Marc Marquez domination to end? Austrian MotoGP hints at rivals getting closer

“I am reborn”, giggled Marc Marquez after winning the Austrian Grand Prix as he reflected on his most dominant stretch of victories since he was a 21-year-old sophomore in MotoGP in 2014. The factory Ducati rider has won nine for the season, with six of them coming over the last half-dozen rounds as he maintained his 37-point weekend streak.

On a weekend in which MotoGP (somewhat mutedly, it must be said) celebrated its 1000th premier class grand prix, with a host of legends in attendance, Marc Marquez is achieving generational statistics as a seventh top tier title edges ever closer.

With an 120-point advantage over his rivals coming into the Austrian Grand Prix, even a total non-scoring event would only have merely scratched his commanding lead in the standings. That he extended it to 142 matters little in the grand scheme of things: this is very much a championship of when, not if, at this point.

But there remains scores unsettled in what is shaping up to be Marquez’s greatest season. Of the remaining rounds, there were four circuits ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix where he hadn’t won at before in MotoGP: Red Bull Ring, Balaton Park (new host of the returning Hungarian Grand Prix), Mandalika and Portimao.

He’ll have his chance to tick Balaton Park off the list this weekend, while he arrives at Indonesian and Portuguese Grands Prix for the first time with the means to actually win them. But of all of them, the missing No.1 trophy from the dusty shelf with a ‘Red Bull Ring’ nameplate attached to it is the one that rankled the most.

Since it returned to the calendar in 2016, Marquez came within inches of winning the Austrian Grand Prix in 2017, 2018 and 2019. On all three occasions, he was beaten in last-lap duels by factory Ducati riders: two to Andrea Dovizioso, the other to Jorge Lorenzo.

“I lost three years against red bikes,” he said on Sunday. “Now I’m riding the red bike, so there were no excuses!”

It was the question everyone was asking him pre-weekend. Now he can put it to bed. Despite crashing in qualifying and leaving himself fourth on the grid, he came through to win the sprint and the grand prix for his 12th and ninth victories in each respective contest.

He is right: there wasn’t really an excuse. It’s a circuit Ducati has now won at 10 times over the years, including the last three with factory Ducati team-mate Pecco Bagnaia. The bike suits the circuit, while the form Marquez has been on offered him his best chance ever at finally righting a blot that has seeped through his copybook.

Yet, the relatively slender winning margin of just 1.118s tells a wider story of the difficulty he faced against two riders that really only needed one thing each to have been different for them to have denied Marquez his long-awaited Red Bull Ring success.

Mystery issue for Bezzecchi and Aprilia works to Marquez’s favour

Aprilia has been Ducati’s most consistent challenger of late, with Marco Bezzecchi winning at Silverstone, pushing Marquez hard at Assen, a few laps away from a Sachsenring podium, and again runner-up at Brno.

But Red Bull Ring has always been a bogey circuit for Aprilia, its best result prior to last Sunday in an Austrian Grand Prix being a sixth-place finish. Stop-and-go layouts don’t tend to suit the RS-GP too much, though they are pretty good for a hard-braker in Bezzecchi.

Bezecchi came from Q1 after a pretty dismal Friday, put it on a surprise pole - in no small part thanks to some help from MotoGP legends Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner - and led for 19 of the 28 laps of the grand prix.

He didn’t just lead, either. He really forced Marquez to push. For the first half of the grand prix, Bezzecchi was able to keep Marquez at bay, lapping on average just a little faster than him at 1m29.927s versus 1m29.943s for the Ducati rider. This also included Bezzecchi setting the fastest lap of the race at 1m29.533s, with that pace enough to be forcing Marquez into overusing his medium rear Michelin.

“The fact that I was all the race behind Marco I understood I was using the rear tyre too much because when you are behind somebody I couldn’t brake as I wanted,” he explained. “And then I was using more the rear tyre on the exit of the corners. For that reason, in the middle of the race I just gave up a bit and breathed.”

The lead gap went from 0.138s at the start of lap 10 to 0.876s at the beginning of the 14th tour. Marquez didn’t relent for long, as by lap 17 he was back to within 0.4s of the factory Aprilia rider.

On lap 19, he would take the lead from Bezzecchi on the brakes into Turn 4 having gotten a better run down the straight from Turn 3. But Bezzecchi used the superior turning of the RS-GP to carve back underneath Marquez into the Turn 6 left-hander. Despite his typical strength in left corners, it was sector three where Marquez lacked compared to his nearest rivals in the race.

Bezzecchi would succumb to Marquez’s advances at Turn 1 at the start of lap 20, but not before hanging on for dear life around the outside of the corner and trying to lean on the Ducati as much as possible without causing an incident.

From this point, Bezzecchi was rarely faster than Marquez and soon had Gresini rookie Fermin Aldeguer bearing down on him. At this stage, however, Bezzecchi was well within the grips of a technical issue that forced him to “slow down a bit”. He wouldn’t reveal what the issue was, though his hard charge at the front may well have seen him take his eye off fuel saving at one of MotoGP’s thirstiest tracks.

Bezzecchi was ultimately powerless to stop Aldeguer coming through and wound up 3.426s off the win in third. Without that issue, though, Bezzecchi was in the hot seat to take a second win of the season and frustrate Marquez’s hopes to banish his Austrian Grand Prix drought - not least because the Ducati rider had no need to risk a crash while in command as much as he is in the standings.

And the form of both Bezzecchi and Aprilia is not going unnoticed: “We see in the first races, from first to sixth were all Ducatis most of the time. Now it looks like, as we are in the world championship and we are in MotoGP, all the manufacturers keep improving… Aprilia, as I know already last year, they have a different concept of bike that is working very good in some race tracks and very weak in other race tracks. But in a weak track, he finished on the podium. So, Marco was riding in a very good way.”

“From nowhere” came an unexpected internal threat to Marquez in Austria

After Friday practice, there appeared a genuine threat to Marc Marquez’s victory hopes from a Ducati rider at the hands of team-mate Pecco Bagnaia. Using the 355mm front brakes that helped return him some front end confidence at Aragon, and at one of his strongest tracks, Bagnaia was a bit faster in terms of race pace than Marquez was. So much so that, even on Saturday night after his sprint win, Marquez was still bigging up Bagnaia’s potential.

However, the real ‘call came from within the house’ story arc at the Red Bull Ring sensationally revolved around Gresini rookie Fermin Aldeguer.

Aldeguer may very well have had a sprint podium on the Saturday at the Austrian Grand Prix had he not gotten wheelspin off the line and dropped positions from sixth on the grid. His pace was faster in that sprint than even Marc Marquez’s.

And coming into Sunday, Marquez himself was wary about one particular aspect of Aldeguer’s riding.

“I started to be a bit worried, because yesterday we analysed the Ducati riders and he was the one that kept the tyre life better,” he explained.

Aldeguer didn’t have the best of starts, dropping to as low as ninth as his season-long struggles in switching everything on in the early stages of races prevailed. But he was soon making his way back up the order, with a daring dive from Raul Fernandez on Brad Binder at the last corner on lap seven saving Aldeguer a lot of time - and tyre - in boosting him to fifth.

He cleared Acosta with a brilliant move at the Turn 2 chicane on lap 19 to get into the podium places and set about eating into Bezzecchi’s advantage ahead. On the eight laps building up to his pass on Bezzecchi at Turn 4, he was faster than both riders ahead of him.

That move came on lap 23, which at the start of he was just over seven tenths away from Marquez. The overtake, at Turn 4, was bold but costly as he went right to the edge of the track on the exit. Across the line, Marquez was almost a second up the road and was able to keep that gap hovering in that region as he responded to Aldeguer’s push.

Aldeguer’s crew chief Frankie Carchedi later explained that the team has done a lot of work with the young Spaniard on used rubber. Marquez noted, having seen his data, that through sector three Aldeguer was letting his GP24 flow through the left-handers of Turns 6 and 7. This kept the rubber healthy and Marquez duly tried to copy.

A cleaner move on Bezzecchi may have given Aldeguer a better run at Marquez, but the inexperience he has is what ultimately kept him away from a shock maiden win. Sixth on the grid was solid enough to do something big from, but that lack of early speed robbed him of a few more laps to seriously pressure Marquez. As the table below shows, his average pace was identical to Marquez’s.

Marquez came through another weekend with a perfect score as his nearest title rivals - Bagnaia and Alex Marquez - struggled on Sunday. Looking to Hungary, its anticlockwise nature is likely to favour Marc Marquez particularly and another double is a fairly sizeable possibility.

However, Marquez wasn’t at his most absolute dominant in Austria, certainly not compared to what we saw at Brno and Sachsenring. The competitive order is closing up and beyond Hungary, the season does take on a complexion that will see him further tested.

Barcelona, for example, is one he often cites as among his weakest circuits. Misano will be a track Bezzecchi will be eyeing as a place where he can do something special on the Aprilia. And then come the flyaway rounds, which often see the form book thrown in the bin.

While the championship is looking like a certainty, his stranglehold on the top step of the podium is less so.

Patience being tested on the other side of the Ducati garage

In a summer break ‘ask the writers’ feature published on Crash.net, I predicted that Pecco Bagnaia wouldn’t win another grand prix this season. His struggles on the GP25 have gotten to such a point that he’s barely putting himself in a position to be second to Marc Marquez, let alone challenge him.

But I was sincerely hoping I would be tucking into a sensible portion of humble pie on Sunday night, following analysis of long run pace after Friday practice. Bagnaia genuinely looked quick, was slightly better in race pace compared to Marquez and the championship leader was quite happy to admit that.

A tyre issue, which Michelin is investigating, robbed him of a podium shot in the sprint. But even still, Bagnaia always does better on Sundays than he does in sprints. And for a few laps at the start of the Austrian Grand Prix, he was there.

He jumped into second behind Bezzecchi, he repelled Marquez at Turn 4 having just been passed at Turn 3. But as soon as Marquez came through at Turn 3 on the second tour, Bagnaia’s race just seemed to get worse.

His pace dropped, he was powerless to stop being overtaken and ended up 12.486s off the win in an ignominious end to his Austrian Grand Prix hat-trick run. While there were several off-track excursions as he got beaten up, Bagnaia’s average pace was almost half a second per lap slower than his team-mate's.

Bagnaia had no answer for his woes in the grand prix, but frustration got the better of him: “I couldn’t accelerate, everyone was overtaking me out of the corners. I hope Ducati can explain this to me, because I’m running out of patience.”

General manager Gigi Dall’Igna was hardly full of praise for Bagnaia after the race either: “Every race that passes is a wasted opportunity to improve. He had a good weekend during all the practice sessions. Yesterday he had a problem [in the sprint] that we have to analyse, but his race was definitely underwhelming today.”

Bagnaia has said repeatedly that he knows he has to do more to change his situation, while Ducati has continued to back him and claim that it also has to do its part with the bike to make him comfortable.

But yet another good circuit for Bagnaia has passed with him producing little to shout about...