PREVIEW
The 2022 MotoGP™ season promises to be one of the most dramatic and competitive in memory with as many as twelve potential winners lining up on the grid . And if the first races are anything to go by , it will be difficult to predict as well .
Take the close of the final day of testing at Sepang for instance : just 0.3s covered the top eleven , and one second covered 18 names . Five of the six manufacturers were represented in the top eight , too . Closeness and variety were the order of the day .
Then the first race offered up its fair share of surprises . Enea Bastianini , now entering his second premier class campaign , took a brilliant first MotoGP™ victory on his year old Gresini Ducati under the floodlights in Qatar . The Italian looks poised to spring several surprises in the year ahead and leads the championship after two races .
KTM enjoyed a strong turnaround . Opting for a new testing strategy that placed priority on reassessing parts used last year and making moderate changes to its bike rather than test a slew of new components , Brad Binder came out in the first race of the year swinging , finishing a brilliant second , just 0.3s behind the winner and Miguel Oliveira brilliantly won race two in Indonesia .
And there are signs that Honda has built a brilliant allnew bike for the 2022 season . Pol Espargaro ’ s third place in Qatar showed he could well be a player for the title after a series of excellent testing performances . aboard the thinner RS-GP , and backed up testing performances with an excellent fourth place in the first race , just 2s behind the winner – the closest Aprilia has been in the MotoGP™ four-stroke era .
But among a range of preseason stories , the biggest was the latest return of Marc Marquez . Back from a serious eye injury sustained last November , the eighttime champ felt the double vision issues which kept him from full training until mid-January are now fully recovered . He eased himself into the year , finishing the first race a solid fifth but had to withdraw from race two after suffering a concussion in a violent warm-up crash .
The continued growth of Aprilia has been one of the preseason ’ s big takeaways . Aleix Espargaro was fast
16 | MotoGP™ | Argentina Preview