It seems impossible to avoid the topic of sprint races ahead of the start to the 2023 MotoGP season. Such a drastic shift to a MotoGP season is bound to get people talking, and when the riders themselves are some of the most opinionated people on the topic it leads to a great deal of discourse. Will they be good or bad for the health of the sport? Will they solve the issues of attendance at GPs post-covid? Why did the FIM decide to introduce them for every race weekend rather than slowly transitioning them in? Will the riders get paid appropriately for the fact that they are now contesting 42 races in a year?
The unfortunate truth is that we simply won’t know all the answers until the season starts in Portimao and we see first-hand how a sprint race affects the structure of a weekend. In the mean time, one could talk and theorise endlessly about what could be and should be, but I thought it would be fun to dive into some numbers instead. The big one on my mind is this: how many points can we expect a rider to score in a winning campaign with sprint races on the menu?
When we talk about record-breaking seasons in MotoGP, one that comes to mind very quickly is the 2019 championship in which Marc Marquez romped and stomped his way to 420 out of a possible 475 points. This is the highest individual score a rider has achieved in a year to date, and at the time was expected to remain so for quite a while. The thing is, there aren’t 500 points on offer this season – there are 777 points to play for between 21 races and 21 sprints.
So, with the power of maths, we can take a look at previous seasons to see what a championship-winning score has looked like relative to what was on offer, and get an idea of what could theoretically be possible in 2023. Will Marc’s miracle score of 420 finally come under fire with so many additional points on the line? Let’s take a look.
| Season | Champion | Points Scored | Points Available | % of total |
| 2022 | Bagnaia | 265 | 500 | 53% |
| 2021 | Quartararo | 278 | 450 | 61.78% |
| 2020 | Mir | 171 | 350 | 48.86% |
| 2019 | Marquez | 420 | 475 | 88.42% |
| 2018 | Marquez | 321 | 450* | 71.33% |
| 2017 | Marquez | 298 | 450 | 66.22% |
| 2016 | Marquez | 298 | 450 | 66.22% |
| 2015 | Lorenzo | 330 | 450 | 73.33% |
| 2014 | Marquez | 362 | 450 | 80.44% |
| 2013 | Marquez | 334 | 450 | 74.22% |
Let’s talk about some of these numbers. Firstly, I wanted to highlight that the three lowest scores and the three lowest percentages were the three most recent seasons, and that’s no accident. Not only were 2020 through to 2022 seasons with a wide variety of winning riders and constructors, meaning the points are divided among a large number of strong competitors, but there’s also the notable absence of a fully fit Marc Marquez. Without the presence of the 8-times champion to keep the scoreboard in order, there hasn’t been a clear best rider or team, and this is reflected in the numbers you see above.
Not only is Marc a consistent factor throughout all of this, but you can actually see the cut-off for when the ‘Aliens’ era comes to a close. The 2016 season was a record breaker at the time for the sheer number of individual winners across the season, with the time before that being mostly dominated by the factory Hondas and Yamahas. As such, prior scores tended to be more top-heavy as most podiums were divided between a much smaller number of riders. This plays no part in the 2019 score from Marc, however, but that was a rather special season.
So how do we apply this for 2023? If we can find a happy average for what percentage we expect a winner’s total to look like, then all we have to do is apply that percentage to the new total of 777 points. Rather than simply mashing them all together, however, I’m going to provide a couple of different numbers to give a broader idea of what the real total will look like.
The first will be an average of all ten percentages we have from the last ten seasons, to give the broadest estimate of what we’re looking at. The second score will be an average of the 8 middle scores – that is, cutting out the top two and bottom two percentages to account for outliers like the covid-riddled 2020 campaign and Marc’s domination in 2019. Finally, I wanted to look specifically at the post-covid era of the sport, so we’ll grab an average of the last three seasons to compare and contrast.
| Seasons Applied | Average winning % | 2023 Relative Score (777) |
| 2013 – 2022 | 68.38% | 531.31 |
| 2013, 2015 – 2018, 2021 | 68.85% | 534.96 |
| 2020 – 2022 | 54.55% | 423.85 |
Firstly, I just wanted to highlight how curiously the winning percentages ended up averaging out. The idea of removing the outliers ended up barely impacting the total score – yes, we eliminated Marc’s two most successful championships to date, but Mir and Bagnaia’s more complex title fights had much lower scores to balance them out. Additionally, this gives a really tangible idea of just how hard it is to win a modern-day MotoGP title, with the three seasons post-covid being a full 14% down on the total average.
Now onto the scores themselves. The first two scores of 531 and 534 are nothing short of astonishing, and would completely decimate all the previous record totals. When Marc’s 2019 points tally is the only one to ever cross the 400 threshold and this season could jump straight to the mid-500s, that would simply blow away all previous attempts.
The post-covid average is likely the more reasonable guess at what 2023 will deliver us, but even that appears destined to be a record-breaker. Should a rider score a little over half the available points, they would end up comfortably in the range of Marc’s 2019 total, and even a slight improvement to that would see them sail past into the record books. There’s just no denying how impactful the addition of sprint races is set to be here – compared to the hard-fought winning streak Marc had to put together in order to chase that magical score of 420, a rider in 2023 should be able to hit that mark by default if they are in contention for the championship.
So there we have it – tangible proof of exactly what sprint races will do for the points tally in MotoGP this year. Regardless of how the season pans out, I would expect at least one rider to end up in the vicinity of the previous all-time high score, and we could easily have multiple riders in the 350+ bracket for the first time in the sport’s history. MotoGP is changing, and regardless of whether it ends up being for better or for worse, we as an audience need to prepare for this shift in the sport’s format. The age of sprint races is nigh.
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