Marc Marquez clinched an incredibly well-deserved/long foregone-conclusion 2025 MotoGP title at Motegi, but he wasn’t the standout rider of the Japanese Grand Prix weekend.
Instead, it was between a former team-mate and a current team-mate – and ultimately the step one of them made relative to their form in recent rounds was the deciding factor.
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Qualified: 1st Sprint: 1st Grand Prix: 1st
One of the most dramatic form turnarounds in recent memory and a ‘Fabio Di Giannantonio in Qatar in 2023’-level shock, which is strange to say for a rider now tied for eighth-most premier-class wins of all time.
But how bad Bagnaia was in that Red Bull Ring-to-Misano stretch is equal to how good he was here, good from the first moments of the weekend, laptime seemingly coming at will the way it had for Ducati team-mate Marquez for so much of the season.
It still remains to be seen how this Bagnaia – whatever ‘this Bagnaia’ means – will respond to fighting in the pack, but he never gave anyone the chance to test that this weekend, and kudos to him for that.
It was so good his engine seemingly started to blow up and then just decided ‘nah, I can’t do this to you after a weekend like that’.
Qualified: 2nd Sprint: 4th Grand Prix: 3rd
The most important weekend of Joan Mir’s career since he clinched the 2020 title at Valencia, and a much stronger weekend than that one, too.
Mir was stunning in Q2 – did the lap all by himself, too – then rode an impressive sprint, denied a podium by a “perfectly inside of the limit” Marquez move that nonetheless probably hurt his chances of pouncing on Pedro Acosta later on.
He was close to disaster at Turn 1, nearly tagging Acosta’s KTM and losing two places, but dealt with Fabio Quartararo quickly enough to be able to translate his podium pace over the rest of the distance.
Qualified: 3rd Sprint: 2nd Grand Prix: 2nd
It was surprising to hear Marquez admit nervousness throughout the Motegi weekend, not because he’s somehow above that but because after Misano the title was effectively impossible to lose – and Marquez surely understood that he could’ve spent the rest of the season sitting at home playing Call of Duty and still arrived at the same outcome.
Nobody will confuse this for Marquez’s finest weekend of the season – he didn’t look to have his usual margin on Friday, had to dig deep to end up on the front row, was traffic-limited in both races but also didn’t have his usual pace edge over Bagnaia in clean air.
Two second places is still an incredibly healthy return, but Marquez will do well to avoid any championship hangover in the next five rounds – lest his resurgent team-mate get any funny ideas about 2026.
Qualified: 5th Sprint: 6th Grand Prix: 8th
It doesn’t look pretty for Quartararo sometimes this year, with a Yamaha M1 that – in his hands anyway – appears more geared towards single-lap performance than race pace, which means the races can be a bit chastening.
But he was in a league of his own among the Yamahas again, got the most out of the sprint – fighting off a clearly quicker Honda, Luca Marini’s – and felt he maximised the grand prix, too.
That one’s harder to be sure of given Quartararo’s second-lap spiral after a wild entry into Turn 5 and Franco Morbidelli’s forceful move, but even after that he was still well clear of the other Yamahas.
Qualified: 4th Sprint: 3rd Grand Prix: 17th
Acosta was potentially blameless in his race-ruining trip to the gravel – you can see that the bike just didn’t respond at all to his initial attempt to brake into the corner.
The bigger mark against him instead is that already by that point it didn’t look like he’d taken the best care of his tyres, which was easier said than done on the KTM this weekend but which Enea Bastianini, for example, seemed to do much better at.
That’s not enough to outweigh the rest of the weekend, though, in which Acosta was the most effective KTM rider by a clear margin – especially in his very impressive Q2 recovery after a bike issue denied him the first run.
Qualified: 6th Sprint: 5th Grand Prix: 5th
A pair of fifth places feels like a pretty conventional 2025 return for Franco Morbidelli, but on a weekend like this – where Ducati didn’t exactly look dominant – it’s more valuable.
He was shaken up (“daunted”, as he put it) after crashing twice on Friday, but found his groove the following day and converted it into two good races.
He was closer to the win on Saturday but Sunday was maybe more encouraging, with no sign of the late-race pace drop-off that has tended to plague him on the Ducati.
Qualified: 9th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 4th
There remains a bit of vagueness over Marco Bezzecchi’s qualifying – he was slower than he had been on Friday due to not finding the laptime on the second run, of which he said “something happened that we still need to analyse”.
That qualifying put him in the firing line of Aprilia team-mate Jorge Martin – but the aftermath of that crash combined with the complicated grid position made Bezzecchi’s Sunday effort extra impressive.
In “pretty bad” shape, with a thigh “completely full of blood” and a knee not doing so well, Bezzecchi was fast and incisive, arriving to the cusp of the podium battle and adding to the credit he’s built up this season.
Qualified: 10th Sprint: 8th Grand Prix: 7th
Raul Fernandez had a “very strange” crash at the start of the weekend, and is a rider prone to being unsettled by early-weekend strife, but was instead rock solid from there to the finish.
Though within Aprilia Bezzecchi clearly had a lot more – much more than the one-place gap between them here shows – Fernandez delivered on his potential on both Saturday and Sunday.
The early laps in the sprint were particularly impressive as he held his own as the sole medium rear tyre runner in the field (though then vibrations began so he never got the late-race benefit of the tyre), while on Sunday he may have had something for Alex Marquez up ahead but didn’t want to try anything silly.
Qualified: 7th Sprint: 7th Grand Prix: DNF
Marini gave credit to Honda team-mate Mir for his “very perfect” lap in qualifying – one he himself couldn’t even get close to thanks to an error at Turn 10.
He nearly made up for that right away in the sprint, getting attacked off the line by Alex Marquez yet navigating the first two corners so deftly that he was looking at fifth place – only for a (totally above board) Quartararo attack into Turn 3 to leave him seventh instead, his race subsequently spent in futile attempts to get past the Yamaha and manage an overheating front tyre.
A clutch issue made his Sunday a total irrelevance, but his idea that he could’ve joined Mir in the podium battle otherwise feels plausible – given Mir had gone down to fifth on the opening lap and was able to recover.
Qualified: 13th Sprint: 9th Grand Prix: DNS
One point was hardly sufficient reward for Ai Ogura on home soil, given his weekend was shaping up quite nicely until his sudden withdrawal for post-Misano-crash hand pain.
He was maybe a little too far back from Aprilia benchmark Bezzecchi on Friday – though it’s understandable for a rookie and he had the same laptime as Martin. He had “no requests” on the bike after day one, and duly picked up the level on Saturday, denied a likely Q2 spot by yellow flags on consecutive laps.
The race pace was good in the sprint (though he didn’t have to do anything for the ‘overtake’ on Alex Marquez), and it promised a good grand prix ride that injury would deny him.
Qualified: 8th Sprint: 10th Grand Prix: 6th
At a track that clearly doesn’t play to his strengths, a front-limited Marquez admitted he came into the weekend with the wrong “intensity” and struggled to tune out all the noise and attention surrounding the quote-unquote title battle.
He looked off on Friday already so had to scrape through Q1, then didn’t deliver in the sprint – failing to make stick a crucial overtake on Fernandez on the second lap, then getting his front tyre out of shape behind the Trackhouse man and letting Ogura through with an error.
Sunday was better, and potentially maximised – given Bezzecchi, who picked his pocket with an excellent early move, was quicker anyway – but that just underlines that he wasn’t quite at the level.
Qualified: 11th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 9th
Johann Zarco’s weekend dispelled the notion that the recent Honda upgrades are an instant silver bullet – because he finally got the new chassis and carbon swingarm at Motegi and they haven’t provided an immediate boost.
To be fair to Zarco, he insists it’s just a matter of honing the set-up around the new package and there’s no denying the works riders have a head start in that regard.
Narrowly getting into Q2 on Friday – in Martin’s tow but on tyres that were past their peak – was integral here, but Martin then destroyed Zarco’s sprint at Turn 1. Zarco eventually decided to park up just to preserve himself for Sunday.
That seemed to pay off on Sunday, where ninth maybe could’ve been eighth – but Zarco felt “a bit stressed” on the bike, desperate to bring home a first grand prix top-10 since his Silverstone podium four months ago, so didn’t force things in pursuit of Quartararo until it was too late.
Qualified: 15th Sprint: 11th Grand Prix: 10th
This was an unremarkable Fermin Aldeguer weekend – which may well be a good thing in that he stayed out of trouble, save for a Q1 crash, and seemingly just allowed himself to gain experience.
It could’ve been quite different as just 0.008s separated Aldeguer and Q2 on Friday, but starting from the fifth row was a big limitation on both days, even if he came off better than most from Martin’s error in the sprint.
He rued a mistake on Sunday chasing after Brad Binder, then finally cooked his tyres behind Zarco after overtaking Binder.
Qualified: 22nd Sprint: 17th Grand Prix: 15th
Somkiat Chantra’s third one-point weekend of the season was by a huge margin his best in MotoGP and the first time all season he’d looked like someone who genuinely had enough to stick around in the premier class for longer – even if that ship has now long sailed.
Already strong at Motegi in Moto2 and clearly more at ease with its hard-braking focus than the more balanced demands of most MotoGP tracks, Chantra was a fringe top 10 contender on Friday before crashing – and should’ve probably qualified a row ahead but for a Turn 10 mistake.
He was OK in the sprint and genuinely impressive in the Sunday race, much of which was spent attached to the exhaust of Miguel Oliveira’s Yamaha.
Qualified: 16th Sprint: 15th Grand Prix: 14th
Oliveira’s push for a laptime on Friday was a yellow flag-hindered “disaster” but hitching a ride with Alex Marquez in Q1 helped ensure his grid position was at least competitive.
That didn’t mean anything in the sprint, which was wrecked immediately by the Aprilia crash, and in the grand prix he was 18th after the opening lap, coming off second-best in an all-Pramac duel.
The pace didn’t hold up amazingly well anyway, though this was clearly more of a Yamaha issue than an Oliveira issue.
Qualified: 21st Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 11th
Bastianini’s new crew chief Xavi Palacin was absent this weekend due to personal reasons, with Thomas Foale stepping in from the test team.
“Stupefied” by a lack of performance out of the blocks on Friday, with braking an issue despite usually being a KTM strength, Bastianini had his Q1 destroyed by yellow flags but was never making Q2 anyway – and had no real chance of scoring in the sprint even before what was apparently an engine failure.
He did a good job on Sunday but is concerned by what he sees as a negative performance trend since the start of the Misano weekend a fortnight ago.
Qualified: 18th Sprint: 12th Grand Prix: 12th
After joking on Friday that he’d “rather shoot myself than be in 17th”, Brad Binder deftly avoided 17th on the grid by crashing out in Q1 – which cemented this as a weekend to forget.
He struggled with upright spin – which naturally caused him to “smoke the centre of the tyre” – and was hindered on Sunday by “massive vibration”, particularly after the halfway point.
The two actual race results are fine given everything, especially as he was one of the riders hindered by the Aprilia crash in the sprint, but as an overall package it was a disappointing weekend.
Qualified: 20th Sprint: 14th Grand Prix: DNF
Taka Nakagami had good pace upon his return to MotoGP competition, but found the step from medium to soft rear difficult to get his head around – which helps explain the lacking single-lap performance.
His sprint was compromised by “crazy” vibration but the grand prix was shaping up nicely – with Nakagami saying that he dialled out the vibration through riding style, though going soft to medium was also surely a factor.
He crashed after a “tiny” mistake at Turn 10 while on course for points so ultimately can’t be too happy.
But the primary job is that of test rider, and Nakagami can take a lot of satisfaction with how the RC213V performed this weekend, especially with Marini acknowledging the Japanese rider has been a “really big advantage” for bike development and “is doing a great-great job”.
Qualified: 23rd Sprint: 16th Grand Prix: 16th
Maverick Vinales’ weekend looked off from Friday already – with massive chatter, even compared to other KTMs, according to him – and it never recovered.
The injured shoulder is still an obvious hindrance, though progress is being made, but more worrying is Vinales’ admission that the bike doesn’t feel right and that he “made a mistake” accepting KTM’s aero upgrade for his injury return instead of carrying on with his pre-injury package.
He believes the “most intelligent thing we can do” now is go back a bit on bike spec – which strongly suggests injury is not the only thing stopping him from running Acosta close right now.
Qualified: 14th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: DNF
A strong Q1 lap was probably the high point of Jack Miller’s weekend – set without any reference rider up ahead – but nothing else was particularly positive.
He’d lost a Q2 shot on Friday with a “stupid, don’t-even-know-why” crash on an outlap, then went down again in the sprint after the opening lap had played into his hands.
Sunday was trending towards a reasonable if unspectacular outcome, in that he was probably going to finish as the second-best Yamaha before the chain came off.
Qualified: 12th Sprint: 13th Grand Prix: 13th
Fabio Di Giannantonio said Friday was “one of the best days on the bike this year” – and admitted he was “scared” to say much more given all the ups and downs of the campaign. His attempt to ward off the jinx didn’t pan out, because the rest of the weekend was absolutely shocking.
With no changes on the VR46 Ducati, it suddenly felt “completely different” on Saturday – which Di Giannantonio said was backed up by the data – and so the most important sessions of the weekend were all negative.
The sprint at least had the excuse of Di Giannantonio being caught up in the Martin-Bezzecchi crash, but there was no such excuse on Sunday, when things were just awful and the pace in the second half of the race was catastrophic.
Di Giannantonio “really believes” he and VR46 will sort it out in the next races – and admits that Bagnaia’s recent improvement on the same bike spec is very relevant here. He sure sounded and looked a lot like the pre-Motegi Pecco this weekend.
Qualified: 19th Sprint: 18th Grand Prix: 18th
Alex Rins reckoned that this was a better weekend than what had come before, and that felt true in glimpses – but it fell apart at every important moment.
He crashed in Q1, though was already struggling to put the laptime together on that run, then was basically removed from the sprint by the Martin-Bezzecchi incident, last by 14 seconds after digging himself out of the gravel.
The grand prix on Sunday was at least an actual race for Rins, but it was first compromised when he went off right after overtaking Aldeguer for 13th, then as he completely ran out of tyre to ultimately trundle home in last place.
He is not the problem with this Yamaha, but he just doesn’t look like the solution either.
Qualified: 17th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: DNS
There was a dash of the circumstantial in Martin’s mistake – he was on an awkward line into Turn 1 due to Aldeguer trying to work his way past Miller – but ultimately both Aldeguer and Miller made the corner from around the same spot, and Martin emphatically did not.
It had every appearance of a rider trying to do too much, having to rely too much on the opening laps because single-lap performance isn’t coming along and grid position is too big a hindrance, influenced by yellow flags this time though he clearly wasn’t alone in getting unlucky there.
My best wishes, of course, to Martin for his upcoming recovery from the collarbone fracture, and hopefully he takes his time, but as far as the weekend itself goes, you can’t really do much worse than qualifying last within your manufacturer stable and then crashing into your team-mate at the very first opportunity.
AloJapan.com