Five Grand Prix wins in a row was something a Ducati rider had never previously achieved.
Casey Stoner didn’t do it. Nor could Jorge Lorenzo. Neither could Andrea Dovizioso. Valentino Rossi certainly couldn’t.
More pertinently to 2025, Francesco Bagnaia hadn’t done it either.
Which is why Marc Marquez’s latest success – sealing a fifth straight perfect weekend by winning the Czech Republic Grand Prix on Sunday – carried extra significance.
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Ducati’s current involvement in MotoGP stretches back to 2003; Marquez, lest we forget, joined Ducati just 18 months ago, and at the start of this year in Bagnaia’s factory team with which the Italian won the 2022 and 2023 world titles as part of a four-year run where he finished first or second in the championship and won 29 Grands Prix.
In just 12 rounds in 2025, Marquez has done what that aforementioned quintet of world champions – or a rider in Dovizioso who was runner-up three times – couldn’t. It’s why that, with a 2025 MotoGP season that still has 10 rounds to run, the question is ‘when’, not ‘if’.
Marquez’s win on Sunday at Brno – on a day where the bubble burst for younger sibling and chief title rival Alex Marquez with a careless early-race crash – swelled his championship lead to an unthinkable 120 points.
Bagnaia sits 168 points adrift. Fourth-placed Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia) has less than half of Marquez’s 381 points. Marquez is averaging – from a maximum of 37 points per round – 31.75, six points per round more than Jorge Martin managed in winning last year’s world title.
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Since the British Grand Prix in late May – through events in Aragon, Mugello, Assen, the Sachsenring and Brno – Marquez has won all five sprints and all five Grands Prix. It’s a run that, as he sees it, reminds him of 2014, when he won the first 10 races of his first championship defence, or 2019, the most recent of his six premier-class titles when he finished inside the top two in 18 of 19 Grands Prix.
“We are in one of my best moments of my career,” he said on Sunday after passing Bezzecchi on lap eight of the 21-lap race and, as he put it, played from there as his mind drifted back to his round three crash from the lead in Austin that feels like it belongs to another season.
“The feeling is like ‘19 or 2014, I’m riding in a very good way, I’m calm, the races I can manage as I want. The margin was there, and when we get the perfect connection we start to improve a lot.
“One of the reasons when I did the mistake in Austin was [because] of losing focus. Problem, solution. If you have some mistakes, you need to work on it. I started to work on it and it looks like now I am able to keep better the concentration. Sometimes when you have that big advantage, it’s difficult to keep the same intensity.
“Today, some laps I was pushing more, some laps less, just to keep playing with my mental side, not with the limit of the bike.”
The way Marquez is tracking, he could very well win the title that has eluded him since 2019 before MotoGP even gets to Australia in mid-October; if he’s 148 points or more to the good by the time he gets on the plane to head to Phillip Island for round 19, a seventh premier-class crown will already be his.
It’s a run of form that justifies the 32-year-old leaving an injury-marred end to his Honda pomp in the rear-view to move to Ducati for 2024, and offered a chance for reflection as MotoGP prepared for its four-week summer break before the final 10 rounds.
“Ten races to go … a big advantage, and honestly speaking I can only lose [the championship],” he said.
“Records, I don’t care … I just want to be world champion again.
“I would like to have a race next week, because we are in a super good moment. But it’s important to take a rest and understand what we did this first part of the season.”
CHAMPIONSHIP CHARGE ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ FOR YOUNGER MARQUEZ AFTER CRASH
Alex Marquez was a title contender in more mathematical than realistic terms coming into the Brno weekend, but had his first scoreless event of the season and copped a long-lap penalty for the next race in Austria after taking out Honda’s Joan Mir on the second lap on Sunday.
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The younger Marquez – who had finished either first or second in the first 10 sprint races of the year before a dreadful start at Brno on Saturday saw him fall from eighth on the grid to a 17th-place finish – was scrapping with 2020 world champion Mir for sixth place when he slid off trying an ambitious pass of his compatriot on the inside of turn 12, his Ducati cannoning into the luckless Mir and ending the races of both riders on the spot.
After qualifying fifth for his best grid position in over two years, an incensed Mir remonstrated with Marquez in the trackside gravel trap, and the race stewards were equally unimpressed, giving the Gresini Ducati rider a penalty to be served in the Grand Prix in Spielberg next month.
“He was really agitated … that conversation didn’t go in any point,” Marquez said of Mir, who was torpedoed in a similar fashion in last weekend’s German Grand Prix by Aprilia rookie Ai Ogura.
“In the end I said sorry because it’s the only thing that I can say. It was a mistake, it probably wasn’t the right place for what I did. I didn’t mean to overtake him, that wasn’t my intention, but I wanted to know if that was a point to overtake.”
Marquez’s error came two races after he broke a bone in his left hand after a crash with KTM’s Pedro Acosta at Assen, and the younger Marquez has scored just 31 points – to his brother’s 111 – in the past three rounds.
As Alex Marquez sees it, his title chances – given his familiarity with the rider he’s chasing – are over.
“Getting 120 points back on Marc is impossible,” he said.
“My goal remains the same. We’re in a position that wouldn’t have been ours, and now the objective must be to recover well from the injury. I want to apologise to the team, because I haven’t been my usual best, I’ve lost focus a bit.”
BEZZECCHI CHALLENGES, MARTIN TICKS BOX
Marc Marquez aside, Aprilia were the big winners on Sunday at Brno, with Bezzecchi a strong second after finishing fourth in Saturday’s sprint, and returning world champion Martin finishing seventh in his first race for three months since fracturing 11 ribs and suffering a collapsed lung in a crash in Qatar in round four.
Bezzecchi – who has a sprint or Grand Prix podium in the past four events – said an early ambush of Fabio Quartararo’s Yamaha made his race, while Martin finished 15.8secs behind Marc Marquez on a weekend of mending fences with Aprilia after he’d given up on trying to escape from a contract that ties him to the team until the end of 2026 during his long injury layoff.
“It was a fun race, very good race,” Bezzecchi said.
“I was able to make a fantastic overtake on Fabio on the outside of turn three, it was really crazy and I risked all the risks I could take in one race, I [added] everything and I take in one corner.
“It was the key moment, because after I was able to go on the front … I knew Marc was managing [the tyre] and I was managing as well to be honest, because I didn’t want to push to try to escape knowing he had something in his pocket.
“When he overtook me I wanted to fight, but he was something faster than me, compared to us. That was the last time I was close. But the pace was fantastic and I made my best lap in the last one, so very happy to make up this weekend like this.”
Aprilia CEO Massimo Rivola, speaking to motogp.com after the race, was ecstatic as Aprilia extended its margin over KTM to 12 points for second in the constructors’ championship.
“I’m really happy … Marco was just great, a super perfect start,” he said.
“I’m super happy for Jorge because we didn’t know anything about his condition, really. Also you can see the bike is fast, so I think he will have a big motivation in him.”
Martin, after finishing his first Grand Prix since Barcelona in late November last year when he secured his world title, said learning about Aprilia’s RS-GP machine in the heat of battle was important for the remainder of the season.
“I was really focused after 10 laps to find what I need for the future,” he said.
“We achieved our goal, to finish the race, to make passes, to keep learning together with the team about the bike. I feel really confident that in the future, we can do really good things.”
MILLER’S ‘DECENT’ RACE INTO TOP 10 AFTER CLUTCH ISSUE
A post-race penalty for Alex Marquez’s rookie Gresini Ducati teammate Fermin Aldeguer promoted Jack Miller into the top 10 of Sunday’s Brno race, after the Pramac Yamaha rider struggled with a late-race clutch gremlin that saw him fall from eighth to 11th in the final four laps.
From 10th on the grid, Miller ran in the wheel tracks of Martin for much of the race in eighth before being gobbled up by KTM’s Brad Binder and Aldeguer on lap 18; on the 21st and final lap, Miller dropped to 11th when passed by KTM’s Pol Espargaro, the Spanish veteran and injury replacement for regular Tech3 rider Maverick Vinales (left shoulder surgery) in the Czech Republic.
Aldeguer was given a three-second penalty after the race for failing to serve a long lap penalty for contact with Miller’s teammate Miguel Oliveira earlier in the race, the Spaniard dropping from eighth to 11th and promoting Binder, Espargaro and Miller one place apiece.
Miller, who will briefly head home to Townsville this week ahead of his appearance for Yamaha at the Suzuka 8-Hour endurance event in Japan (August 1-3), moved up three places in the championship standings to 14th with 52 points after 12 rounds, but was left scratching his head after his clutch started to hamper his performance in the final third of the race.
“Not happy with the last three laps, but it was a decent race,” Miller said.
“The clutch was giving me no engine braking into [turn three] so it was difficult to even understand what gear I was in, sometimes I was in third and sometimes second because you weren’t feeling the actual downshifts,” he explained.
“As I shut the throttle, it felt like someone was pulling the clutch in. It caught me off-guard the first time it happened, I nearly ended up off the end of the track, and I had to learn to ride with it for the last six laps. The bike felt mega everywhere else in terms of braking … it was a pain in the a**e because I was able to brake pretty late to defend an overtaking manoeuvre, but once that happened I had to keep a margin and left myself vulnerable.”
Miller goes into the northern hemisphere summer break with no clarity over his MotoGP future, but once again got the better of Oliveira in qualifying and both races in Brno, and has outscored the Portuguese rider 52-6 for the season.
“I hope I can stay, but I know as much as you do, which is f**k-all,” he said to an amused media pack after the race.
“I ain’t got a clue. We’ll wait and see what they do. I want to stay and I’d love to stay at Pramac, I love being with those guys over there. Whether they want to keep me is another question.”