Pit Pass
TOO SOON FOR THE INEVITABLE…
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It’s two from two for Mav!
PICS: YAMAHA
Two races into the fresh MotoGP season, and there’s already an air of inevitability floating around the paddock. There’s also just one man’s name on everyone’s lips – Maverick Viñales… After winning both opening races, seemingly comfortably, he’s already being tipped as this year’s champion. With good reason though, mostly due to the huge points gap he holds over all the main players bar his team-mate Valentino Rossi. So is it over already? Of course not, too many things can (and probably will) happen over the course of the year, which could scupper his first meaningful attempt at clinching the big crown.
The biggest threat will be when the others get their respective shit together, because thus far, Maverick has been aided somewhat by mistakes elsewhere. In Qatar, Honda made the wrong tyre choice, leaving Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa flailing, and then in Argentina they were unable to get the chassis to work properly with the Michelin front, and we saw both riders have near identical crashes on the same corner. True, Marquez was vanishing into the distance up until his crash, but a solitary fourth-place finish from two-races now leaves him with a mountain to climb, because we doubt Viñales will be finishing off the podium much, if at all, for the rest of the year.