A MotoGP rider scored the perfect 37 points at the French Grand Prix – while also perhaps positioning himself as the new 2026 title favourite.
That rider does not top our ranking this weekend. In a field of some serious ups and downs this weekend, several riders really separated themselves from peers on similar machinery – and one in particular did so to a ludicrous extent.
Agree, disagree or just want to send Val spiralling off down a ludicrous tangent? Leave your comments and questions on this post in The Race Members’ Club and Val will tackle them in his Q&A later this week
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: 5th Grand Prix: 6th
The entirety of my Fabio Quartararo #1 argument is numerical. I am not sure it will convince you, but I will give it a shot.
Here is how far ahead of the other Yamahas he was in every session:
Q1: Razgatlioglu +0.700s; Miller +0.720s
Q2: Rins +0.785s
Sprint: Rins +11.011s; Razgatlioglu +12.566s; Miller +13.201s
GP: Rins +24.587s; Razgatlioglu +24.720s; Miller +28.303s
A “big step” to address a “floating feeling” into corners unleashed some truly crazy speed from Quartararo’s V4-engined Yamaha, and a pair of expert attack-then-defend races more than doubled Yamaha’s constructors’ tally in 2026.
Yes, he wouldn’t obliterate his M1 peers quite to such an extent without the grid slot – but when you’re 0.197s off pole on a bike that has struggled so much, and outqualifying the guy who will go on to score the full 37 points, you deserve to reap the track position benefits.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 1st Grand Prix: 1st
Jorge Martin is no longer graded out as a nice little Aprilia reclamation story but as a bona fide title contender. He looked every bit one – every bit the title favourite, really – across the 40 racing laps at Le Mans.
I’m ever-so-slightly hung up on qualifying – he’s still yet to outpace Marco Bezzecchi in a Q2 in their time as Aprilia team-mates, and the two tenths of a second defeat this time was certainly nothing egregious but ultimately limiting.
Not, as it turned out, limiting enough. Martin was ultimately the best rider on the best bike here, and capitalised accordingly. And the ability to make up positions early is very much part of his skillset – but he will need to rely on it less to feel comfortable in this title battle.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 4th Grand Prix: 5th
The last-lap overtake from Fabio Di Giannantonio brought out quite a lot of self-reproach from Pedro Acosta, who said he misestimated the gap to the incoming Ducati and rode too defensively.
It was perhaps a consequence overall of trying a little too hard to stay in touch with the lead battle – though, going by where the other KTMs ended up and where the RC16 has been all season, I don’t think you can really fault Acosta’s approach to this race.
Again, he was KTM’s clear best option, helped out by some single-lap gains from the Jerez test and a marginal passage into Q2 on Friday – but ultimately just on another level versus his stablemates.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 3rd Grand Prix: 2nd
Shaky but he’ll take it.
Bezzecchi seemed well-aware throughout the weekend that he wasn’t quite in the groove here, as particularly evidenced by his mistake on Saturday that let Pecco Bagnaia through into second (or the initial mini-error that had opened the door to Martin).
But a very strong qualifying and two lights-out launches meant he never had to worry too much about a big points hit to his title aspirations. The end result of a ‘meh’ weekend pace-wise was still 27 points, the second-highest tally of his year, but also a perfect signal of the high floor of performance for the championship leader.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 7th Grand Prix: 3rd
Ai Ogura’s biggest ‘win’ of the weekend was when the heavily-anticipated rain no-showed on Sunday afternoon, allowing him to profit from his best session of the MotoGP weekend.
Starts and opening laps clearly remain a limitation, but the latter must be at least in part a trade-off that enables his lightning late-race speed in the grands prix.
It was maybe a winnable grand prix somehow somewhere – the initial botched overtake on Quartararo at Raccordement, that dropped him behind both Quartararo and Joan Mir, was one he really couldn’t afford – but the podium in the end felt seriously overdue.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 16th Grand Prix: 4th
Turbo-fast on Friday – and never really slow over the rest of the weekend – Di Giannantonio had a more eventful weekend than he, VR46 or Ducati would have liked.
Second row, instead of the first (though it turned into that for Sunday after Marc Marquez’s withdrawal), was likely a direct consequence of a bee getting into his helmet and compromising his main Q2 run. A dreadful start, which he acknowledged was partly his fault, wrecked the sprint even before he crashed at the Dunlop chicane.
But Sunday was good, as he chose not to chase the Aprilias and run his own pace – which paid off with the best available result of fourth, courtesy of the last-lap lunge on Acosta.
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 2nd Grand Prix: DNF
Bagnaia’s exit from the Sunday race was a strange one – he alluded to a recurrence of a brake issue from Jerez, but whereas at Jerez he had had to pull up, here the crash that put him out was seemingly a more tangential cause than a direct one.
It’s a question, then, of who should be doing what differently (Bagnaia, crew chief Christian Gabarrini, Ducati, Brembo) and we’ll see what answers Barcelona brings.
It was a very nice Bagnaia weekend otherwise – fairly assured from the get-go despite a Friday crash, strong over one lap, strong in race pace (but needing to do too much work due to a pair of “very terrible” starts).
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 6th Grand Prix: DNF
An outside contender for the #1 spot in these rankings until lap 20 on Sunday, when his front tyre cooled off once clear of Quartararo and he crashed trying to get temperature back in it.
It ended how it ended, and I’m running out of ways to rewrite the same paragraph every other weekend, so let’s talk some positives.
Friday? Super strong. Q2? “Amazing lap”, as acknowledged by Honda team-mate Luca Marini. The sprint? Good use of discretion, as he probably should have overtaken Quartararo there, too, but was wise not to risk it.
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 11th Grand Prix: 9th
Going nowhere not-so-fast on Friday, especially after the tip-off in the chicane, Fermin Aldeguer looked like he would have to accept a lost weekend here – a feeling heightened by a very poor Q1.
The Le Mans direction changes were stressing his injury, too, but whatever was the biggest limitation was clearly gone going into the races, as his crew played around with the bike and he came alive.
The grand prix played out particularly well, set up by a bet on the soft front to make up ground early on (he went 19th to 11th by lap two).
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 14th Grand Prix: 13th
Toprak Razgatlioglu made solid work of getting his head around a Le Mans track that he had never visited before, much less raced at (unless you count the video game).
He was off the pace on Friday but found a decent chunk over one lap in qualifying, then seemed to figure out some race pace sprint-to-GP, having struggled to stop the bike due to rear-locking.
There were clearly errors in both races but an overall level of performance that was fundamentally sound relative to… two of the other three Yamahas.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 9th Grand Prix: DNF
Diogo Moreira accepted, maybe even embraced, the possibility of crashing out of a wet grand prix in the hunt for condition-learning. The race was dry in the end – but the crash came all the same.
He went off in battle at Chemin aux Boeufs, then crashed trying to catch the pack back up.
It happens, and with a rookie you take the good with the bad. Ninth in the sprint, though attrition-helped, was certainly good, but to be a more regular threat for sprint points he needs to find more consistency in qualifying trim, and perhaps be a bit less tow-reliant.
Qualifying: 14th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 7th
Enea Bastianini said he “cannot be happy” with seventh place as he was too limited by bike stability – so unable to make any progress after moving up to 10th on the opening lap, with the remaining positional gains all coming from attrition.
He hadn’t helped his weekend by crashing on the under-temperature hard front in Q1 – and also went down in the sprint.
But he was also very clearly the second-fastest KTM throughout – so while Acosta has pulled clear again, Bastianini hasn’t worryingly regressed or anything like that.
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: DNS
Marc Marquez’s disclosure about his screw-induced shoulder nerve problem paints his whole season in a different light – especially as he had been unaware of it.
And his aborted Le Mans weekend, too, becomes very easy to understand and dismiss, from the Friday struggles, to the indifferent pace early on in the sprint, to the sprint crash that put him out of two grands prix.
But you could also make the argument that, if he wasn’t in full control when that crash happened (as he himself hinted, having insisted he was riding conservatively), he shouldn’t have been out there to begin with.
That Q1 lap was very-very-very nice, though.
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 8th
Raul Fernandez’s weekend was wrong-footed by that Friday afternoon bike fire that forced him to switch to his quite-different spare for the top 10 bid – which came up short.
As an Aprilia rider, he probably should be successful in navigating Q1, except the two riders who beat him then also beat Martin and Ogura in Q2.
He was managing a clutch issue in the sprint and crashed chasing after Alex Marquez, apologising to the team, then salvaged an acceptable result on Sunday.
But he really didn’t enjoy how the bike felt in Bastianini’s tow. Ogura and Martin, he said, make overtaking look “like we are on a MotoGP bike and the rest are on a Moto2 – but in my case it’s not like this”.
Qualifying: 11th Sprint: 10th Grand Prix: 11th
Johann Zarco admitted the “busy” home weekend of additional commercial and promotional duties left him running on empty by the end – but also pinpointed an early Saturday crash as a potential culprit for a promising French Grand Prix unravelling.
The crash, at Raccordement, looked very mild but the timing aligns. He had been fantastic on Friday, but struggled to find the same “great feeling” over one lap in Q2, struggled with an early-developing vibration in the sprint and got roughed up (albeit with no contact) by Fernandez in the race.
He was ultimately “very disappointed” by how the performance trend through the weekend.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 10th
Yet another Marini weekend that began promisingly on Friday and got derailed by a trip to Q1 – the result of some errors, some yellow flags and some traffic, and the cause of “really, really big frustration”.
The worry is, while Marini’s pace is never truly alarming, he seems to be missing the upper bound of performance accessed by Honda stablemates Mir or Zarco – though he does tend to make up with for it with professional work in races, as did happen on Sunday despite what he felt was the wrong front tyre choice.
But the laptime in Q1 was a real worry, and the crash in the sprint was an uncharacteristic letdown.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 13th Grand Prix: 12th
Alex Rins deserves a lot of grace for this weekend. The Friday push to Q2 was probably always going to prove a bit of a mirage – he tucked in nicely behind Martin on that lap – and Q2 itself was uncompetitive (rear tyre sliding), but he didn’t get to capitalise at all in the races through little fault of his own.
There was a clutch issue on Saturday, another really poor start on Sunday – and subsequent power cuts that left him in battle with his fellow Yamaha riders that, really, should have never been.
That he fought off those non-Quartararo Yamahas is at least some credit.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 8th Grand Prix: DNF
The younger Marquez’s erratic form is one of the primary markers for just how screwed Ducati is without a fit Marc right now.
Two crashes really compromised the Spanish GP winner’s weekend: number one came mid-Q2, costing him a shot at a more competitive starting position; number two came early in the race, as he popped an unwanted wheelie on acceleration mid-Dunlop chicane in what he called a “strange” but “really stupid” error.
But the pace just looked really middling outside of that. Perhaps it’s better to crash here than last time out at Jerez or next time out at Barcelona.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 15th Grand Prix: 15th
A “relatively decent” Friday parlayed itself into nothing much for Jack Miller, who did get his first point on the board this season – but was last of the Yamahas in qualifying and both races.
Was he the slowest of the Yamahas? Maybe, but probably not – but this has been the story of Miller’s season, with true results almost completely absent.
This time, a bit of enforced track-cutting at Chemin aux Boeufs hurt him in the sprint, and his roll of the dice with the soft front went nowhere in the grand prix, as the tyre was rendered non-functional by the heat of pack racing and the loss of cloud cover.
Qualifying: 22nd Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 16th
“Super excited and nervous” to ride after three years away (and nine years on from his aborted MotoGP career), Tech3’s Maverick Vinales stand-in Jonas Folger settled at around 2-2.5s off the pace for the weekend.
He crashed early in the sprint (claiming there was nothing explaining it in the data), and didn’t really progress hugely towards the regulars through the weekend – there or thereabout on braking from the outset but missing corner speed.
The final result on Sunday was uninspiring, but was a consequence of building discomfort on the bike over 27 laps (he is 178cm tall whereas the regulars are all in the 168-171cm range, so it’s not quite geared to him yet), and a conviction to avoid a double DNF.
Folger expects to be back on the bike at Barcelona, so Vinales’s absence sounds like it will continue.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 14th
Aldeguer’s early-weekend struggles granted Franco Morbidelli a couple of sessions of reprieve – but where Aldeguer perked up for the races, Morbidelli couldn’t really follow at all.
He has no culpability in his sprint falling apart – it was ruined when he had to avoid the crashing Di Giannantonio, though later he would crash out himself.
But the Sunday race was really as bleak as they get without a DNF.
There had been glimpses of ‘something’ earlier in the season, but suddenly he can’t seem to get this bike work for him at all.
Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 12th Grand Prix: DNF
Though Saturday was totally unsalvageable, Brad Binder managed to sound positive on Friday and Sunday. In truth, it was a pretty grim weekend throughout.
Using Acosta as a reference nearly helped him into Q2 on Friday, which could have been transformative, but he was – in his own words – “useless” in Q1, and had too much tyre degradation in the sprint.
A more encouraging main race ended with a crash at Musee. He may well have worked into the top 10 otherwise, but it won’t have fundamentally changed the outlook.