Misano MotoGP: Márquez back in machine mode

If Marc Márquez wins the 2026 MotoGP world championship, many will look back at Misano as the turning point, the moment the reigning champion took the points lead for the first time, while his strongest rivals buckled, Marco Bezzecchi ending his weekend in a gravel trap, Jorge Martin undone by arm pump.

Especially because Misano wasn’t supposed to end like that: this was supposed to be Bezzecchi’s weekend, because Misano is the Italian’s home track, where he trains with his VR46 buddies, so he knows every ripple and bump.

And Aprilia’s too, because Bezzecchi beat Márquez in last year’s Misano sprint and came within six tenths of beating him in the Sunday race, at a time when the RS-GP was weaker than it is now and Márquez was stronger than now.

But Misano wasn’t the turning point in this latest miraculous Márquez comeback. The real turning point came back in May, when Márquez crashed out of the Le Mans sprint and headed home for yet more surgery on his mangled right arm, specifically to remove a couple of loose screws that were pressing on the radial nerve, numbing the arm. Not what you want aboard a 225mph motorcycle.

Márquez scored just 71 points from the first seven races, before he went under the knife, and has amassed 203 from the last seven. During those same seven races, Martin has been his closest rival, on 118 points, while Bezzecchi has amassed 68, a third of Márquez’s score.

This would be impressive if his most recent surgery had fixed his arm, but of course it didn’t.

“The right arm is very limited in strength; especially in the biceps,” Márquez’s surgeon Dr Samuel Antuna revealed last week during an interview with El Periódico de Catalunya. “I would say the arm is around 50% of its capacity.”

So Márquez is effectively riding with one and a half arms.

When he got hurt last October, the injury didn’t seem serious: torn ligaments and a fractured coracoid, a tiny part of the shoulder blade. But in fact the coracoid is hugely important, because it’s an anchor point for numerous muscles and tendons.

“Before the Indonesia accident, the whole arm injury was very well compensated,” continued Antuna. “Marc wasn’t perfect, but he was fine. After that mishap, he became decomposed… If he were Carlos Alcaraz (world number three in tennis), he would have had to retire.”

This is why Márquez is a different rider now. Back in the old days he took risks for kicks – “Yeah, yeah – it’s an addiction!” – but in recent years, especially since last October, he only tempts fate when he absolutely needs to.

All weekend at Misano he was millimetre perfect, barely a wheel out of line over the three days. During qualifying – when he needed to risk it to ensure a front-row start – he broke Ducati’s lean-angle record, reaching 65 degrees at Turn 8, then got a bit loose into the next corner, so he immediately admitted defeat.

“I gave up,” he said. “There are still many races.”

He was the same in the sprint, only pushing when runner-up Bezzecchi seemed like a threat.

“I am trying to manage the risk,” he said.

Pole-sitter Bezzecchi ended the sprint a second down on Márquez but didn’t manage the risk so well on Sunday. Beaten into the first corner by Márquez on Saturday, he made sure that didn’t happen again the next day, but pushed too hard too soon, crashing at speed at Turn 13.

“For sure when you have a full fuel tank, you have to manage a little bit better the braking point,” Bezzecchi explained. “I had a bit of shaking in the fast part [Turns 11 and 12], so when I braked I didn’t close perfectly the line and unfortunately I lost the front.”

We don’t know what would’ve happened if Bezzecchi hadn’t made that almighty mistake, but afterwards Márquez admitted that the crucial factor in his fifth victory of 2026 was the Aprilia rider’s exit.

On the other hand, this year’s Misano race was a significant three-tenths a lap faster than last year’s, so he wasn’t hanging about, because younger brother Alex was faster once he had taken second place from Pedro Acosta, closing the gap from 2.4 seconds on lap four of 27 to fourth-tenths on lap 22. During the last few laps Márquez the elder upped his pace to finish sixth-tenths ahead.

Of course, Márquez may well have lost the race to Martin aboard the surviving factory Aprilia. The RS-GP and Ducati’s Desmosedici may have been equally matched around most of Misano, but the Aprilia had a real advantage through the most important third sector, which includes Misano’s three fastest corners, including Curvone, the fastest corner in the championship.

The efficiency of downforce and ground-effect aerodynamics increase massively with speed. To be exact, a MotoGP bike benefits from four times as much downforce through the 160mph Curvone as through the 80mph Turn 3, creating a massive increase in grip. And because the Aprilia’s downforce aero works better than the Ducati’s, the RS-GP had a quarter of a second on the Desmosedici through that sector.

Márquez didn’t know it at the time, but Martin’s victory challenge – he came through from the second row to lead from lap seven to 11 – wasn’t ended by the 2024 champ burning up his tyres, but by that dreaded racer’s curse, which may derail his title challenge…

“I started in a great way and I thought Marc was going to pull away,” said Martin, who may undergo arm-pump surgery following this weekend’s Austrian GP. “But then I was catching him again and I went into the lead. After that, I wasn’t pushing like crazy and I was still pulling away. But then I started to have issues with braking and opening the throttle and every lap was worse and worse. At the end I couldn’t do anything. I was completely not in control of the bike.”

That made Martin easy prey for the Márquez brothers and MotoGP’s young lions Acosta and Fermin Aldeguer, who were riding out of themselves for third place, after biting chunks out of each other in the sprint.

Aldeguer rode Sunday’s fastest lap, on lap 22, as he closed on 22-year-old Acosta, who responded the following lap with the second fastest lap of the race. That was enough for 21-year-old Aldeguer, who knew he had run out of time, so he eased off for a safe fourth. It was an impressive ride, considering Aldeguer’s lingering injury problems, from the leg he broke in January and the fractured vertebra he suffered in June.

Acosta was once again remarkable, charging through from the third row to fourth place on the first lap, his KTM RC16 working better in the long race than in the sprint, when he was more than half a second off the winning pace.