HIGH ACHIEVER AWARD
Ducati. For winning the MotoGP World Championship for the first time in 15 years and the WorldSBK title for the first time in 11. Just to hammer it home, it picked up the triple crown in both categories, too, adding the constructors’ and teams’ world titles to the 2022 trophy cabinet.
IRON MAN AWARD
Goes to Danilo Petrucci who raced factory machinery in three different top-tier genres with three different manufacturers. He kicked off the year in the sand with the 2022 Dakar Rally on a KTM 450 (and even won a stage!), fought tooth and nail with Jake Gagne (Yamaha) for the MotoAmerica Superbike title on a Ducati Panigale V4 before going down by just 20pts, and then jumped on a plane to compete in the hot and humid Thai Grand Prix on a Suzuki GSX-RR MotoGP machine to replace the injured Joan Mir.
Special mention must go to Marc Marquez, because only he knows the courage, self-belief and downright hard work it took him to recover not only from another two episodes of diplopia – which nearly ended his career a decade ago – but from the fourth and what he knew needed to be his last major surgery to rectify his right humerus bone.
And not forgetting Peter Hickman who, after breaking the NW200 Superbike lap record by over four seconds(!), now holds benchmark times at all three major international road races.
BABY COME BACK!
The spy pictures we published of Jeremy McWilliams testing a fully faired MotoGP-inspired KTM
