How Is Marc Márquez Winning MotoGP World Championships With Lots Of Crashes And Very Few Points?

The last riders to put together consecutive MotoGP titles for Honda, Mick Doohan and Valentino Rossi (each took five straight), sometimes made it look almost easy. That is something no one could say about Honda's current four-time MotoGP champion, Marc Márquez. He makes doing a difficult thing look very, very difficult.

There is a kind of grandstand legend about Márquez. His fans believe he is a fearless swashbuckler, who laughs off crashes and takes pride in battling Cal Crutchlow for the title of “most frequent crasher” (Crutchlow leads Márquez 86 to 83 in crashes since Márquez entered MotoGP in 2013, but he “out-crashed” Crutchlow in four of the last five seasons). There is some truth to that, but Márquez has good reason to want to avoid crashes. His career almost ended in his rookie year in Moto2 when he was engaged in a battle for the title with Germany’s Stefan Bradl.

Márquez, then the reigning 125cc champion, came into Sepang, Malaysia, in the fall of 2011 trailing Bradl by three points with two races to go. The first Friday morning session was just starting and riders were on their out lap when a water pipe burst under the track flooding a corner. Corner workers were late with rain flags (it wasn’t raining) and several riders went down, among them Bradley Smith, who suffered a broken collarbone, and Márquez, who hit his head and developed double vision shortly afterward, ending his season and title bid.

An operation in January of 2012 restored his vision, and Márquez went on to win the Moto2 title. Then, in 2013, as Kenny Roberts did in 1978, he won the premier class title as a rookie. His margin of victory was a mere four points over Jorge Lorenzo, who ended the season with three wins in a row and eight to Márquez’s six, but a broken collarbone in the rain at Assen and, in retrospect, a too-hasty return after a rushed operation in Barcelona, saw Lorenzo take a “miraculous” fifth in the Netherlands only to crash in Sachsenring a week later and miss the German GP. By the end of the season, Lorenzo was dominant again but Márquez took the title.

Many thought 2013 was a fluke, but any doubts about Márquez's worthiness as a MotoGP champion were erased by a breakaway 10-race winning streak at the start of 2014. That season Márquez went on to win 13 races (one more than the previous record held by Doohan, albeit in a season three races longer) and average just over 20 points per race. The factory Honda, back in the days of unrestricted electronics, seemed dominant and Márquez became only the second rider in GP premier-class history to win the title in each of his first two seasons. (Roberts won the 500cc crown in his first three seasons, a record Márquez would not equal.)

For Márquez, 2015 was the year that got away. The season is best remembered for the bad blood between Márquez and Rossi, and the bitter and—to fans who wanted to see a race for the title in Valencia—inconclusive end to an otherwise wonderful season.

Lorenzo averaged 18.3 points per race for the season, only slightly lower than the 18.6 average of all 500cc/MotoGP champions since the current FIM point system was imposed in 1993. He won, however, only six of 18 races, 33 percent, well below the 25-year average of 48.2 percent.

And that brings us to these last two seasons: In 2016 and ’17, Márquez has battled and crashed his way to consecutive titles with surprisingly few points (identical totals of 298 in both seasons, a very low average of 16.6 points per race) and a winning percentage of just over 30 percent for the combined seasons. Ironically, one of the most exciting years in FIM GP history was the late Nicky Hayden’s heroic 2006 season, the last of the 15 500cc/MotoGP class titles by US riders to date. The Kentuckian averaged only 14.8 points per race but won the title by five points to end an unforgettable season.

In recent years, the full implementation of the neutralized electronics rules, introduced in 2016, and on-going attempts to limit aerodynamics, plus Dorna’s big decision in 2008 to impose a single brand of tire, have combined to produce a “democratization” of MotoGP that has made for great racing but threatened the cozy concept of a class of three or four “aliens.”

Preseason testing in 2018 has shown that there are at least six riders, in alphabetical order: Andrea Dovizioso, Lorenzo, Márquez, Dani Pedrosa, Rossi, and Maverick Viñales, who have all shown over the preseason the potential to win the title, plus longshots capable, on a given day, of winning races. Crutchlow won twice in 2016 and Jack Miller, now on a Ducati, also had a win that season, and then there are a couple of satellite riders who showed great speed (Johann Zarco) and very convincing pace (Danilo Petrucci) in the recent Qatar tests. Suzuki riders Andrea Iannone and Alex Rins have also had their moments. Suzuki, like KTM and Aprilia, have the option of continuing engine development during the season while engines from Honda, Ducati, and Yamaha will be sealed as of the opening round.

Will 2018 continue the tendency toward multiple winners and fewer points taken by the eventual champion? When I first saw these numbers, I recalled Charlie Brown, in the comic strip of the same name, saying to Schroeder, “Tell your statistics to shut up!” But these stats seem to have a lot to say, or to suggest. Although Márquez has won three of the last four titles and two in a row, nine riders have won GPs over the last two seasons (nine in 2016 and five of those same nine in 2017), a number of winners that exceeds by one the winners in that hectic 2000 season. Points have never been so scarce or crashes so plentiful.

It is true that there is method to Márquez's madness, as Kevin Cameron pointed out but for the first time Márquez has been cautioning himself on crashing. In a recent article in the Madrid sports daily, As, speaking of himself in the third person, he said, "For sure I'll take risks because I am Marc, but it is not necessary to crash every lap!" A few days later in La Vanguardia of Barcelona, he again voiced concern about his crash totals, but added, "How often I crash depends basically on the other riders because if they push me, I'll crash more often, but I am teaching myself not to crash so much during preseason."

Márquez had, for him, a fairly calm preseason, and he seemed uncharacteristically less concerned about setting fastest laps and more centered on race pace and tire life. But his rivals, across the board, were faster too—a lot faster. Limiting ourselves only to the final three-day test in Qatar, we see that, while in 2017 there were 26 laps under the 1-minute, 55-second line, this year there were 44.

In recent years Honda riders, especially Márquez and Crutchlow, have led the league among factory riders in crashes, but there is some reason to think that might change this year.

After disorienting and befuddling their riders with an “overly aggressive” (Dani Pedrosa’s and Márquez’s words) engine in 2015, then reversing the direction of crank rotation in 2016 with all the discombobulation that entailed, and, in 2017, going to an engine with semi-big-bang crank intervals that was easy prey for the Ducati on the longer straights, Honda now seems to have regained something close to parity with Ducati in top speed without spoiling acceleration and corner speed.

We will get our first indication of how it is going to be when the lights go out on the straight at the Losail International Circuit this Sunday. Will things go back to how they were or will 2018 be another year of many winners, many crashes, and very low point totals?