The battle for victory at last year’s Spanish Grand Prix between Francesco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez – MotoGP’s new master against the multi-time champion who long preceded him – was gripping in its intensity, fun while it lasted, and a fight for something meaningful that looked like a momentary snapshot in time.
How wrong we all were.
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Bagnaia was a MotoGP rookie in 2019, when Marquez won his sixth title in seven years. By the time Bagnaia rose to become the sport’s champion in 2022, Marquez was desperately bidding to rewrite his injury-interrupted career narrative. Their time at the top has been more adjacent than overlapping.
Then came Spain last year, Marquez’s fourth Grand Prix on a satellite Ducati, Bagnaia in the fourth race of what eventually became a failed bid to win a hat-trick of titles, last achieved by Marquez from 2017-19. On a spectacular April Sunday, Bagnaia prevailed.
And then, just two months later, the pair became teammates-in-waiting for 2025 after Marquez engineered a move to Ducati’s factory team.
The prospect of regular Jerez 2024-like fights was a mouth-watering prospect, but so far, it hasn’t happened. Not because Bagnaia has been bad, but because Marquez has been too good.
Bagnaia has never scored more points in the first four rounds since MotoGP adopted its sprint race format for 2023 than this year; 97 points and six podiums tops his 2024 (75 and two) and 2023 (87 and five) tallies in each category. It’s the most prolific the 28-year-old Italian has ever been, but he’s further away from the front than any time since his first title in 2022.
Marquez has won seven of eight starts this year, could have swept all eight but for a crash while leading the Grand Prix in Austin in round three, and made a statement when he won both races at Lusail in Qatar – a track he’d not won at since 2014 and a circuit that’s become one of Bagnaia’s best – a fortnight ago.
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Jerez, though, is proper Bagnaia territory; undefeated in Andalusia for the past three years, it’s the perfect place to take a stand against the Marquez juggernaut, as he did last season.
For 32-year-old Marquez, Jerez is three parts joy – his trio of MotoGP race wins in 2014, 2018 and 2019 – and one part significant pain, for it was at Jerez in 2020 when he crashed while recovering from an early-race off and broke his right humerus, an aborted return a week later setting in chain a series of injuries and surgeries that ruined the next three years of his career, and led to him leaving Honda for Ducati to chase past glories.
It’s all set for a Spanish showdown this weekend in front of a pro-Marquez crowd – last year, more than 181,000 fans packed the hillsides in one of MotoGP’s most evocative amphitheatres – and a weekend where Ducati is chasing a record-equalling 22nd consecutive Grand Prix win, a feat last achieved by Honda in 1997-98.
With that momentum, it’s hard to see another brand getting a look-in, and equally difficult to imagine another Ducati muscling in on the likely battle between the red bikes at the front that’s crucial for Bagnaia to get his elbows out – again – in the face of the Marquez onslaught.
Here’s your Insider’s Guide to round five of the MotoGP season, with the 25-lap Grand Prix set for 10pm AEST on Sunday after Saturday’s 12-lap sprint race (11pm AEST).
MARTIN FINALLY EN ROUTE BACK TO EUROPE
The Spanish Grand Prix was set to be Jorge Martin’s first home race as the reigning MotoGP champion; Martin’s crash in the Qatar Grand Prix left the Aprilia rider with 11 rib fractures and a collapsed lung, the latest mishap for the 27-year-old in a nightmare start to life with his new employers after crossing from Ducati in the off-season.
Martin will again be replaced by test rider Lorenzo Savadori – the Italian stepped in for Martin at the first three rounds in Thailand, Argentina and Austin as Martin recovered from breaking his right hand, right foot and left radius and scaphoid in a pair of pre-season falls – with Savadori’s meagre results as the world champion’s stand-in raising questions about the depth of Aprilia’s rider corps.
PIT TALK PODCAST: In the latest episode of Pit Talk, hosts Renita Vermeulen and Matt Clayton review Marc Marquez’s victory at the Qatar Grand Prix, discuss the podium finish that wasn’t for Maverick Vinales, what Aprilia do with Jorge Martin sidelined again, and preview this weekend’s Spanish GP at Jerez.
Martin will finally return from Doha to Europe in an air ambulance this weekend, 13 days after his accident; speaking at Jerez on Thursday, Aprilia Racing CEO Massimo Rivola said there’s no timetable for his return, with initial reports suggesting Martin could miss at least three months.
“The first good news was when [Jorge] could leave the hospital to go to the hotel, the other good news is that on Saturday he will be able to fly back to Madrid with an ambulance,” Rivola said.
“In Madrid, they will do some checks at the Ruber International Hospital – after the checks, we start knowing what is the real situation, get maybe an idea of the recovery time.
“We don’t want to do any forecast, we want to give him all the time he needs. There’s no rush … we want him back 100 per cent.
“The only thing we have to do it now is to treat him like a son. If I have a son, I want him back when he’s ready to do it and let him feel that we love him, we stay close to [him]. That is priority number one.”
Savadori contributed just one point – for 15th place in Austin – in three events as Martin’s stand-in, with Aprilia sitting in third place in a tightly-packed constructors’ championship table, just one point ahead of KTM and Yamaha.
While Martin’s absence is a blow to a manufacturer with three of its four riders being new for 2025 – Martin’s teammate Marco Bezzecchi came across from Ducati, while Ai Ogura graduated after winning last year’s Moto2 title – Rivola emphasised the positives of Savadori testing developments to Aprilia’s RS-GP machine in a race setting.
“Him racing is an opportunity for him to get up to speed, and a good opportunity for us to keep testing things that would have to be done in private testing or eventually one item at a time during the race weekend,” Rivola said.
“It is always very difficult [to test with race riders] during a race weekend, but now Lorenzo can do it easily because his mental attitude and approach, he knows that he’s here to test.”
The Spanish Grand Prix precedes one of the three one-day in-season tests scheduled this season on Monday, with subsequent test days coming after the Aragon Grand Prix in June, and the San Marino Grand Prix in September.
MILLER LOOKS FOR BOUNCE-BACK AT WINNING CIRCUIT
Jack Miller’s yo-yo first season with Yamaha takes its next laps at the site of one of his four MotoGP victories this weekend, the Australian winning at Jerez for Ducati in 2021, and enjoying the best event of his two-year stint with KTM in Spain in 2023, when he finished third in both the sprint and Grand Prix proper.
The 30-year-old endured his first pointless event of the season in Qatar last time out on a miserable weekend where a bout of food poisoning saw him shed three kilograms, and where 16th on the grid preceded an early-race crash that saw him tumble to 15th in the riders’ championship.
On Thursday, Miller said the Yamaha YZR-M1’s sweet spot – its agility in high-speed corners on a gripped-up track – makes him more optimistic for Jerez than he was in Lusail a fortnight ago, which came one event after he’d finished a strong fifth in the main race in Austin.
“In Qatar I rode like s**t, so that was on me,” he said.
“But I feel like the more experience I have with this bike, I understand you’re reliant on track conditions because when there’s grip, we’re able to use it. When there’s not grip, it takes away what is our strongest point and you end up with less tools in your toolbox to recover.
“It’s something that we’re working on and we’ve improved already with chassis updates, and it’s something we’ll continue to try to improve. You try to manage what you can because the front-end [of the bike] is really solid, so you try to manage with [corner] roll speed. I felt very fortunate in Texas with the grip conditions, the way the track was … same as Thailand.”
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Yamaha’s extensive test team has been working on the Japanese manufacturer’s nascent V4 engine project, the introduction of which would bring Yamaha into line with Ducati, Aprilia, KTM and Honda, Yamaha the only marque to use an inline-four engine since Suzuki withdrew from MotoGP three years ago.
In general terms, an inline-four [cylinder] engine is smoother but offers less straight-line grunt than a V4, the four Yamaha bikes on the grid among the slowest six machines on the 1.1km start-finish straight last time out in Qatar, Miller’s top speed (350.6km/h) significantly slower than Brad Binder’s grid-leading 361.2km/h.
On Thursday, Yamaha factory rider Fabio Quartararo made it clear his preference would be for Yamaha to debut its V4 for 2026, but Miller – out of contract at the end of this season – felt both options have their benefits.
“You can only p**s with the d**k you’ve got, so that’s what we have at the moment,” he said.
“Yamaha have a lot of irons in the fire to try to understand where they’re going in the future, and I only have a one-year contract at this point in time so I’m trying to deal with what I’ve got.
“Going forward, everybody else is on V4 [engines] so there’s got to be something to it, but an inline-four won the championship in 2021 [with Quartararo].
“Will it [Yamaha] ever be the fastest thing in a straight line? Probably not, but it’s about limiting that and we’re working very hard on making this thing the best possible version it can be before this season is out. Yamaha have … a plan going forward. What they come with at the end is up to them, and I trust 100 per cent their direction.”
UNPOPULAR TYRE PRESSURE RULE MUST STAY, RIDERS CONCEDE
Maverick Vinales’ charge to the lead and an eventual second-place finish before being penalised for breaking MotoGP’s convoluted tyre pressure regulations in Qatar was the talk of the paddock on Thursday, with the Spaniard’s peers sympathetic to the KTM rider’s penalty, but backing the rationale behind it.
Vinales, who hadn’t spent a single Grand Prix lap in better than 13th place before Qatar, audaciously passed Marc Marquez before leading for five laps in Doha, eventually finishing 1.8secs behind his compatriot.
After the race, Vinales’ KTM was found to have spent more than 60 per cent of the race distance running with lower than mandated tyre pressures, the subsequent 16-second penalty dropping him to 14th place.
At Jerez, Vinales conceded that running at the front of the Qatar race – which allowed his tyres to cool in clean air and led to their pressure plummeting – was his downfall.
“We calculated the pressures to be [racing] in a group, and after four laps we were out in front – we didn’t expect that,” he said.
“The penalty is 16 seconds, but those are the rules, you have to stay within the pressure limits. If the penalty were only four seconds, people would take more risks. Actually, when you race with low-pressure tyres, it’s not comfortable at all.”
Speaking in the pre-event press conference, Marquez felt the 60 per cent threshold could be reduced, but felt the rule – introduced on safety grounds in 2023 and revised for harsher penalties last season – should stay.
“For me the thing is the question of safety, as Michelin says,” Marquez said.
“The only thing that we can work on is maybe trying to understand, if it’s safe, if we can reduce the percentage of the laps. When Vinales led the race, [the pressure] dropped and then it never recovered again.
“The only thing I see is reduce the percentage, but always Michelin needs to accept because it’s a matter of safety.”