First off, we have a new leader…again. And it’s the fifth time this season that the leader has changed! It’s never been closer at the top – as a rider or manufacturer:
- Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Team) heads the Championship table with an advantage of just nine points over Marc Marquez (Repsol Honda team), 13 points over Maverick Viñales (Movistar Yamaha MotoGP) in third place, 26 points ahead of Valentino Rossi (Movistar Yamaha MotoGP) in fourth and 35 points ahead of Dani Pedrosa (Repsol Honda Team) in fifth. These are the smallest margins at this stage of the season since the current scoring system was introduced in 1993!
- Just 19 points cover Yamaha, Honda and Ducati in the manufacturers’ Championship, the closest top three after twelve races during the MotoGP™ era.
That’s explained easily enough – with wins between the top three currently perfectly matched:
- The victories in the first twelve races of the year have been split evenly between three manufacturers, with four wins each for Honda, Yamaha and Ducati.
- The last time that three manufacturers took four or more wins in the same season was in 2006, when Honda took eight, Yamaha five and Ducati four.
And it’s not just the points that are closer than ever. So are the riders on track – with a third of the season so far having seen the points scorers incredibly close:
- Loris Baz (Reale Avintia Racing) finished 15th at Silverstone and was just 33.901 seconds behind race winner Dovizioso – the fourth time from the twelve races in 2017 that less than 35 seconds have covered the top fifteen. Only five times in the previous 840 premier class races before the start of 2017 had the top fifteen riders been covered by less than 35 seconds.
That means that before 2017, 35 seconds over the points scorers was a one in 168 races occurrence – round about once every ten years in current calendar terms!