Almost anyone could’ve won the completely wild dry-wet Jerez MotoGP sprint, but perhaps inevitably it was Marc Marquez who did – even though he crashed along the way.
That meant plenty of tales of woe, and some tales of unexpected success. Here’s our pick of both.
Winner – Marc Marquez (1st)
This was shaping up to be a pretty alarming Marc Marquez race, actually, given he had got a great assist from Johann Zarco in holding off his rivals yet was getting chased down emphatically – not just by brother Alex, but Fabio Di Giannantonio and Raul Fernandez.
When everything shook out, he obviously got away with one, crashing in a better place than anyone else at a more advantageous moment than anyone else. He maybe would’ve won without the crash, too, but he wouldn’t have won without the rain.
That’ll be a continued concern going forward. For now, it’s a 12-point gain on both works Aprilias, which Marquez still had to work for in reeling in and picking off Ducati team-mate Pecco Bagnaia. As he can rightly point out, while a stroke of luck it does sort of return the favour for the tyre failure in the Thailand Grand Prix opener.
Loser – Aprilia (2 x DNF)
“It’s not luck,” said Marco Bezzecchi of Aprilia’s double DNF coinciding with Ducati’s 1-2 to start the weekend that’s expected to show where the 2026 MotoGP power balance really lies, “they were better than us”.
There was some (bad) luck involved – you couldn’t really describe Bezzecchi wheelspinning from fourth to nearly last off the line because he had one of Alex Marquez’s visor tear-offs lodged under his wheel anything else.
But the yet to be fully diagnosed brake problem that sidelined Jorge Martin early on is the kind of technical glitch Aprilia won’t be able to afford if Ducati really gets going now, and Bezzecchi didn’t need yet another sprint crash either. He put this one down to the brakes not being warm enough on his out-lap after his bike switch, though he felt he’d given the warming process a good go.
On the brighter side, Martin’s surge up to the lead pack in his brief race showed Aprilia has very good pace in the dry here and the initially alarming sight of Bezzecchi’s legs trapped under his bike after his crash was nothing to worry about. He said it had been a “super slow” crash in which he’d just been trying to keep his bike going with his legs to avoid falling foul of the tighter rules over post-crash restarting.
Loser – Alex Marquez (DNF)
Saturday’s results sounded pretty easy for Alex Marquez to shrug off as just “completely luck”, that occasional sporting moment where you just take a kicking and have to dust yourself off.
It could be the optimal way to take it psychologically – but today it’s also just plainly correct. The Gresini man looks a lot quicker than everyone else here, and he was riding a top-drawer race – including a frankly delightful round-the-outside overtake at Aspar on his brother – until the rain came.
Watching the onboard, I can’t fault him in the decision not to pit (you do not pull into the pits from first place when the track is that dry, and the first time Alex saw a track that looked wet was the main straight after he’d passed pit entry) – and can’t really fault him in the crash, which just looks a slicks-on-wet-patch fluke at pedestrian speed.
Winners – Pecco Bagnaia (2nd) and Franco Morbidelli (3rd)
A valuable snapshot of the race, from the end of lap seven. Ducati 1, Ducati 2, Ducati 3, and then Bagnaia and Morbidelli, in 17th and 18th respectively, going nowhere fast.
Such is the nature of the flag-to-flag beast that they stood on the podium in the end, with a pair of finishes the two desperately needed. Bagnaia’s form has been disappointing to start the year, and Morbidelli’s something worse than that.
That said, I am not sure I am entirely on board with Morbidelli’s post-race message in parc ferme.
“He has no chance, he cannot make the result, he has no speed, he has no whatever – and here we are,” he said. But, though Morbidelli was admittedly quite impressive in the wet, taking this as anything other than a welcome gift from Lady Luck feels folly to me.
Losers – The non-Quartararo Yamahas (10th, 16th, DNF)
Augusto Fernandez is obviously excused from this category as a test rider, but the rest of Fabio Quartararo’s Yamaha stablemates should feel a sting from being shown up by the 2021 champion here.
Wet weather isn’t Quartararo conditions – and he whiffed on the correct pit timing by a lap – but in the end he’s the one scoring points for seventh.
Toprak Razgatlioglu removed himself from consideration when he unceremoniously clattered into Lorenzo Savadori, Alex Rins just didn’t have the pace even when he did have the right strategy, and Jack Miller had a general day of horrors – from a Q1 crash that left him trundling around on a spare bike running a hilarious 3.5 bar rear tyre pressure, to a race crash that immediately followed the “f******k” realisation that he should’ve followed Brad Binder into the pits.
Winner – Raul Fernandez (6th)
Rain turned Raul Fernandez’s ‘at-least-fourth’ into sixth – though it likely would’ve also been a win had he followed his “heart” rather than his head and pitted a lap early.
In any case, he has put together an accomplished weekend so far after a couple of rounds of meandering and continues to score at an impressive clip.
He’s at 44 points already. Last year, it took him until the end-of-June Assen weekend to arrive at 44 points.
Loser – Joan Mir (DNF)
Joan Mir’s fifth consecutive crash out of a race is… fine, in the circumstances. This was a wild one, a lot of people crashed, he got tripped up on the out-lap, things happen.
Problem is, while fellow Honda riders Johann Zarco and Luca Marini put up points on the board, Mir will hardly get a chance to hold up his end of the bargain tomorrow – facing a double long-lap penalty that sure looks race-ruining.
He lamented the “very strict decision” relating to his apparent flaunting of the black-and-orange flag – which he claimed he was unable to make out with certainty until it was too late in the lap.
Loser – Brad Binder (4th)
Binder deserves more credit for nailing strategy today than anyone else.
He read the situation right, though admittedly “quite lucky” to do so, and – unlike many of those behind him – sacrificed an actual points-paying position (eighth) to pit, whereas those behind him effectively had absolutely nothing to lose.
But he can’t be in the winners here, because he should’ve won had he not crashed – and Binder, of course, knows this, describing himself as “happy and heartbroken at the same time”.