València 2015

This post relates to events taking place almost 18 months before this blog even existed. The bitterness that followed has never really gone away so this is still, in some small way, relevant to MotoGP today. This first post will cover a quick analysis done shortly after València 2015.

First a quick recap.   At the penultimate round of the 2015 championship Valentino Rossi accused Marc Márquez of having “played” with the other riders during the previous round at Phillip Island. He went on to say that he thought Márquez did this to support Jorge Lorenzo’s world championship. Márquez denied this and the two riders clashed during the race. This earned Rossi three penalty points; relegating him to the back of the grid for the championship decider in València. Lorenzo won the final race and with it the championship. Then the real bitterness started, as Rossi accused Márquez of protecting Lorenzo in the race to ensure his championship victory.

The accusations generated plenty of opinion but not much actual analysis. Here are my observations, based on the lap times published on motogp.com.

The first figure shows lap times for the top four riders at Phillip Island. The second figure simplifies this by showing times for the podium contenders over the last four laps. It is pretty clear to see that Márquez won the race by riding the fastest lap of the race on the final lap. This fits the narrative at the time: Márquez having gone all out for glory with an amazing final lap. We can also see that his penultimate lap was quicker than the other podium contenders and that they all slowed – while he went quicker – on the final lap.

Márquez’s final lap was 0.38s quicker than his penultimate lap, which was itself a good lap. There’s not much point comparing the last lap to a trended average lap time because his lap times were so inconsistent. In fact, we see a lot of inconsistency in lap times for the top four over the race. This is understandable given the amount of overtaking in the race.

The next two graphs show the same information for the top four riders at the València round. Once again we see that Márquez has a great final lap (0.49s quicker than his penultimate lap). Crucially we also see that both Lorenzo and Pedrosa are also quicker on their final laps, each by 0.24s.

It’s hard to see anything in the lap times to indicate that Márquez wasn’t really trying at València. It looks very much like he’s trying to win the race, just as he did at Phillip Island. Admittedly the teams and riders have access to more data than this but what could they possibly have that would contradict the obvious conclusion from lap times?