A 100 per cent sprint race victory record. An 80 per cent pole position record. A 60 per cent Grand Prix winning record. Yet not leading the MotoGP world championship?
With six MotoGP titles and 65 victories on his CV, Marc Marquez isn’t a one of one, but he’s one of a select few. But it’s hard to imagine any other rider having that aforementioned level of dominance and still be looking up at a rival – in this case his younger brother Alex Marquez – atop the standings after five rounds of 2025.
As history has shown, when Marc Marquez doesn’t win, he often loses – big.
In 2015, he threw away a potential hat-trick of world titles by winning just as much – but crashing much, much more – than primary rivals Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi. It was the only championship he didn’t win in his first seven MotoGP seasons.
In 2020, a crash in the season’s first race – and his haste to return from injury too soon as he chased a fifth consecutive crown – saw him lose the best part of three seasons to injuries and surgeries in the prime of his career.
There’s no suggestions – yet – that 2025 will follow the pattern of the two titles that got away for the 32-year old, but Marquez has squandered at least 37 points this season after crashing from the lead of the Americas Grand Prix in Austin in round three, and out of third place in the early stages of last Sunday’s Spanish GP.
When your championship deficit is just one point with 17 rounds still to play out, it’s a mathematical equation that’s hardly cause for concern.
But for Marquez’s rivals, brother Alex and Ducati factory teammate Francesco Bagnaia in particular, his speed after he crashed at Jerez and rejoined the race at the back with a Ducati GP25 missing aerodynamic parts and looking like it been attacked by a cheese grater after its trip through the gravel trap was mildly terrifying.
With Alex Marquez’s maiden Grand Prix victory seeing Ducati win for a 22nd consecutive Sunday – matching Honda’s all-time record from 1997-98 – it’s not going out on a limb to predict this year’s world champion will come from one of the six riders on the Borgo Panigale brand’s bikes.
Sunday’s recovery ride at Jerez, though, showed why the only person who can prevent Marc Marquez from winning the seventh MotoGP crown that has eluded him for six long years is Marquez himself.
CRASH UNCORKS FURIOUS COMEBACK
Marquez was mildly irked by losing pole position to an otherworldly lap by Yamaha’s Jerez specialist Fabio Quartararo on Saturday in Spain, but went on to win that afternoon’s 12-lap sprint race after the Frenchman – admitting he had nothing to lose – crashed out on lap two, Marquez maintaining his perfect record in MotoGP’s short-form races so far this year.
Quartararo again won the race to the first corner for the 25-lap Grand Prix 24 hours later, but Marquez was immediately overtaken by teammate Bagnaia and Alex Marquez, the siblings leaning on one another and making contact at the turn one apex before Marc emerged ahead.
The rest of lap one was a high-speed intra-team brawl, Marquez passing Bagnaia into turn eight before the Italian retaliated one corner later. Marquez scythed past Bagnaia again at turn 10 before Bagnaia – this time with contact – reclaimed second place a corner later, Quartararo blissfully unaware of the mayhem behind him as he cleared off in the lead.
Two laps later, disaster.
Marquez, running in third place, went too deep into the turn eight left-hander that’s typically one of his better corners at Jerez and tried to save a slide by digging his left knee into the tarmac, but sliding off into the gravel trap.
Not even five minutes into the race, the prospects of a fourth home Grand Prix win were dashed, the left side of his machine missing a raft of aerodynamic winglets and the bodywork on the left-hand side of his GP25 ripped open.
Marquez lost 14 seconds extracting himself from the gravel trap and finished the lap in 22nd place from the 23 starters, only Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi – who had run deep into the gravel at the first corner to begin lap two – in his rear-view.
Out front, the leader – still Quartararo – was nearly 20 seconds ahead. The rider immediately in front of him, Bezzecchi’s teammate Lorenzo Savadori, was 10 seconds up the road.
Time, then, for Marquez to let rip.
By lap seven, when he’d finally managed to get his cooling tyres back to race temperature and clean from the gravel trap’s dust, only Quartararo, Alex Marquez and Bagnaia – the top three in the race – were faster. Savadori was caught and dispatched by lap nine, and on lap 11 – as Alex Marquez overtook Quartararo for the lead – Marquez was faster than the top three.
A lap later, he was the fastest of all despite his bike being – by MotoGP standards – a slug on Jerez’s two straights of note with the holes torn into his bodywork. By lap 16, Marquez moved inside the points allocated for the top 15 finishers after passing Yamaha’s Augusto Fernandez, and when Ducati’s Franco Morbidelli crashed out.
A lap later, he was again the fastest rider on track. On lap 18, Marquez then set his fastest lap time of the race (1min 37.544s) on tyres that had done 70 per cent of a race distance. It was the sixth-fastest lap overall; the five riders who produced a faster single lap all did theirs within the first five laps of the race when their Michelin rubber was close to new and full of grip.
Fellow Spaniards Raul Fernandez (Aprilia) and Aleix Espargaro (Honda) were dismissed on laps 20 and 22 respectively, and Alex Rins (Yamaha) was passed on the final lap as Marquez came home in 12th place, 20.084s behind brother Alex, who took his long-awaited maiden MotoGP win in his 94th start.
From the first full lap after he remounted (lap four) to the end of the race on lap 25, Marc Marquez lost eight-tenths of a second to the race leader over 21 laps while riding with a damaged bike and gaining 10 places.
His lack of straight-line speed – his fastest speed through the speed trap on lap 18 (295km/h) came courtesy of a tow behind Espargaro’s Honda, and was 5km/h down on the quickest Ducati (Fabio Di Giannantonio) – showed the magic Marquez was conjuring in the corners and on the brakes with a bruised bike.
A 12th-place finish and four measly world championship points wasn’t much, on the surface, to get excited about. But how he did it demonstrated why, self-inflicted wounds aside, Marquez should comfortably win this year’s title.
Broken bike or not, it was a display of the speed no other rider can access.
SHADES OF JEREZ 2020, BUT WITH WISDOM
Afterwards, with the top three finishers assembling for the post-race press conference and Marquez returning to his Ducati garage after a quick congratulatory visit to his brother in parc ferme, Marquez’s comeback was front of mind for both his teammate, and his sibling.
All season, Alex Marquez has been in his brother’s wheel tracks as best of the rest – in nine previous starts across Thailand, Argentina, Austin, Qatar and the Spain sprint, the younger Marquez had finished second eight times – and knew what was on offer when he had a front-row seat to his brother’s lap three crash, running right behind as Marc tumbled at turn eight.
“When Marc crashed I say to myself ‘Alex, today is your day’,” the younger Marquez grinned.
“I know with Marc on track, I maybe have some opportunities, some chances … without him, I knew I was the strongest one.”
Bagnaia – a two-time MotoGP champion and winner of the past three Grands Prix at Jerez – was struck by his teammate’s progression on the same, albeit damaged, bike.
“Marc is very good at riding everything, but I’m struggling a bit more to do it,” Bagnaia lamented.
“I want to have a good feeling with the front [of the bike]. Maybe we will have to understand and change the balance of the [2025] bike to different solutions, because it’s difficult like this.”
As Marquez’s comeback last Sunday was unfolding, it was hard not to reminisce about the race at Jerez five years previously, the sliding doors moment of his career that will make a seventh MotoGP title, should he achieve it, one of the most remarkable redemptive tales in any sport.
In the 2020 Spanish GP, Marquez was leading when he ran wide coming out of turn three on lap five, careering across the gravel trap but staying upright before falling to the back.
His speed and bravery across the next 16 laps – when he went from 16th to third – might have been the best he’s ever ridden, but a brutal lap 22 spill at turn three broke his right humerus, a crazy attempt to try to return days after surgery for the next round backfiring when he missed the rest of the season and needed four surgeries to fix his broken body, a decision he’s subsequently admitted is his greatest career regret.
Marquez’s recovery ride last Sunday had echoes of 2020, but this time – older, wiser, his surgically-repaired right arm probably wincing at the thought – the Spaniard put a self-imposed ceiling on his ambition, content to lap in the 1min 38sec bracket for the final six laps after his lap 17-19 burst when he was at least half a second faster.
“I was coming back and then I said ‘OK, I will not exaggerate’,” Marquez said afterwards when asked if 2020 at the same circuit had crossed his mind.
“I saw that I had another group in front after [Alex] Rins [in 12th place], but I thought about 2020 and said ‘I will not exaggerate, I will not crash again’.”
As the grid reassembled at Jerez on Monday for one of the three in-season test days scheduled for 2025, Marquez kept his head down and the throttle pinned. Almost predictably, he was fastest by three-tenths of a second from KTM’s Maverick Vinales without ever pushing for an optimum lap time, content with bedding in new parts set to debut in the coming rounds.
“It was a mistake and we need to learn about it and try to avoid for the future if we want to fight for the championship,” he said of Sunday’s crash.
“Austin, I understand why I crash. [Spain], I still don’t understand because I was not attacking, I was cruising just because I know that the second part of the race is my strong point. But it’s like this, and I have to accept.
“Maybe one degree more [lean] angle [in the corner] … but it’s true that I was behind two other riders. It was the first time in the weekend that I was behind riders and then maybe the bike changed a bit, and I didn’t think about it and unfortunately did a mistake.
“The speed is there, but the important thing is to avoid the mistakes. We are one point behind the leader, and that is the most important.”
Matt Clayton is a MotoGP writer for Fox Sports Australia.