Marc Marquez wasn’t MotoGP’s biggest winner at the Aragon Grand Prix

Carrying a 61% win rate on anticlockwise tracks coming into the Aragon Grand Prix, even in his less-than-ideal current physical condition, betting against Marc Marquez to sweep both races last weekend was an unwise move.

In MotoGP’s most recent visits to anticlockwise tracks in 2026 at Balaton Park and the Sachsenring, the reigning champion doubled up at both events. Since joining Ducati, he had yet to be topped in a race at Aragon, and that trend continued in the 2026 event.

A daring raid on polesitter Marco Bezzecchi at Turn 1 of the sprint on the opening lap allowed him to score 12 points. A similar move in the 23-lap grand prix didn’t pan out, after he forgot to disengage his rear ride height device, allowing Bezzecchi and Aprilia team-mate Jorge Martin to pounce on him through Turns 3 and 4.

Marquez was forced to win the grand prix the hard way. He took second back from Martin at Turn 15 on the opening lap, forcing the 2024 world champion to check up and leave him vulnerable to attack from KTM’s Pedro Acosta.

On lap six, Marquez had wiped out Bezzecchi’s near-second lead to put the same move on him into the Turn 15 left-hander. While Bezzecchi was a bit wiser to it than Martin was, Marquez didn’t have poor momentum onto the back straight. The pair, being “sucked” together by the wake coming off of their bikes’ wings, ran side by side down the kilometre-long stretch.

Marquez held the slight edge into the braking zone and seized the lead. Once more, KTM’s Acosta was in tow to capitalise and snatched second from Bezzecchi’s hands on the outside into the Turn 16/17 left-hander complex; a move Acosta later said was “easy”.

Marquez had to keep his wheels in line as Acosta hounded him for a few laps, before breaking free on lap 14 with a new fastest lap and putting almost a second between them. The gap at the chequered flag was 1.754s.

Victory has seen Marquez sweep yet another anticlockwise track in 2026, with his 37-point haul - and an average weekend for championship leader Martin - putting him second in the standings, 19 points from the top. It’s a solid turnaround after fading 40 points back at a disastrous British Grand Prix two weeks prior.

Naturally, Marquez has stolen the headlines. His championship challenge is still very much alive. But it would be folly to ignore the rider who finished third on Sunday. Perhaps not the standout result he would have wanted, Bezzecchi has added another brace of third-place finishes to his tally in successive rounds since suffering collarbone and particularly bothersome knee injuries ahead of the summer break.

Bezzecchi is finding his groove again on the Aprilia

Though he’s dropped to third in the standings, he’s still closed in on Martin. Starting the weekend 31 points down, that gap is now 24 heading to the San Marino Grand Prix and a weekend where Bezzecchi and Aprilia are certain to start as favourites.

Considering the miserable run of four non-scores on Sundays he endured, for one reason or another, before the summer break, Bezzecchi has steadied the ship remarkably for a rider who admitted on Thursday at Aragon that he is going to have to “suffer” in the coming rounds while he continues to recover from his injuries.

Aragon was always expected to suit Ducati a bit more. Despite its flowing nature, there are a fair few hard braking zones that play into the Desmosedicis favour. But the current RS-GP also worked well around the Spanish venue, at least in Bezzecchi’s hands last weekend.

He was keen to point out on Friday, after beating Marquez in an Aragon session as a Ducati rider for the first time, that the reigning champion hadn’t done a final time attack in Practice. But his historic 1m44.952s in qualifying to claim pole was all down to him just being that little bit better than Marquez was. The gap between them may only have been 0.089s, but Marquez could do nothing but hold his hands up to the job the Italian did.

Marquez may not be at his physical best, but he admitted he was able to be in “attack mode” from the off at Aragon, because the track places less strain on his right shoulder. But Bezzecchi is well below his physical best, too, so that really was a statement lap.

A decision to run the soft rear tyre in the sprint didn’t pay off for Bezzecchi, who couldn’t do anything to claw his way back through on Marc or Alex Marquez after the opening lap. He admits he braked a bit early for Turn 1, which let Marc Marquez put on a block pass for the lead. But he doesn’t believe his alternate tyre choice worked against him; he just didn’t have the pace.

The grand prix looked like it was going to be a different tale. As had been the case earlier in the season, the RS-GP fires up its rubber quicker than the Ducati, and once he’s been able to hit the front, Bezzecchi has been hard to beat.

In those first five laps, he really did force Marquez to work for his money. But once he’d dropped to third, there wasn’t a lot he had in the tank to trouble Acosta or Marquez ahead of him again.

With Marquez expected to win both races, bagging strong points was the main objective for Bezzecchi and Aprilia. And he did just that, especially on a weekend where team-mate and championship leader Martin couldn’t get the bike to work for him, finishing fifth in both races. In the grand prix, Martin was 8.943s back from his team-mate.

“At Silverstone I didn’t expect at all the podium, but honestly also here because it’s a track where historically we’ve been struggling; Aprilia was never really super-competitive and last year I was quite fast but the weekend was super-tough,” Bezzecchi, who said he is “walking like Dr House”, from the TV series House, remarked. “So, these two weekends have been fantastic for me, and now I have to try to be a little bit more in-shape because to try to fight with these guys you really need to be perfect. So, I will work hard at home.”

Martin’s lack of Aprilia knowledge at most circuits on the calendar after his injury-plagued 2025 is throwing up some issues. He banked some solid points and retains his championship lead. But in a weaker weekend for Aprilia by its 2026 standards, he cannot be allowing Bezzechi to achieve what he did.

Marquez is devastating when he can be, but his title battle is getting harder

This year, more than most, is a championship that will be won by consistency. As Bezzecchi gets stronger physically, there are good tracks for himself and the Aprilia coming up. Misano was already strong for him last year, while Austria will likely play even more into his hands because of how well the Aprilia works the stiffer rear tyre carcass brought to the Red Bull Ring.

Conversely, the next few tracks seem likely to work against Marquez and Ducati. Misano features a sequence of fast right-handers that Marquez struggles with right now. The stiffer tyre brought to Austria has been particularly bad for Ducati this year, with the brand struggling to get near Aprilia in Thailand and Brazil when it was last used.

Asked what his weak tracks will be in this run-in to the end of the season, Marquez said he has to take each one as they come and see how they shake out.

“Race by race,” he said. “From history, Indonesia is the worst one [for me], because every year I have bad memories from there. But apart from that, the rest of the circuits I feel OK [at]. So, race by race. Now, recover from this race and concentrate on Misano.”

After the race, he also noted that to keep himself in the hunt, he must repeat what he did at Aragon on the circuits he knows he will have an advantage. And to his credit, that’s exactly what he has been doing since returning from surgery on his right shoulder in May.

Yet, when weekends have been bad for Marquez and Ducati, they’ve taken some huge hits, as we saw at Assen and Silverstone. When Bezzecchi is managing consistent podiums at a weak moment for him in the championship, that’s going to be hard to go up against.

Aragon proved two things. One we already knew: when he is able to be at his best, Marquez is almost impossible to beat. If he can just get his shoulder to a point where the bad days are not so damaging, he will remain a major threat.

The second thing Aragon proved is that, even while injured, Bezzecchi is Aprilia’s fastest rider. If his season continues this current trend as he gets fitter, he’s going to once again become incredibly difficult to beat.

Acosta’s unwelcome MotoGP record is no reflection on his true talent

Pedro Acosta’s ride to second at the Aragon Grand Prix has moved his career tally to 14. Unfortunately, he continues to hold the unwanted title of MotoGP rider with the most podium finishes without any of those being a race win. Colin Edwards previously held that record at 12.

But his first grand prix podium since Hungary, when he was once again beaten by Marc Marquez, continued to show just how big a fumble KTM has made in losing him to Ducati for 2027. Running Marquez hard for a brief period in the 23-lap race at Aragon last weekend, Acosta was 23.987s clear of the next-best KTM rider, which was Tech3’s Enea Bastianini in eighth.

Since racing resumed after the summer break, Acosta has looked stronger on the KTM. He says this is a result of some hard discussions he had with the brand in the summer, which has led it to be more “aggressive” in its approach to bike set-up.

Clearly, he’s the only KTM rider able to extract the most from that altered approach. And with performances as he delivered at Aragon, that maiden race win still feels entirely possible in the final races of 2026…