The Gran Premio de la Comunitat Valenciana, home to this weekend's finale of the 2017 MotoGP Champio9nship season, will be the deciding round between Marc Marquez (282 points) and Andrea Dovizioso (261 points) for the 2017 MotoGP Riders World Championship.
Since the World Championship series was introduced in 1949, this will be the 18th occasion in which the premier-class title will go down to the final race of the year (including 1993 when, strictly speaking, the title went down to the lastย roundย with Kevin Schwantz leading injured Wayne Rainey by 18 points).
In the MotoGP era this will be the fourth time, the others having been Valencia 2006 (Hayden-Rossi), Valencia 2013 (Marquez-Lorenzo), and Valencia 2015 (Lorenzo-Rossi).
This will also be the third time in Marc's career that he has fought for the title at the season-finale Grand Prix, the others having been Valencia 2010, versus Nico Terol (Marc won the 125cc Title, finishing fourth), and Valencia 2013, versus Jorge Lorenzo (Marc won the MotoGP Title, finishing third).
In Valencia, Marc will take the title if Dovizioso does not win the race, or if Dovizioso does win and Marc finishes 11th or better. In addition, after securing the Constructors World Championship in Malaysia a fortnight ago, the Repsol Honda Team will have the possibility to win the Teams World Championship.
Marc has 2 wins here, 1xMoto2 (2012) and 1xMotoGP (2014)โplus 3 podiums and 2 pole positions.
โOf course it will be natural to feel some pressure in Valencia with so much at stake, but honestly there has been pressure for the entire second part of the season. And the fact that we've been able to manage some tricky situations, as was the case at the last race in Malaysia, gives me a positive feeling,โ he said. โRegarding the track, I feel good because I like Valencia. It's an anticlockwise circuit, which normally suits me. Of course it's also good to have a points advantage to manage.โ
โThat said, we won't think too much about any of those things. We definitely don't think it will be easy, so we won't go to Valencia with any extra confidence. We'll keep the same mentality and working method that have brought us to where we are, and we'll give 100 per cent because it will be important to be fast beginning with FP1.โ
