Marc Marquez: “I'm Mr. Saturdays! But...” - MotoGP title leader reflects on Sprint dominance

During his debut Ducati season at Gresini, Marc Marquez took just one Saturday Sprint MotoGP win versus three Grand Prix victories.

His rostrum tally was an equal ten each, for Sprints vs GPs, but Marquez and most of his rivals felt he was always at his strongest on Sundays.

But as a factory Ducati rider in 2025, it’s the Sprints where Marquez has a perfect score of six out of six, while winning half of the GPs.

Two of the GP defeats were self-inflicted, by mistakes at COTA and Jerez, while Johann Zarco used a smart strategy and mastered changeable weather to keep Marquez comfortably at bay at Le Mans.

“At the moment, I'm Mr. Saturdays,” Marquez said in France. “But I would like to be Mr. Sundays and miss some Saturdays!”

“It's true that during the pre-season I have been working a lot on those Saturdays because it was my weak point last year, qualifying and the Sprint.

“This year looks like the opposite, so now we need to find the balance.

“But on Sundays, I always feel good. I feel fast. The thing is that I made two mistakes [COTA and Jerez].”

Marquez’s record sixth consecutive Sprint victory came after passing Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo, who arrived home on a high after breaking Yamaha’s podium drought at Jerez, then qualifying on pole for the second event in a row.

“It's good news for the championship,” Marquez, speaking before Zarco’s Sunday victory for Honda, said of Quartararo’s resurgence.

“First of all, I would like Ducati to keep its dominance. But for the championship, it’s better if we have different manufacturers [on the podium] and big names like Quartararo - who is a world champion, a superstar.

“This makes our sport bigger. So I'm happy that he comes back at these races. Then maybe will arrive other races that he will struggle more. But Jerez and here he was super fast.”

Although it took Marquez until lap 6 to pass Quartararo for the lead in the Sprint, that was largely due to a storming opening lap by the Frenchman, where he pulled 0.727s clear of the red machine.

Marquez was faster than the Yamaha rider from lap 2 onwards, while Gresini riders Alex Marquez and Fermin Aldeguer also got the better of Quartararo late in the race.

After backing off ‘a little too much’ on the final lap, Marc’s official winning margin over his brother was just 0.530s. But he later warned: “When I pushed full gas in practice, I was ‘30.7,’30.8. Today, I was ‘31.1,’31.0. So I had that margin...”

With Alex Marquez and Francesco Bagnaia both failing to finish the wet grand prix, Marc takes a 22-point title lead into next weekend’s Silverstone round.