Márquez centimetres from MotoGP disaster: 'Today I had a special fire inside me'

San Marino GP winner Marc Márquez will be crowned 2025 MotoGP champion next time out at Motegi, so long as he outscores his younger brother Alex by three points during the Japanese GP.

The two brothers are now the only riders that can win the title. Even if Marc fails to score in all 12 remaining races and factory Ducati team-mate Pecco Bagnaia wins them all, Bagnaia still won’t win the championship.

A seventh MotoGP title will make Marc the fifth-oldest rider to wear the crown and still the youngest.

Márquez’s 11th grand prix success of the year followed a rare mistake in Saturday’s sprint, when he crashed out soon after taking the lead from pole-starter Marco Bezzecchi.

“Today I had a special fire inside me,” he said after winning his 99th grand prix. “After yesterday’s mistake I tried to reply in the best way possible and the best reply was to try to win the race.

“I fought against a very tough Marco Bezzecchi. He was pushing super-hard, we were both pushing more than usual. He had extra motivation because it’s his home GP and I had extra motivation because of the crash.”

Márquez followed Bezzecchi for the first third of the race, staying right on the Aprilia’s rear wheel to put the Italian under maximum pressure.

Finally Bezzecchi ran wide at the Turn 8 left-hander, which put Márquez into the lead. The expectation was that the 32-year-old Spaniard would then make the race his own, but he didn’t. Each time he upped his pace, Bezzecchi counter-attacked and on several occasions he looked ready to have a go at regaining the lead. But it wasn’t to be. Márquez took the chequered flag 0.568 seconds in front. This was his toughest victory of 2025, along with Assen, where Bezzecchi also gave chase.

“It was a really tough race but also really beautiful,” said Bezzecchi. “I was on the limit and Marc was pushing a lot, so being able to stay there was fantastic. I thought I could bring home the win but Marc was super-fast and they [Ducati] still have something more, especially when the tyres go down, they can be smoother and quicker.”

Bezzecchi’s result once again proved the progress Aprilia has made this year, mostly in better controlling the tyre in the braking phase, allowing its riders to attack corners faster.

Meanwhile Ducati cannot move forward because its 2025 engine has a fundamental design flaw. After Márquez, the next best GP25 rider at Misano was Fabio Di Giannantonio in fifth, beaten by GP24 riders Alex Márquez and Franky Morbidelli, who were third and fourth.

Márquez was pushing so hard that he made several mistakes which brought him within centimetres of disaster.

“The brake points changed completely [once he was in front] and the wind was pushing in a different direction at Turns Eight, 11 and 12, so I touched the green three times at Turn 11,” he explained. “If I touched the green again I’d have had a long-lap penalty, so I was extra careful with the green. I slowed the pace, checked the brake points and re-attacked.

“I felt the pressure of Ducati this weekend and I felt the pressure of Davide Tardozzi [the factory Ducati team manager]. For the first time yesterday he said, ‘Give everything,’ and I crashed. Today he said, ‘Okay, give everything but a bit less.’”

Luca Marini came home in seventh, behind rookie Fermin Aldeguer, for his third consecutive top-eight result, running around six-tenths off the winning pace. Honda has introduced Aprilia-style seat side-wings, which improve stability.

Pedro Acosta was chasing a podium, moving up from seventh to fourth in three laps, when his KTM RC16 broke its chain. This was KTM’s third chain breakage of the weekend and the Spanish youngster vented his anger by giving his bike the bird after he’d parked it against a trackside wall. Ride-height devices drop the rear of the bike so far that they can slacken the chain, causing damage.

Yamaha’s all-new V4 had a promising first race weekend in the hands of test rider Augusto Fernandez, who qualified 1.3 seconds off pole and rode a best race lap 1.4 seconds off the top.

But if Yamaha engineers were happy with that, they weren’t so happy when their number-one rider Fabio Quartararo rode the bike in the Monday tests.

“At the moment it’s worse [than the inline-four],” he said. “In Barcelona [where he first rode the bike last Monday] we felt some differences that for me were better but here we don’t find any at the moment. I don’t see any improvements in the areas we need to make them. But the team says there’s margin, theoretically.

“The engine isn’t the issue, but I don’t think the V4 [bike] will resolve our problems, because we still find the same problems.

“Turning is the inline-four’s only strong point, but this is a bit worse with the V4 and we don’t find any other positives, so we have to figure out what is possible.”

The V4’s next race outing is at next month’s Malaysian GP, with Fernandez on board once again. If the bike has shown no real improvement by then, Yamaha will be very, very worried…