2024: Pecco v Jorge, or, "wtf happened with the championship last year" pt. 1
part 2 here (comparison to past MotoGP title battles)
(More) data, notes and analysis/comment below the cut!
tldr: Pecco had a great season, shot himself in the foot with his sprint DNFs, and Jorge was good enough across the board and close enough behind that he reaped the benefits.
or: the sprint DNFs. i did all this maths to circle back to the fact that the podcast men were right. it was definitively the sprint DNFs.
Section 1: comparing the sprint results to the race results (above)
Notes:
- Their total overall points were 498 and 508. Pecco had 33 more race points than Jorge and 43 fewer sprint points, adding up to the overall points deficit of 10 points.
- The "-DNF" numbers ignore all DNFs, I did not consider the causes, e.g. crash vs mechanical retirements.
- Jorge's San Marino race result was that low because of the strategy mistake he made (to go in for a tyre change), and his Indonesia sprint result was because he crashed out of the lead, and with a zero-point finish it almost amounted to a DNF. Because these were borderline, I also calculated the numbers without them and added those below Jorge's table.
Comments: Pecco had so much yellow! He had 18 wins across the season and only finished outside the top-5 twice (both times in sprints). They actually won the same number of sprints. But Jorge was really good at getting P2s, and also only finished outside the top-5 twice (one race, one sprint, which were both due to mistakes).
- Pecco's race points were ~3 points better per (finished) race, and he also on average finished ~1 position higher. However in the sprints, Jorge had the edge, with ~0.5 more points per (finished) sprint and ~0.5 positions higher on average.
Section 2: "points maximisation"
Here's a closer look at those numbers at the bottom:
Notes:
- The bottom two lines in the tables show "points maximisation", a metric that I made up to approximate dominance/effectiveness. It's essentially how many points someone scored as a percentage of the maximum points available (basically how they did compared to a perfect season of winning everything).
- I calculated it first for the full 20 race season, and then for each of them without DNFs. The numbers that include the DNFs reflect the actual result, whereas the higher non-DNF numbers make it a little easier to compare their strengths.
Comments:
- Going off those numbers, you can see that
1) Pecco was significantly better in the races, with or without considering DNFs;
2) he did still lose more points to race DNFs than Jorge did, mostly because he had 3 to Jorge's 2;
3) Jorge was a LOT better in the sprints when DNFs were considered, and lost less to sprint DNFs, and also
4) Jorge did (slightly) better than Pecco in the sprints even when DNFs were not considered. That leads on to part 3:
Section 3: where exactly each of them had advantages over the other
This table shows the advantages (e.g. how many places/points the leader was ahead) in each race:
Notes: - A positive number and pink is a race where Pecco was ahead, a negative number and blue is where Jorge was ahead. The negatives don't mean anything in particular, they just indicate Jorge's advantage.
- I calculated averages for each of them (e.g. how far on average Pecco finished ahead of Jorge when he finished ahead). In this case the "-DNF" values indicate that the big advantages gained from the other rider's DNFs are excluded, as a way to evaluate the average advantages when they both finished, which I think is more balanced.
- The "AVG both" lines is an average of all the advantages, and so therefore a positive/negative overall average indicates who was overall ahead and how much of an advantage they had, but those values can only really be compared to the other averages in those bottom two lines.
- As before, the values for Pecco's averages when excluding Jorge's quasi-DNFs in the San Marino race and the Indonesia sprint are calculated below the main table, but in this case they don't change much.
Comments:
- In the main races, Pecco's advantage was on average 2 points larger, or ~0.7 when discounting San Marino. Jorge's average points advantage was larger when DNFs were considered, because Pecco had more DNFs and Jorge scored well when Pecco DNF'd.
- The AVG both section shows pretty obviously that Pecco had the advantage in the races, while Jorge had the advantage in the sprints.
- The average position values indicate how close behind each other they generally were.
- In races, Jorge had a lower average position advantage, which means that when they both finished, if Pecco was behind Jorge, he was on average closer behind Jorge than Jorge was behind him when he was leading. If that makes sense. But Jorge only had the advantage in 5 races (when they both finished), while Pecco had 10, so those averages aren't necessarily super comparable. When discounting San Marino, when Jorge had his only non-top-5 finish, the numbers are pretty much the same (1.33 vs 1.40).
- Looking at the sprints, the first part of the season was especially terrible for Pecco, and Jorge was much more dominant overall. Pecco however still had a higher average points advantage - until the DNFs were considered, and then Jorge edged it.
- Overall in the sprint, Jorge had quite a significant advantage when DNFs were considered - but also still had a slight advantage when DNFs were not considered, which was even more of an advantage if his Indonesian sprint was rolled into the DNFs. This discrepancy with Pecco's higher average points lead is explained by the fact that, when they both finished, Jorge finished ahead in 8 sprints and Pecco in 6.
- The main point here is in the bottom right corner - the difference between Jorge's narrow advantage when DNFs were not considered, and his much larger advantage when they were considered, and the fact that the latter was larger than Pecco's points advantage in the race. Converting those average advantages into points gives us the points deficits: 1.65*20 = 33, Pecco's lead on race points, and 2.15*20 = 43, Jorge's lead on sprint points.
- In both the races and the sprints, both of them were pretty good at maximising points when the other DNF'd - Jorge was a little worse on average, but that was a larger sample because Pecco had over twice the total DNFs.
Section 4: conclusions
So, on the face of it, the data supports the conclusions that most people were drawing last year. Pecco's Saturdays dragged him down, and his advantage in the Sunday races was not enough to make up the difference.
Main points:
- Jorge started the year off better in the sprints, and over the whole year had a small advantage - and then Pecco's 5 sprint DNFs gave him even more of an advantage.
- He was also on average just over 2 positions (or just over 1 position when his San Marino blunder is removed) behind Pecco when Pecco finished ahead in the races (which was most of the time), so even though he lost points to Pecco in the races, he reduced the damage. The race points deficit was half the average gap between champions and vice-champions.
- Pecco won the same number of sprints, and had a similar average points haul when he finished, and a similar points advantage and position advantage when he finished in front of Jorge - Jorge's advantage in the sprints without considering Pecco's DNFs was really quite small.
Summary: Pecco's DNFs handed Jorge a big advantage in the sprints, which gave him the points to just about overcome Pecco's (not huge) advantage in the main races.
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