Winners
Losers
Pecco Bagnaia
Winning the Algarve GP with such ease really isn’t what poor Pecco wanted. What he wanted even less was to see the new world champion and the man who defeated him to the title Fabio Quartararararo struggle to keep up then struggle to stay up. The season-surrendering Frenchman ended up in the gravel for the first time this season.
It was utter misery for Bagnaia after his win as the real cost of his crash at Misano seeped through like a weeping scab. Had the Ducati rider not fallen whilst leading the race he would have potentially cut Fabio’s lead down to just 13 points with one round to go. Furthermore that final round next week in winter is likely to be wet and cold – something the Ducati likes and Yamaha hates.
Joan Mir
“If I can start at the front of a race I have the pace to win.”
Not quite on this evidence Joan. But close.
Portugal
Last year, when we concerned about the virus, the Portuguese event was run without any spectators – a bit like women’s football. The hairy locals, all of whom were builders or concierges, were forced to watch the race at home with their daily baked cod. That race was dominated by Portugal’s very own Miguel Oliveira.
So with two races being held at the Algarve International Circuit this season it gave the unshaven men and women of Portugal two potential chances to actually see Miguel once again storm to victory and give their country their first sporting success since their football team last had a sporting success.
The first race in April didn’t go well. Oliveira finished out of the points and out of favour with his sister. But surely this time would be better?
Sadly not. After a terrible qualifying but promising start the Portuguese rider was hanging on to 10th place with two laps to go as Tech 3’s Iker Lecuona chased him down on the KTM Lite.
Lecuona, who publicly states he now hates MotoGP and everyone associated with it, put the Portuguese fans out of their misery early by falling off attempting to pass Miguel and taking them both down.
Which leads us nicely to…
KTM
It’s all going disastrously wrong in MotoGP for Hitler’s second favourite company. This time out one KTM rider fell off, then another KTM rider fell off knocking a third KTM rider off.
Only Brad ‘can’t be arsed with qualifying’ Binder managed a half decent result scraping into the top ten 14 seconds behind the race winner. Sadly the Binder name had already been tarnished by that point.
Franco Morbidelli
This is Franco’s official post-race quote:
“Because of the speed that we put on track this weekend, I was expecting to have some more speed during the race. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. For sure, after some laps I needed to slow down to pace myself and finish the race. But generally, I was hoping to have more speed and it didn’t happen. We need to understand what happened, and we will figure it out before Valencia, I hope.”
More speed? What’s he on about? Is he criticising himself? Or is he already slagging off the Yamaha he moaned so much about not having?
Whatever the reason the fact remains that the work-shy Italian was the last Yamaha finisher beaten comfortably by a guy retiring and another one just out of retirement.
Us
MotoGP was boring. Moto2 was boring. Moto3 was quite good but then ruined by Darryn Binder.
F1 Viewers
As bad as we had it our races shone like beacons of entertainment brilliance compared to the utterly tedious grey pile of monotonous TV-spewage F1 parade that falsely masqueraded as entertainment.
Sunday’s two hour ‘race’ has already been recorded by neural calculators at the John Hopkins University as the most mind-numbing period of time in this or any predicted multiverse ever.
It was even too boring to bore anyone to death – as by doing so would have made the ordeal less boring.