Aragon MotoGP: Márquez is back, along with the Márquez/VR46 feud

This time was different. Doohan was so weak and drugged up from surgery he sounded like a 90-year-old. Each word was whispered, almost like it might be his last. I was taken aback, really shocked to hear a man of such power reduced to such a pitiful state.

No doubt, Márquez has also been through times like that.

“Step by step, the comeback was heavier and heavier,” he admitted on Sunday.

Although Sunday’s big number was the 1043 days since his previous victory, at Misano in October 2021, this grim odyssey actually started in a Jerez gravel trap on 19th July 2020. That was a long time ago: Valentino Rossi was still a factory Yamaha rider, Pedro Acosta was a Red Bull Rookie, current MotoGP championship leader Jorge Martin was in Moto2 and everyone was wearing masks against Covid.

The weekend’s other big number was 86 – the number of grand prix victories achieved by Márquez across all classes. This brings the 31-year-old within sight of the all-time winners’ podium. Five more wins and he will surpass third-placed Angel Nieto (90 wins) to join Giacomo Agostini (122) and Valentino Rossi (115). That’s a very, very big deal.

No one was surprised by Márquez’s Aragon success (this was his seventh at the track) because the circuit is anti-clockwise and this time it was also super-slippery. Both these factors work in the Spaniard’s favour, because he’s spent half his life going left around dirt tracks, always searching for grip.

For the first time on a Ducati he looked perfectly in control from the first session – at one with his bike and taking no wrong turnings with set-up.

“We need to be realistic because this weekend the conditions were super-special,” he explained. “For me, Red Bull Ring [the previous track, where he’s never won a race] was more important, because I felt super-good and my pace was very close to the top guys… I’ve started riding the bike a bit more naturally and I’ve started to better understand the [2024] rear tyre. Step by step I’m riding smoother and by instinct – this makes a difference.”

Márquez is still some way off producing the kind of consistency he needs to win a seventh MotoGP crown. And although he’s not yet out of this year’s title fight, I don’t believe that’s his number-one focus. He knows he’s still building and he knows that rivals Martin and Pecco Bagnaia have superior machinery, so I think he’s aiming the arc of his learning curve towards 2025, when he will share the same garage and have the same machinery as Bagnaia.

When Márquez celebrated on Sunday night he didn’t only toast his Aragon victory he also celebrated the fact that his master plan – mapped out this time last year – is coming together perfectly.

Perhaps his joy was tempered – a tiny wee bit – by what happened to his brother Alex and Rossi’s protégé Bagnaia. The pair collided during the closing stages of Sunday’s race while they were fighting for third place.

Bagnaia was closing on the younger Márquez, who ran wide at the Turn 12 left-hander, losing speed. Bagnaia saw his opportunity and dived around Márquez’s outside at the subsequent right-hander. They tangled and both went down in a scary heap.

The stewards judged the collision to be a racing incident. Two riders were chasing the same piece of asphalt, because – at crucial moments like this – all top racers think the racetrack belongs to them and them alone. They wouldn’t make it to the top if they didn’t. ‘After you, sir’, ‘No, after you’, doesn’t tend to work too well in this game.

Both riders played their part in the coming together, and trying to analyse every millisecond of the incident, trying to blame one or the other, makes us blind to what the riders were seeing and how they were reacting during those milliseconds. Life happens insanely fast when you’re racing for position at high speed, so rewinding the accident at super-slow-mo can give us an unreal version of the reality. Also, the nature of the corner and the condition of the racetrack – slippery and like ice off-line – played their part.

The accident was nasty but I fear the fallout could be nastier.

The story of the Márquez family versus the VR46 family is turning into the Montagues and Capulets, a feud passed on from generation to generation. There was Termas de Rio Hondo in 2015, Sepang in 2015, Portimao in 2024 and now Aragon 2024.

Let’s hope we’re not in for some kind of 2015 redux, with Misano, VR46’s backyard, next.

What is certain is that Bagnaia had the unluckiest weekend of his career. And all because he was four hundredths of a second too fast in qualifying. Ironically, he would’ve had a much better weekend if he’d qualified fourth and started the sprint and the GP from the same side of the track as the man who won both. Instead he qualified third, which put him on the unused side of circuit, where the grid was very dirty.

This kind of thing shouldn’t happen in motorcycling’s biggest championship, not only because it destroyed Bagnaia’s weekend but especially because it very nearly caused a horrible pile-up.

Bagnaia got ridiculously sideways at the start of the sprint and his GP start was very nearly as messed up. On both occasions only the superhuman skills of the reigning champion and (oh, irony of ironies) Alex Márquez avoided a collision, which could’ve ended with a start-line accident involving a number of riders, which is when they can get very badly hurt because there’s so much machinery flying around.

There’s a lot of that going on in MotoGP right now – the championship relying on the otherworldly skills of riders to avoid potentially disastrous situations caused by the air-stop problem, the front tyre-locking problem, the aero-wake problem and so on.

Of course, there were other riders at Aragon, apart from Bagnaia and the Márquez brothers.

New world championship leader Jorge Martin has finished second in the last six races – three GPs, three sprints – which is a good thing, not a bad thing. He didn’t have Enea Bastianini’s pace at Silverstone, he didn’t have Bagnaia’s pace at Red Bull Ring and he didn’t have the pace of the elder Márquez at Aragon. He wouldn’t have accepted that in the past – instead he most likely would’ve pushed for the win and crashed.

Perhaps crashing out of the lead at Sachsenring convinced Martin that discretion can be the better part of valour. Or maybe the set-up change he made following that crash – a different geometry setting that gives a bigger safety margin with the front tyre but slightly less outright performance – is partly responsible for his longest win drought this year.

Whatever, he went into Aragon five points behind Bagnaia and emerged 23 in front. Points make prizes and the only prize that counts is the championship.

Martin’s high point of the weekend was his recovery from his Q2 crash and he knew it. Because if he’d messed that up he would’ve started from the third or fourth rows and would’ve been in the same hole as Bagnaia.

“Normally when this happens I go back out with a lot of emotion and I always crash, so I was calm and I’m a more mature rider,” he said. “And normally when there’s no grip I struggle a lot, but I’ve improved in all conditions. Apart from Marc I was much stronger than the rest this weekend. This is really good, because at the moment my battle is more with Pecco, so it’s important to be faster than him.”

Misano this weekend will be a critical moment of the Martin/Bagnaia duel, because they’re both super-fast there and have won the last four races at the track – Martin took both races last year, when Bagnaia was recovering from being run over at Barcelona, while Bagnaia won there in 2021 and 2022. This time Bagnaia will be fighting back from another pounding.

Pedro Acosta’s return to the podium – enabled by the Bagnaia/Márquez crash – gave KTM some respite in what’s been a mostly disappointing season so far. But did the rookie’s third place mean that KTM has found a better way with the RC16?

Maybe not, because Acosta finished the GP 14.9 seconds behind the winner, the biggest podium gap since Barcelona in 2015, when Jorge Lorenzo won the race and Dani Pedrosa was third.

And more irony… Acosta’s lack of pace in Friday afternoon’s pre-qualifying session was hugely helpful in his first sprint/GP double podium. Many MotoGP riders say that failing to make the Q2 cut on Friday can have a hugely negative impact on their weekends – and the 20-year-old missed out by eight hundredths of a second.

Acosta and his crew didn’t know it at the time, but this was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. Saturday qualifying took place on a drying track following earlier rain, so Acosta was able to learn the conditions during Q1, which helped him go second-fastest in Q2, between Márquez and Bagnaia.

Qualifying and the start are everything in MotoGP. Acosta nailed both. He was third at the end of the first lap of the sprint, a position he kept throughout. He started the GP even better running second on lap one, but he only rode the eighth fastest lap of the race, so more than anything it was the start that gave him the result.