A Win for the Italians
Pecco Bagnaia is your 2022 MotoGP champion, becoming the first Italian since Valentino Rossi in 2009 to win the premier class title. It’s almost becoming Bagnaia’s trademark to get hot at the end of the year, and it’s what he did in 2021 which set up such high hopes for 2022.
Bagnaia had some ups and downs early on in 2022, but he got hot towards the middle of the year with four straight wins improving his MotoGP odds this week weekly until the end of the season. Bagnaia got another win late in the season, setting up a showdown in Valencia in the season finale. As it turns out, a 9th place finishes in Valencia was all Bangaia needed to pick up the championship, the first rider’s title for Ducati since 2007.
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Close Call for Quartararo
Fabio Quartararo came into the 2022 MotoGP season as the defending champion. Although he finished ahead of Bagnaia in Valencia (4th), it was not good enough, and “El Diablo” had to settle for second place in the rider’s standings.
Quartararo’s win in 2021 was significant because he became the first-ever French driver to win a premier-class championship. Still, he could not join the back-to-back ranks most recently accomplished when Marc Marquez won four straight titles from 2016 to 2019. Quartararo did have three wins this past season, but that was well behind Bagnaia’s pace of seven, so the best driver truly did claim the crown in 2022.
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Ducati Gets It Done
Australian Casey Stoner was the last Ducati driver to claim the premier class championship before Bagnaia, so that was a long drought put to rest by the manufacturer this season. In fact, Bagnaia and Stoner are the only Ducati drivers to win the riders’ championship, so they’ll both have their share of lore within the company.
Ducati driver Enea Bastianini finished third in the overall standings this season, allowing the company to clinch the manufacturer’s title for the third consecutive year – and doing so even with five races remaining on the year. Bastianini set the pace by getting a season-opening win in Qatar, getting the first Gresini Racing team win since 2006, and will be someone to watch in your online sports betting for 2023. Still, it was the factory Ducati Lenovo who picked up the team championship.
Swan Song for Suzuki
While Ducati was being showered in riches, another manufacturer decided that 2022 would be it for them in the MotoGP and betting online. That announcement came as a shock to many in the moto world, especially considering that Joan Mir had just won the driver’s championship in 2020 on a Suzuki.
Mir’s success was about the last bastion of hope for the company, though, and it was the first individual win for the manufacturer since Kenny Roberts in 2000. While it may appear that Suzuki’s decision to leave MotoGP was performance-based, it actually appears to be a more climate-related decision as the company announced its goals to reach zero carbon dioxide emissions.
Suzuki is eliminating their entire motorsport production and is even going so far as to crush and recycle existing stock so as to have no taxable assets. Maybe we will see them reemerge with an electric motorbike in the near future, as has been slightly hinted at.
At the least, Suzuki went out with a bang, with driver Alex Rins winning two of the last three races of the season, including the company’s last-ever MotoGP event in Valencia. You can’t write this stuff.
