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Back in January (Remember January? It was approximately 3,000 days ago, in a galaxy far away.) if you'd gone to your favorite London bookie and put £100 on Joan Mir to be the 2020 MotoGP world champion you'd be £12,500 wealthier today.
In the most unpredictable of years, it's fitting and just that we have a MotoGP champion nobody predicted. Mir wrapped up the title today at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Valencia, Spain, with one round still remaining at Portimão, in Portugal. He did it with the kind of smart racing that he's shown all season and that earned him a championship in the top class at the young age of 23.
After the first three races of the season, with two DNFs and a fifth-place finish, Mir was in 14th place in the standings with just 11 points to the 59 points of Fabio Quartararo in first. But his consistency since then, with seven podium finishes and his first MotoGP win at the Grand Prix of Europe at Valencia, pulled him ahead decisively in the standings while everyone else suffered highs and lows.
The Spanish rider becomes the first to win a premier-class world championship on a Suzuki since Kenny Roberts Jr. in 2000, at the end of the two-stroke era. In fact, the Suzuki ECSTAR team has a good shot at winning both the manufacturer's title and finishing the season in the top two spots in the rider championship, as Álex Rins sits in third place, just four points behind Franco Morbidelli.
The 2020 season has already tied the 2016 record of nine different race winnners and there's still the chance of setting a new record at the final round. Jack Miller came within a second of becoming the 10th winner at Valencia, but was held off at the line by Morbidelli. That tied record only begins to hint at the parity in MotoGP this year. In Friday's practice sessions at Valencia, 19 riders lapped within 0.750 seconds of first place.
Some will say, "Well, what if Marc Márquez hadn't been hurt at the first round?" But there's no end to "what ifs." You could just as easily argue that Honda honed the RC213V to such an edge that nobody could consistently win on it without crashing and that if he hadn't been injured, Márquez would have still crashed out of four or five races and not won the title. I'm not saying Álex Márquez and Taka Nakagami are the same level as Marc, but the fact is neither of them won on the Honda and both times Nakagami was in position for a podium finish, he crashed. It's an entertaining benchracing discussion, but ultimately pointless. Mir earned the title and deserves it.
Racing seasons pulled off despite a pandemic
Motorcycle racing looked a lot different in 2020 — but it's a success that it happened at all. There were days in the spring when that wasn't a certainty.
World Superbike had the strangest season, getting in the opening round at Phillip Island at the end of February just before travel restrictions began cascading across the globe and then not racing again until August. MotoGP got off to a similarly odd start, with the Moto2 and Moto3 classes racing in Qatar, because they were already in the country for a pre-season test when travel restrictions were imposed, but the MotoGP teams couldn't participate.
After that, however, the the world championships were all-Europe affairs, as flyaway rounds were canceled. In the end, though the seasons were shorter and compressed and limited to one continent, they still felt like legitimate championships. There's no need for an asterisk in the record books.
Here in the United States, MotoAmerica stuck to its plans to run a 20-race season in the HONOS Superbike class, though it meant having to run three races at each of the final two rounds to make it to 20. The Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Championship pulled off a season of nine rounds in a compressed period of two months and Zach Osborne won his first 450 title. The Progressive American Flat Track series got in 16 rounds (the second Charlotte race was rained out) as Briar Bauman successfully defended his SuperTwins championship.
Of course the majority of the races took place with no fans present, and despite that and many other precautions, COVID-19 still affected the paddock. Riders ranging from Iker Lecuona to Valentino Rossi missed races and many team members couldn't make it to the track because they tested positive or were in quarantine due to exposure to someone else who tested positive.
For now, all these series are putting out 2021 schedules that are assuming, or at least hoping, that things will look more normal next year. That's far from given, considering the recent spike in COVID-19 cases across the United States and Europe. But the good news we can take away from the 2020 racing season is that motorcycle racing didn't disappear, despite a pandemic. Even with the hardships, teams didn't go bankrupt on a mass scale and we still saw motorcycles competing, if only on television and our streaming devices.
Given the year we've had, from viruses to wildfires to more than an alphabet's worth of hurricanes, that feels like a championship-level win.
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