Always listen to people in the know. When three-time MotoGP race winner Cal Crutchlow and title-winning crew chief Frankie Carchedi told us a couple of years ago that no one would see which way Marc Márquez went if he got on a Ducati, they knew what they were talking about.

The 32-year-old factory Ducati rider’s current form is ridiculous: four grand prix victories and four sprint wins from the last four MotoGP rounds, which puts him 83 points ahead of brother Alex at the championship’s halfway point, with 75% more points than his team-mate Pecco Bagnaia.

So far this year he has led 222 laps, 154 more than the next rider, Alex. And Sunday’s victory – at the end of his 200th premier-class start – was his 69th, which moves him past Giacomo Agostini in the all-time winners’ list, with only Valentino Rossi ahead, on 89.

No one was at all surprised with Márquez’s total domination of super-anti-clockwise Sachsenring, where he scored his 12th German GP success. Those dozen wins go like this: 2010 (125cc), 2011 and 2012 (Moto2), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2025 (MotoGP).

His Saturday and Sunday victories were opposites: after the rain-lashed sprint he admitted that he had taken “too much risk” to fight back from a first-corner mistake to chase down Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia).

After that race he said, “This year I’m trying to work a lot on my instincts,” while acknowledging that he had totally failed to do so, in order to gain a barely worth it extra three points. The devil inside still rules his throttle hand.

On Sunday, he cruised to a 6.4-second victory, without even going to his “extra limit”, giving the devil inside an afternoon off.

Márquez’s current domination may not thrill us like his hard-fought Honda successes, but we are witnessing history, because what he’s doing – dominating the world’s toughest race series after three years in injury hell – has never been done before.

Márquez may finally have the best bike on the grid beneath him – or very nearly the best bike, because last year’s GP24 is still a more manageable ride – but that doesn’t mean he’s having it too easy.

The photo at the top – taken by the super-talented Gareth Harford of Gold and Goose – illustrates how Márquez is riding around the kind of problems that have been troubling fellow GP25 riders Bagnaia and Fabio Di Giannantonio and most of the rest of the grid.

Michelin’s super-grippy rear slick, introduced at the start of last year, can cause chatter and vibration, which is caused by a harmonic mismatch between the tyre and the motorcycle.

Harford’s photo shows Márquez during Sunday’s Grand Prix. The tell-tale ‘Morse Code’ mark left by his rear tyre shows the tyre going through a grip, slide, grip, slide cycle as it chatters, literally hopping and skipping several millimetres above the racetrack.

Chatter comes and goes, like headlice in the school playground. It’s a hard-to-cure technical disease that drastically reduces grip, because the tyre is only in intermittent contact with the asphalt. And it can be so difficult to cure that it has riders and engineers tearing their hair out.

“We call it ‘the jackhammer’ in the US,” twice World Superbike champion Colin Edwards told me many years ago. “Having chatter is like having syphilis, it’s all you think about all day!”

Chatter is a confusing engineering infestation that appears with some tyre compounds but not others, at some racetracks but not others, in some conditions but not others, in some corners but not others, at some lean angles but not others, in some gears but not others, sometimes with new tyres, sometimes with used tyres.

It’s a nightmare – the rider has to slow down, risk a crash or use his skills to deal with the chatter.

Ducati has made a better job than its rivals of dialling out this bout of rear-end chatter and extracting maximum grip from the current rear tyre, which is one of the reasons it’s been so dominant since the start of 2024.

The Bologna brand, like the other manufacturers, has developed special suspension set-ups in an attempt to cure the chatter, but these usually fix the issue by reducing grip, so they give the rider an easier time, at the expense of lap time.

Márquez has tried these set-ups on various occasions and each time he gives his engineers the same answer: please return to my usual settings – give me grip and I will deal with the chatter.

How does he deal with the chatter? We don’t know, but it will be some combination of throttle, brakes, body position and so on to constantly adjust front and rear load, so he can maintain his usual speed without crashing.

So, he may look like he’s having an easy life but he’s not.

The only rider to – briefly – look like he might be able to go with Márquez at Sachsenring was Di Giannantonio, who had also chased the six-time MotoGP champion in both Friday sessions to learn from the king of the ’Ring.

“It’s always difficult to understand what he does with his hands and feet,” said the Italian on Friday afternoon. “You can only see the difference in speed or in body position, so you don’t really know what he’s doing. I tried my best to copy him, trying to learn from the best. In every game it’s like this – when there’s someone better than you, you try to study and copy.”

Di Giannantonio finished third in the sprint, then during Sunday’s GP he was the first of the rash of high-profile Turn 1 crashers, when he slid out of second place.

“Marc was just a little more precise with his lines,” he said. “I had the same speed in a lot of corners but the laps I was there, maybe I went one metre wide, or half a metre wide and he never did, so he was taking a tenth here, a tenth there. Also, when I was behind him, I was trying to be really smooth and precise with the throttle to avoid spinning. I was having little moments, so a little pumping from the rear, while he never did and he had the best acceleration.”

Márquez explained later that he was inch-perfect because he was riding well within his limit.

The same couldn’t be said for the seven riders that went past their limit while giving vain chase: Di Giannantonio, Bezzecchi, Pedro Acosta, Johann Zarco, Ai Ogura, Miguel Oliveira and Lorenzo Savadori (who fell twice). Joan Mir also ended up on the ground, after being taken out by the falling Ogura. Luckily, no one was hurt.

Most of the crashes happened at Turn 1, a deceptively tricky slow right-hander, where negative camber, a tailwind, cool temperatures, lack of rubber down (after Saturday’s rain) and the right side of the tyres that hadn’t touched the road since Turn 11 conspired to leave only ten riders circulating at the finish, the fewest finishers since the 2011 Australian GP, where there were only 14 starters (in the wake of the global financial crisis).

Márquez navigated his way through the chaos, taking heed of the yellow flags and the marshals scampering through the Turn 1 gravel trap.

Those who think that MotoGP bikes are too easy to ride should consider the fact that three riders didn’t even make the start on Sunday due to racing injuries: Maverick Viñales, who dislocated and fractured a shoulder during qualifying, Franky Morbidelli, who took a purling high-speed crash in the sprint, and reigning champion Jorge Martín, who is still recovering from his nasty fall during April’s Qatar GP.

Thus Sunday’s race started with the smallest grid since Argentina in 2023, the first year of the sprint format, when not a single race started with a full and fit grid.

And Alex Márquez wasn’t exactly fighting fit last weekend, finishing a superb second despite the finger he broke when he crashed after tangling with Acosta at Assen.