Marc Márquez has won four of the last five MotoGP titles and leads the current championship by 36 points after five races and will take a three-race winning streak into the sixth round of the 2018 season this weekend at Mugello. There, in front of thousands of Italians, the 25-year-old Spaniard expects to be booed by Valentino Rossi fans. He also expects, I am sure, to win.
Following his fairing-to-fairing contact with Rossi (and others) in the Argentine Grand Prix, Márquez was warned of severe and instantaneous response by Race Direction in case of any further bursts of what FIM Sporting Regulations 1.21.2 calls “irresponsible” riding. Regardless of whether you consider his riding irresponsible or merely very aggressive, Márquez has since his first Moto2 season in 2011 been involved in more controversial incidents than any other rider currently racing in the premier class.
Fans will recall that in Argentina the reigning champion was given a ride-through penalty after killing his engine, bump-starting it, and then riding in the opposite direction while the rest of the 24 riders were under starter’s orders on the grid. In his charge through from last place after serving that penalty, Márquez grazed a couple of riders and made hard contact with Aleix Espargaró and Valentino Rossi, incurring both ire from his rivals and a second ride-through, which, because the race was in the final stages, was converted to a 30-second penalty that dropped him from fifth to 18th.
At Circuit of The Americas two weeks later, Márquez was warned of the dire consequences of any further irresponsible riding. The reaction from Márquez was twofold: On the one hand, he rather defiantly said he was prepared to learn from his errors but he was not going to change the way he rode. Then he went out and won in Texas, Spain, and France without incident. Some of his overtakings were close and aggressive—just as one would expect MotoGP passes to be—but not once during the actual races did the crawl across the bottom of the broadcast screen inform of an investigation involving the number 93.
Longtime observers of the GP scene are of two minds about this state of affairs. Some fear that Race Control, by defanging Márquez, has taken away a lot of the excitement. Others, myself included, believe it was high time Márquez was reigned in, especially since it is evident that the factory Honda rider has established himself as the fastest rider in the current field and has no need for the argy-bargy, “rubbin’ is racin’ ” tactics. Márquez has now added an uncanny ability to save the front-end tuck that is as revolutionary to MotoGP riding as Kenny Roberts’ back-it-in, fire-it-out, tire-smoking, crossed-up, applied flat-track style was when the Californian arrived on the Grand Prix stage in 1978.
Inevitably, it has been suggested that Márquez may already be a candidate in waiting for the title "G.O.A.T."—greatest of all time; "El mejor de todos los tiempos" is how it is written in the Spanish press. Márquez has only ridden in five complete seasons in the MotoGP class and is just five races into his sixth, but he has already made more starts than some of the legends who rode back in the days of much shorter seasons. So how does Márquez stack up against the top riders of what series rights-holder Dorna calls "The Modern Age"?
Thanks to Dorna’s now semi-retired chief statistician, Dr. Martin Raines, journalists can bank upon reliable data. Before Raines came along, the FIM record books were plagued by errors and oversights. The division of racing into “The Early Period” (1949–1974) and “The Modern Era” (1975 to the present) is partially based on the lack of accurate information of poles and fastest laps and, in fact, starts, from the period before 1975. The secondary reason is that 1975 marks the end of the rule of the MV Agusta four-strokes and the dawning of the 500cc two-stroke period that lasted until the change to 990cc four-strokes in 2002. But it would be just as logical to start The Modern Era with the arrival of the factory Yamaha 500cc team and Jarno Saarinen in 1973. Using 1973 or ’75 as opening date does not change these statistics.
Having said all that, we can now compare Márquez and his contemporaries against the greatest riders of this so-called Modern Era. I timed this article to coincide with Márquez’s win in Le Mans because that win, his 38th in 95 starts, makes him, in baseball language, a .400 hitter—a winner of 40 percent of his races. And how good is that? How good, in fact, statistically anyway, is this kid from the little (9,000 residents) Catalan town of Cervera, located 60 miles inland from Barcelona in the Province of Lleida?
When folks argue about who is the Greatest of All Time, and when that discussion is limited to the period from 1975 onward (eliminating the greats of the early days from Geoff Duke and John Surtees to Giacomo Agostini, Phil Read, and Mike Hailwood), all we have to go on is personal memories of those who were there from the Barry Sheene/Kenny Roberts days. And those opinions are invariably tainted by a combination of nostalgia and subjective opinion. And then there are statistics.
I am basically a Spanish journalist (albeit from Hoopeston, Illinois) so I haven’t earned the right in the American press to express opinions. That’s a good thing because, at this point in Márquez’s career, it is more interesting to compare his results than to try comparing his impact on the way MotoGP bikes are being ridden now with the way Roberts revolutionized the way 500s were ridden when he blew everyone’s mind in 1978. (Roberts had “a cup of coffee in the bigs” in ’74: a single start in the 250cc class at the Dutch TT. He took pole, had fastest lap, and finished third, remounting after crashing while battling eventual winner Walter Villa for the lead.)
So here goes. Márquez against the world, comparing his wins, podiums, poles, and fastest laps on a percentage basis with the top 10 in each of these categories. (Note: The official FIM records credit Roberts with only 55 GP starts, but Dr. Raines has established that Roberts actually made 58 starts in the 500cc class.) I established a minimum of 50 GP starts to qualify for inclusion. I just did, that’s all.
Amazingly, at this moment in time, a snapshot of a man in motion, Márquez leads the legends in three of the four categories.
The great “Splendid Splinter,” Ted Williams, said, a bit self-servingly perhaps, that the hardest thing to do in sports is hit a baseball. Williams was the last of the .400 hitters and there may never be another. It could be argued that winning a MotoGP race against a field of hard men on 280-hp, 1,000cc motorcycles capable of 220 mph on some tracks is also a pretty hard thing to do. Williams hit .406 in 1941 and nobody has beaten that since. In MotoGP the champion often wins 40 percent or more of the races in a single season but there never has been a “.400 hitter” over an entire career in the Modern Era of the premier class. Five-time 500cc World Champion Mick Doohan came close, but he would have needed two more wins in two more starts to clear the .400 barrier. And we are talking about career (to date) averages not single-season records.
Now, after his three wins in a row, Marc Márquez is “hitting” exactly .400, the only active rider who seems to have a real chance of maintaining such a high winning percentage over his career.
A wise man once told me, “Rpm without taking into consideration stroke is a number without a context.” The same can be said for lists of most wins, most poles, etc. It is grossly unfair to compare career wins without considering that GP riders of previous generations competed over much shorter seasons and, therefore, had many fewer opportunities to run up totals.
If Kenny Roberts (the elder) had raced in this century of 18-race seasons (19 now and moving toward 20) he would have ended his career with well over 100 starts, and if he had continued winning at the same rate he might have had 40 or so wins. But that is not the way it works.
Wayne Rainey was a winner, finishing first in nearly 30 percent of his starts and placing sixth, provisionally, just ahead of Valentino Rossi in winning percentage, but the three-time 500cc world champion’s greatest strength was his ability to pick up points and lots of them on the days when he didn’t win. Rainey started 83 Grands Prix in his injury-shortened career and finished in the top three 64 times. That is a 77-percent podium percentage. To understand just how good this is, observe that in order to top Rainey’s podium percentage rate Márquez would need to finish on the podium in each and every one of his next 28 starts!
Rainey’s record may be beaten someday, but of all the records based on rate of success, this one seems the most formidable.
The key to a good start is a place on the front row, and there is no better grid slot than pole position. For the moment three riders are alone at the top in pole-position percentage. Among Grand Prix stars of “The Modern Era,” only five started more than 30 percent of their races from the pole.
Rossi missed the top 10, starting only 17 percent of his races from the pole, He is called a “dominguero” (Sunday driver) in the Spanish press because he is often off the pace until race day, never caring much about qualifying in his early days, confident that he could come through from a second-row start. But times have changed as the number of competitive machines and riders has grown, and there is an intensity in the Rossi garage that was lacking when he was dominant.
And a note on Freddie Spencer: Like Márquez, Spencer, who became the youngest-ever premier-class winner in 1983, a distinction he held until Márquez won the title in 2013, put up dazzling numbers over his first seasons. Following his 1985 season, when he became the last rider to win the 500cc title and the 250cc title in the same year, his career stalled (Spencer tells his story in his excellent autobiography, Feel). Spencer qualified for the pole in 26 of his first 43 500cc races, an overwhelming 60 percent! After that he scored a single pole in his final 19 starts.
There is a very close relationship between winning and putting up the fastest lap. Márquez, Roberts, and Doohan, the riders with the top three winning percentages, are also the top three—with Márquez ahead of Roberts for the moment—in fastest-lap percentage. Of the top 10 in winning percentage, only Eddie Lawson and Jorge Lorenzo from the top 10 winners are absent, bumped by Dani Pedrosa and Wayne Gardner in fastest-lap percentages.
Although we still lack totally reliable info on the old days prior to 1975, we do have accurate data on starts and wins. These winning percentage numbers come from a time when there were rarely more than four factory bikes on the grid and sometimes only one or two, thus the big numbers. I never saw Geoff Duke race and I only saw John Surtees at the wheel of a Formula 1 car, but Giacomo Agostini and Mike Hailwood were blindingly fast in their prime, take my word for it. And these numbers are reliable, take Dr. Raines’ word for that.
And finally, just a little perspective on Márquez. He is tearing up the series right now and looks like he could dominate for several years, but back at the turn of the century, a young Rossi was more dominant over his first 95 starts. Age, injury, two years at Ducati, and the emergence of the likes of Casey Stoner, Jorge Lorenzo, and Márquez himself have lowered his stats but not his love, at 39, for this young man’s game.