Fabio Quartararo’s mission impossible coming to Valencia invites a tempting comparison to the only other time in the MotoGP era so far that a rank outsider coming into the season finale left said season finale clutching the big trophy.
“We’re still in the game. We have to be happy with that,” Yamaha team manager Lin Jarvis told MotoGP.com.
“It’s clear we have to win the race, which is not easy, and our competitors have to have some sort of misfortune, which is not the ideal way to win. But hey, in this game, anything can happen.
“I remember going to Valencia 2006, we were very yellow [in attire]we were Camel Yamaha, Valentino [Rossi] going there, it should have been a formality in a way.
“And the unthinkable happened – Vale fell and Nicky [Hayden] went with the title. I know in Valencia it’s a very difficult track so anything can happen.”
An Italian points leader? Check. That points leader being on the verge of making history as the champion who came back from the biggest-ever points deficit? Check. The unforgiving Valencia circuit? Check.
All of that is of course circumstantial, whereas the eight points between Nicky Hayden and Valentino Rossi then are very different to the 23 between Fabio Quartararo and Pecco Bagnaia now. But with it being harder than ever to score small handfuls of points in MotoGP, should its Valencia 2006 defeat really offer Yamaha a glimpse of hope after all?
The history lesson
Hayden only let a 51-point buffer slip away rather than the 91 points in Quartararo’s case, but – unlike Quartararo – Hayden, until the penultimate race, looked very much on course to head to Valencia with a very strong shot if not at least comfortable .
Then Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa skittled him off the track, contributing to a massive 20-point Estoril swing towards Rossi that perhaps could’ve been even bigger than that – given that Rossi was struggling amid the Estoril chill and that a rider running behind Hayden/Pedrosa at the point of contact, Toni Elias, went on to beat Rossi in a photo finish. Kenny Roberts Jr, also behind at the point of accident, was right there in the victory mix, too.
Pedrosa, a rookie, what aghast. Hayden, sounding like he was on the very verge of tears, was upset (if relatively magnanimous) with Pedrosa but seemed even more upset with Honda for not having reined his team-mate in.
He was also unflinchingly realistic about his prospects.
“I mean, it’s never over, that’s why we line up. I was down there pulling for Elias and Roberts so hard in the motorhome.
“I swear his [Elias’s] parents couldn’t have been pulling for him any harder than I was. And that’s the truth. But truth is, Rossi’s just got to go follow me in Valencia.
“Anything can happen in racing but we know Valentino, let’s be real, give him eight points with one race to go, the dude’s just got to follow me.”
On Thursday in Valencia, too: “I know he [Rossi] is a big-time player, last time I checked he’s not exactly a choke artist or nothing. So I’m sure for him it’s just another weekend, as far as championships he’s done them a lot.”
Hayden would set himself a target of the front row to have any chance, but that target was missed. A potential front-row-worthy lap went begging due to Alex Hofmann-shaped traffic, whereas Rossi took pole with a record lap.
But that would mean precious little on Sunday. Rossi was so slow off the line that Hayden, starting fifth, was side by side with him on the lead-up to Turn 1 and boxed him out on exit. Gresini Honda rider Marco Melandri then went past, and by the start of lap two Rossi was being hassled by the Kawasaki of Shinya Nakano into Turn 1 for seventh place.
Hayden, meanwhile, was going the other way, soon getting waved through by Pedrosa into second and latching on right at the back of race leader Troy Bayliss. But even without that, he was already in the ‘champion as they run’ position, with Rossi needing to make up multiple places and with three Hondas (as well as the Ducati of Loris Capirossi) between him and Hayden.
One of those Hondas, the LCR bike of Casey Stoner, was now right in front and refusing to yield, instead pushing Rossi towards the Suzuki of Chris Vermuelen. And just as Stoner established a minor buffer over Rossi, with Vermuelen hot on his tracks, Rossi lost the rear at Turn 2.
How lose-able was the crown?
All these years after, the 2006 outcome seems to weigh reasonably heavily on Rossi, probably with the benefit of hindsight and with the influence of the pain of a certain other title-decider from nine years later.
Adding the 2006 crown to his tally would make it 10 grand prix world championships and eight premier-class titles, the latter equaling Giacomo Agostini.
He told Gazetta dello Sport last year that Valencia 2006 was the one day he’d changed in his career. “There I threw away a world title that I could have won, and then it would have been 10 anyway, even after the theft of 2015.”
Would he have won had he stayed on? He wasn’t on course to at the moment of the crash. But that’s not how Rossi operated that year, or in that era in general. Though he won more races than Hayden in 2006 and led vastly more laps, he had a 5.6 average on-track position (and 4 as the median) versus Hayden’s 4.1 (and 3 as the median). Staying back at the start of the race wasn’t that big a problem.
And there was a glimpse of an opportunity there even after the crash. Rossi would score two points despite finishing 38.5s off the win – such a margin almost always ensures a non-score these days, but it was a different world. He had two Yamahas ahead of him in Colin Edwards and Carlos Checa – two gimme points, if needed – so it was just a question of whether the attrition would be enough. But the exits of Stoner, Vermeulen, Kawasaki’s Randy de Puniet and the two d’Antin Pramac Ducatis of Hofmann and Jose Luis Cardoso were still three short of the magic number.
At the same time, if more started falling, who’s to say Hayden – who surrendered second with not much of a fight versus Capirossi – wouldn’t have made more of an effort to disrupt the Ducati 1-2?
At the moment for Rossi and Yamaha, it was a defeat that seemed relatively easy to take. Then team manager Davide Brivio met Rossi in the pit box with a smile and a shrug and Rossi, while frustrated, was happy to give Hayden credit for “a great fight without the polemics and the s**t that we had [with other rivals] in the past”.
“We did a lot of incredible years, a lot of good victories. In life it’s possible to also lose,” he said.
16 years on
There will be no cushion of five championships for Bagnaia to fall on this weekend if the “unthinkable” happens to him, too. It would be deeply, profoundly bitter for him and Ducati, and that possibility perhaps adds to the pressure. That’s the bad news.
The good news is basically everything else.
“I feel it was quite different,” Ducati sporting director Paolo Ciabatti argued to MotoGP.com when told of Jarvis’s point.
“In this case, as we all know, Quartararo must win Valencia and I think Pecco needs to be 15th or zero points.
“Everything is possible, I agree with Lin, but when our beloved Nicky Hayden won the championship in 2006, he won by finishing third. This time for Fabio he would need to finish first. And last year I think we were a Ducati 1-2-3 in qualifying, 1-2-3 on the finish line.
“Fingers crossed because we must be scaramantici [superstitious] but we can be confident for the last round.”
Bagnaia can absolutely crash out at Valencia – it just happens. And if he does, he’s unlikely to recover to as high as 13th. But unlike Rossi/Hayden, even baking in a Bagnaia crash into a theoretical statistical model would probably not make Quartararo the favourite.
The Frenchman has not led a race since the Sachsenring in June, has not run in the top two since the Red Bull Ring in August.
His situation isn’t 2006. It’s 2017. It’s when Andrea Dovizioso went into a must-win finale versus Marc Marquez and was offered a glimmer of hope when Marquez nearly shunted right ahead of him.
But it was no more than a glimmer. Eleven years on from that Bayliss-led 1-2, the Ducati no longer particularly fancied Valencia and Dovizioso had to go over the limit to try to keep a victory in his sights. He crashed, and the title race was over.
Quartararo is an absurd talent who will ride unburdened by the title dream because it is so distant – but he’ll face such a massive challenge, even not accounting for the fact he broke a finger at Sepang.
Jarvis’s description of Valencia 2006 suggests that Rossi’s side may have been more relaxed than prudent coming in, but that probably didn’t make the pivotal difference, just as Bagnaia’s level of calm is unlikely to on Sunday.
But as for making the road to that Sunday most palatable, both Bagnaia and Ducati can afford to be relaxed. Basic probability is on his side – and, really, history is, too