Top Stories of 2016, #18: MotoGP produces nine different winners

When Jorge Lorenzo beat Marc Marquez by the narrowest of margins to win the Mugello MotoGP race back in May, nobody could have foreseen that this race would mark the beginning of one of the craziest patterns in the history of Grand Prix motorcycle racing.

Subsequent wins for Valentino Rossi, Jack Miller, Marquez, Andrea Iannone, Cal Crutchlow, Maverick Vinales and Dani Pedrosa – all topped off by a long-overdue second career victory for Andrea Dovizioso at Sepang – were nonetheless definitive proof that the organisers’ attempts to make the series more competitive had worked, bolstered of course by the switch from Bridgestone to Michelin tyres.

Before Assen, things seemed reasonably normal. While the racing was as good as ever, the predicted radical shift in the formbook had largely failed to materialise, with reigning champion Lorenzo winning three of the first seven races, and Marquez and Rossi winning another two each. So far, so standard.

It was only at the Dutch TT that things started to take a turn for the peculiar, as torrential conditions opened the door for a winner outside of the usual club of ‘aliens’ – and sure enough, Miller, aboard the unfancied Marc VDS Honda, snatched the opportunity with both hands.

While Miller made the headlines by becoming the first satellite rider to win in MotoGP in just under a decade, it wasn’t seen as being massively out of the ordinary, given the conditions. Indeed, normal service seemed to be resumed three weeks later, when Marquez took a third win of the year with an inspired switch from wets to slicks at the Sachsenring.

It wasn’t until after the summer break, when Andrea Iannone became MotoGP's second new winner in the space of two months at a packed Red Bull Ring, that those in the paddock began to notice that the sport was in the midst of a rather strange turn of events.

Having five different winners over the course of a whole season hadn’t happened since 2009, such had been the pre-eminence of the ‘aliens’ (Rossi, Marquez, Lorenzo, Pedrosa, and – before his retirement – Casey Stoner), and yet Iannone’s triumph had given us a fifth different race winner in a row.

The new winners just keep coming

Still, nobody expected this miraculous run to continue the following weekend at Brno. Then Crutchlow stunned everyone with his hard-hard tyre choice in tricky conditions to become the third new race winner in four rounds. OK, weather-affected, we said; no way there could be a seventh. Then Vinales blitzed the field at Silverstone. It seemed too good to be true.

Then again, three of the last five races had been wet, while Spielberg and Silverstone played beautifully to the respective strengths of the Ducati and the Suzuki. No way would we get an eighth different winner at Misano, we said. For one thing, we were fast running out of potential winners. Dovizioso? Not at a track like Misano. Pedrosa? Not with the season he’d been having.

We were wrong. Again. Pedrosa’s small stature, which had been a penalty just about all year on the new stiffer Michelins, was instrumental in allowing him to make best use of the softer front tyre compound in the Italian heat and – incredibly – make it eight from eight.

Marquez finally broke the spell with victory on home turf in Aragon, but that wasn’t it. Dovizioso put in one of the rides of the year in the wet at Sepang to end a personal losing streak spanning 130 races, making it nine different winners in 2016 and eclipsing the previous record established in 2000, when Rossi was among the eight men to stand atop the podium.

There was fanciful talk of one of the Espargaro brothers making it 10 different winners in Valencia, but, of course, it wasn’t to be. But, in the end, most were just grateful to have witnessed an incredible year of racing with a level of variety at the front of the field unlikely to be matched again any time soon.