP heads to Barcelona this weekend for the 20th and final round of the season, and with the World Championship set to be decided between Jorge Martin and Francesco Bagnaia the performance of other riders relative to them will be one of the most important factors of the weekend.

When MotoGP raced in Barcelona in May, for the Catalan Grand Prix, Francesco Bagnaia beat Jorge Martin by almost two seconds, with Marc Marquez over 10 seconds off the win in third place after starting 14th.

They were similar gaps to what Bagnaia and Martin — who this weekend will decide the championship between themselves — enjoyed over the rest of the field in Sepang two weeks ago, but Gresini Racing’s Alex Marquez thinks that others will be closer in this weekend’s Solidarity GP.

“It depends,” Marquez said. “I think Marc [Marquez] was starting really in the back [ in the Catalan Grand Prix], also Enea [Bastianini] was having problems in the race, but in the end was super-fast.

“So, I expect to have those four more on the top — also [Franco] Morbidelli was quite fast here.

“[But] I think they will not have that advantage, like 10 seconds, if Marc or Enea start also in the front. But, anyway, we need to be there, we need to be in the Q2, we need to make a solid weekend, and we will try our best.”

The unique context of this weekend’s race — notably the late change of venue from the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Valencia to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya — has ultimately meant that Michelin has brought a greater range of tyre options to this race than usual.

The idea of the greater range is to cover more possibilities in terms of temperatures. Although some of the options might be more useful than others, Marquez is of the opinion that it’s better to be cautious than to risk having an allocation that is too hard or too soft for the given conditions.

“One front, that is the hard-hard [compound], it’s optimistic,” said Marquez.

“But maybe the sun comes out — it’s Barcelona. But I don’t think so.

“It’s a good tyre choice from Michelin to have a lot of choices because you don’t know if you will have 10 degrees in the morning and 30 degrees in the afternoon, so you need to be prepared for everything.

“It will be more difficult to try all the tyre options, but some, the front ones that we have four it depends the temperature. All the tyres will work, but with a proper temperature.”