Winners celebrate, losers explain. We were reminded of this by Pecco Bagnaia after yet another crash, his sixth this year, on lap 20 in a Grand Prix in which, after an initial interlocutory phase - leading at the start, then relegated to third place on lap 5 - he was making up on the leading pair, Martin and Bastianini, albeit already more than three seconds behind.
By lap 14, in fact, and with the sole exception of lap 19, Pecco had pulled back to around two seconds. A nice recovery that showed how hard he was pushing.
As usual when the reason for the error is not clearly identifiable, the tyre is identified as the culprit. Sometimes it doesn't work at all, sometimes it doesn't 'light up,' as the neologism coined this year explains. Twice-heated tyres, thankfully, are no longer talked about, but the reality is that of tyres that are undoubtedly critical, that is, difficult to exploit 100 percent and extremely sensitive to use.
The mistake, however, remains, and Bagnaia repays the favour (and hands back some points) to Martin for his early pit entry in the wet Misano 1. Sometimes, and it applies to both cases, a bit more reasoning is needed. And if Jorge a week ago should have just copied Pecco's movements, this time the rider from Turin, with only 7 laps remaining, should not have thought he could shave off two more seconds without incurring some risk.
In such a long world championship, and moreover with double the scoring with the arrival of the Sprint, as Totò used to say, it is always the sum that makes the total. After all, in the language of numbers, the sum of the points still available in the remaining 6 Grands Prix reads 222, the figure of balance and harmony.
And it will be necessary to have a lot of it, of balance because from today begins a long sprint: five double races in six weeks - Indonesia, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, before the show-down in Valencia, after just one week of rest.
These are the last six rounds in the MotoGP calendar, the ones where every shot scored is worth double, because with each round of the carousel the basket with the numbers to be drawn empties.
With Bagnaia at -24, Bastianini at -59 and Marquez at -60, Jorge is the hare with three greyhounds in his wake. And for Ducati, which yesterday notched up the 100th victory in the world championship since Iannone's first in 2016 at the Red Bull Ring (Dall'Igna era , because obviously the first one was Capirossi's in Barcelona 2003), the risk now after the Constructors' world championship already won well in advance, is to see the #1 plate slip away, which, given how the market has gone, could even end up on the fairing of an Aprilia or KTM. The risk is there.
Today Enea, unknowingly, did his teammate a small favor but, as his overtaking move on Jorge proved, from now on no one will grant any concessions to anyone. Then in Valencia under the podium we will see their faces...