Le Mans MotoGP: Martin ascends, Márquez descends

Jorge Martin raced a full 2026-spec Aprilia RS-GP for the first time at Le Mans and in so doing, became the first rider this season to score maximum Saturday and Sunday points. And he did it both ways — a mind-boggling first few corners in the sprint had him lead every lap, then he slugged it out in the grand prix, fighting his way through from seventh on lap one.

No doubt about it, the 2024 MotoGP king now ranks as favourite for the 2026 MotoGP championship. Martin raced the first four GPs without Aprilia’s full array of 2026 upgrades because he had missed the first pre-season tests through injury, so he didn’t get to try that hardware and software until the post-Spanish GP Jerez tests, where he told us the upgrades were worth “a real two-tenths”, which equates to four or five seconds over race distance.

Martin has always looked great on the Aprilia, never mind his idiotic panic at the start of last season. Watching him on the RS-GP reminds me of watching a 250cc GP blade runner: head under the bubble, wringing the thing’s neck, extracting every millilitre of performance from that quarter of a litre.

On Sunday, he had more rear tyre than team-mate Marco Bezzecchi, which was impressive, considering he had to pass so many riders, each overtake giving his tyres a temperature spike, while Bezzecchi seemed to have everything under control at the front, managing his tyres and his advantage.

At one-third distance Martin was almost three seconds down on Bezzecchi, but he was moving relentlessly forward, taking Ai Ogura, Fabio Quartararo, Fabio Di Giannantonio and Pedro Acosta on his way to second place, every overtake beautifully administered, though he had to have two stabs at Di Giannantonio.

When he took second from Acosta on lap 18 of 27, he had 10 laps to consume Bezzecchi’s 1.6-second lead and he did so effortlessly, taking the world championship leader at Turn 3 with three laps to go.

His only issue? His RS-GP was getting a bit too lively when he was in the wake of rival machines, but that didn’t stop him setting up most of his moves through the super-fast Turn 2, then diving past on the inside into Turn 3. We shouldn’t forget, however, his awesome sprint start, which had him take the lead by riding round the outside of Bezzecchi at the same corner.

There are still 17 grands prix to go, so anything can happen, but right now Martin looks unstoppable: he has the talent, the strength and the title-winning experience – Moto3 in 2018, MotoGP in 2024.

What will happen if the title battle becomes an in-house factory Aprilia duel? Bezzecchi is tougher than his carefree character might suggest, but there is something of the cage-fighter in Martin that will surely give him the edge if things get nasty. MotoGP’s last in-house title duel? Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo in 2015.

Ai Ogura made it an all-Aprilia MotoGP podium for the first time in history, a testament to the Noale factory, which began its transformation from loser to winner in 2019. That year, Piaggio CEO Roberto Colaninno faced a stark choice – either admit defeat with the under-performing RS-GP and quit the championship, or invest.

Luckily for MotoGP, he chose the latter option. That summer, the two most crucial decisions in the RS-GP’s journey from grid filler to dominator were taken: hire Massimo Rivola from Ferrari‘s Formula 1 project to bring an F1 mindset to MotoGP and replace the RS-GP’s troublesome 72-degree V4 engine with a 90-degree V4.

Ogura’s third place at Le Mans was his first MotoGP podium and the first by a Japanese riding a non-Japanese motorcycle since Tetsuya Harada took third place in the 1999 French and British GPs, also on an Aprilia, the marque’s original MotoGP bike, the RSW500 two-stroke.

Aprilia is currently dominant and making Ducati look second rate. But is the difference really as big as many seem to think?

No, it isn’t. Factory rider Pecco Bagnaia had a great weekend until a brake problem caused him to tuck the front just after half distance, while running second to Bezzecchi. On Saturday he followed pole position with a strong ride to second in the sprint, 1.1 seconds behind Martin. He also set the fastest lap on Sunday and would probably have made the podium if the same brake problem that had him retire at Jerez hadn’t caused him to crash.

VR46 rider Di Giannantonio was therefore Ducati’s top finisher in fourth, 2.8 seconds behind Martin, a difference of a tenth of a second a lap.

Ducati was already in this situation last year. If Marc Márquez hadn’t been around, Bagnaia would’ve been the brand’s best factory rider in fourth overall, behind the KTM of Pedro Acosta, the Aprilia of Bezzecchi and the GP24 of Alex Márquez.

There’s little doubt that the GP26 is a better motorcycle than the GP25. When the bike is right, Bagnaia says his feeling is pretty much back to where it was in 2024, when he fought a great battle for the title with fellow GP24 rider Martin.

On Saturday at Le Mans, MotoGP got to see the best and the worst of Marc Márquez. Two weeks earlier at Jerez, he had wondered aloud if he would ever be able to dance with a motorcycle again, following his latest right shoulder injury, sustained at Mandalika last October.

The seven-time MotoGP king’s Q1 lap at Le Mans proved he hasn’t lost any of his skills, or the will to use them, when that much-mangled shoulder allows him.

Márquez’s fastest qualifying lap was a massive 0.346 seconds better than Bagnaia’s Q2 pole-position lap and his advantage over his team-mate was bigger than Bagnaia’s advantage over the entire top ten in Q2: 0.297 seconds.

This was the first 1min 29.288sec lap of Márquez magic we had seen in eight months, since last September at Misano, where he beat Bezzecchi in an epic duel. This was the Márquez we know so well, doing things that leave his rivals and engineers slack-jawed in admiration – how the hell did he do that?

That whole lap sizzled, but it was his Turn 8, the tricky downhill double-right before the back straight, that really burned. He had the rear end of his Ducati kicking this way and that as he hit the brakes, the front wheel momentarily looking left as he flicked into the turn, the front tucking again as his right knee skimmed the road. And he nailed both apexes anyway.

This lap wasn’t quite as remarkable as his 2015 pole lap at COTA, when he abandoned his stricken number-one Honda on the start/finish, leapt the pitwall and sprinted to his second bike, with just enough time to do one flying lap. Factory Ducati rider Andrea Dovizioso was behind him throughout that lap, spellbound by what he was witnessing.

“I tried to follow him to learn the line, to see the details and learn some secrets, but he made so many mistakes… and he still made the lap time!” said the Italian later that day.

If Márquez’s Le Mans Q1 lap reminded us of him at his best, what happened moments later told us lots about his current reality. As soon as he passed the finish line, he pulled across the track and braked to little more than walking speed. This wasn’t just getting out of the way; it was more than that. This suggested that when his right shoulder feels right, he can ask everything from it, but for no more than roughly a minute and a half.

Four hours later in the sprint, he was second into the first corner, fifth out of the third and then had Pedro Acosta and Joan Mir come past. Once again he was walking wounded, unable to fight back.

On the penultimate lap, things got worse. Márquez was a fraction wide into the final double right, his rear tyre kicking sideways once, then twice, with such violence that bike and rider ended up on the Le Mans 24-hour car circuit.

But as he flew upside down towards another screaming collision with Mother Earth, perhaps he was thinking that things aren’t quite as bad as they might look to the rest of us because we didn’t know what Márquez knew.

What the rest of us knew was that his right shoulder wasn’t getting better the way it should’ve been getting better. It seemed no stronger at Le Mans, nearly seven months after his post-Mandalika surgery, than it had been during the season-opening Thai GP. This suggested all was not well, which posed this question: Is the shoulder finished, or does it need further surgery?

What Márquez knew was that the shoulder did need more surgery, which was planned to take place after this weekend’s Catalan GP. That’s one reason he didn’t fight so hard during the sprint.

During the Jerez weekend, he had indeed realised that something wasn’t right with the shoulder, which has undergone numerous surgeries, including a full rebuild following the 2019 season.

“We went to see my doctors and they found that everything was fine, but that the infamous broken screw [a remnant of the 2019 rebuild, which surgeons spotted during his post-Mandalika surgery] was in a different position.

“It was a very strange feeling, because at home I felt fine, and nothing happened when I rode a motocross bike, but when I came here, it prevented me from riding, because it was touching the radial nerve. That’s what causes me to make mistakes, be inconsistent and have unexpected crashes.”

Perhaps the nerve issue – a sudden twitch – played a part in the crash. The radial nerve is 100% vital to a motorcycle racer, because it controls muscle movement and provides feeling in the arm and hand. Without it, you are no longer a motorcycle racer. Four-time World Superbike champion Carl Fogarty is one of many racers whose careers have been terminated by a damaged radial nerve.