Calling Alex Marquez’s victory over Marc Marquez in the Grand Prix of Catalunya as being against the run of play doesn’t begin to describe it.
Equally – and somewhat paradoxically – it wasn’t a shock.
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Before Sunday’s 24-lap battle, the Marquez siblings had finished first and second in the same race – sprint or Grand Prix – 16 previous times this season. On 15 of those occasions, it was Marc first, Alex second.
That Marc Marquez held sway in the stats against a rider he grew up sharing a bedroom with in Cervera, about 100 kilometres from the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, is little surprise given the chasm that’s emerged between the six-time MotoGP world champion and everyone else this season, his first on a factory Ducati.
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The 32-year-old came into Sunday’s Grand Prix on a 15-race run, comfortably the longest streak of success since MotoGP adopted the sprint race format for the 2023 season.
If he’d finished ahead of his sibling, he’d have his first chance to win the world championship that’s eluded him since 2019 at next weekend’s San Marino Grand Prix at Misano, the seventh-last round of 22 this season.
The key word in that sentence? ‘If’.
For once, Marc Marquez wasn’t the favourite to win on Sunday, and he knew it. The circuit characteristics at the track on the outskirts of Barcelona – a place where Marquez had, by his standards, struggled over the years – weren’t to his liking before his series of right arm operations since his Spanish Grand Prix accident of 2020, and certainly haven’t been since.
Marquez won in Barcelona in 2014 – part of a 10-race winning run to begin that season – and again in 2019, when he finished all but one race that season in first or second place. Since then, the circuit’s fast right-handed corners are a rare place where he merely looks mortal, and little brother held the edge.
Alex Marquez qualified on pole on Saturday and – after fluffing his lines with a late crash from the lead of Saturday’s sprint race at Turn 10 to enable Marc to extend his winning run – made amends 24 hours later. It was tense, and it was close – from lap four when Alex took the lead until lap 20, the gap was no more than half a second – but, this time, it was a day for Marc to know when he was beaten.
“He’s super-strong in my weak points,” Marc Marquez said after the race, explaining where his sibling held sway.
“I was trying to compensate on the left corners, but that is just three corners on the left side where I was able to recover some gap.
“I already expect on Thursday that Alex will be the rider to beat … he’s second in the championship and he’s riding in a very good way, especially here in Catalunya. He won in Moto3, he won two times in Moto2 … I tried, I tried everything.
“I was on the limit in the last laps, but with four or five laps [remaining] I did a mistake in Turn 7, another in Turn 10, and I give up. It’s true today that Alex is faster than us. Even yesterday, but he crashed. But I’m happy, because in a circuit where we struggle a bit more than usual, we were close to the top guy.”
And that ‘top guy’? As Alex Marquez completed his in-lap back to the pits after his second MotoGP victory, he stopped at the same Turn 10 gravel trap he found himself sliding into the day before, got off his Ducati and theatrically rolled through it. With a few choice words and gestures to make things right.
“I thought before the race that if I win, I need to [do] that,” he laughed afterwards.
“I did the two middle fingers, double, because yesterday was so painful. I hate that corner, I needed to do the revenge.
“I’m so happy but still, the mistake from yesterday is painful. But [today] was the best way to forget that. It’s true that we did a mistake and it cost a lot of points, but it was the best way to not make the [same] mistake today.”
Marc Marquez ramped up the pressure on younger brother Alex, but the race leader held his nerve. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)Source: AFP
‘IT’S NEVER EASY’: ALEX SOAKS UP PRESSURE, THEN STRIKES
Alex Marquez knew from the telemetry where he was faster than his brother on the 14-turn Barcelona layout, and had a plan of how to best execute his race at a track that’s one of the trickiest to master thanks to its old, worn asphalt that offers little traction for MotoGP machines to put their power down without spinning the rear tyre into oblivion.
After the switchback right/left corner combination to begin the lap, the long tyre-torturing third and fourth turns – both right-handers – require a delicate touch to control tyre spin and a firm right hand to keep the speed constant, and it was the ace in Alex Marquez’s pack.
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“Turn 4 … the three right corners I was flying,” he said.
“I saw it on the data in [qualifying] and I saw I was fast. In that sector I was feeling really good, the feeling with the bike was amazing. The corner speed was so, so high. That is where I did the difference.”
With Marc breathing down his neck for 16 straight laps, the race for Alex became one of holding his nerve, limiting mistakes and sticking with his pre-race plan on when to pull the pin, mindful of Grands Prix in Thailand and Argentina earlier this season when Marc sat behind him and then breezed by in the latter stages to end up victorious.
“I was really concentrated on the lines and I did no mistakes today,” he said.
“With seven [laps] to the end I say ‘OK Alex, if you have something more, try to show it’. It’s not easy to control Marc for 24 laps behind you. You are never relaxed when Marc is behind.
“In Thailand I was completely conscious that he was playing with us … maybe not playing, but he was waiting in that moment. Different situations, but today we had the best opportunity to try to beat Marc.”
Last year, when Marc (second) and Alex (third) finished on the podium in Germany for the first time in their five years together on the MotoGP grid, it was the first time siblings had stood on the same rostrum since Japanese brothers Nobuatsu and Takuma Aoki did likewise in Imola in 1997.
In 15 Grands Prix in 2025, the Marquez brothers have now managed six Grands Prix and 11 sprints where they’ve sprayed celebratory champagne together. It’s becoming par for the course, but something neither brother is prepared to take for granted.
“Today, to be 1-2, two brothers fighting for the victory in MotoGP until the last lap … it’s something that, when you stop to think about it, it’s crazy … it’s not normal,” Alex said.
Marc, who crashed out of victory contention and finished 12th at Jerez in round five when Alex took his maiden Grand Prix win in April, concurred.
“Home GP, we are living 100km from here, first and second … I say in Jerez that I was sad not to be on the podium with him. But, amazing feeling for the family and all of our friends.”
Having his first chance to seal the title delayed until the Japanese Grand Prix at the end of September was, in the circumstances, something he was prepared to live with.
“Today it’s true that I was maybe able to go all-in, but it’s not the time to do it,” Marc Marquez said.
“It’s time to keep the same concentration. There would be a day to accept when somebody is faster than me, and today little brother was faster than me. That sentence I kept saying in my head. It was a bit easier to accept. It’s never easy, but Alex deserved it.”
For just the second time this season, Alex took Marquez family honours on a podium with older brother Marc. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images
MILLER BOUNCES BACK AFTER BEING BOUNCED OFF
Jack Miller was positive after a race that – on paper – didn’t appear to be particularly noteworthy in Barcelona, the Australian starting and finishing in 14th place for Yamaha, ending up 24.351secs behind Alex Marquez at the chequered flag.
Given where Miller ended up on the first lap, he had reason to be.
Miller was more than three seconds adrift of the pack in 24th and last place after the opening lap, punted into the gravel trap at Turn 4 in the manic early stages after an incident triggered by Brad Binder (KTM) left him with nowhere to go.
Already 8.2secs off the lead after one lap, Miller’s comeback featured the ninth-fastest lap of the race (a 1min 40.301sec lap on lap two) and a penultimate-lap pass of Ducati’s Fermin Aldeguer to claim 14th place and earn two world championship points.
“All in all it was not a terrible day,” Miller said.
“Unfortunately I got hit at Turn 4 and took a trip through the gravel, and then just had to work my way up from dead-last. I was hard on the inside of [Aprilia’s Jorge] Martin and when I copped a hit, I was tangled with the back-end of Martin’s bike and it was exit stage-left into the gravel, and that was it.
“The pace was decent and the bike was working alright. I feel like we made a step with the bike this weekend, just in general with our base setting. Fine-tuning it more than big changes, so I’m happy with the way the bike was performing and I think we have a good strategy for the next couple of Grands Prix.”
Miller, in his first race after being confirmed for the Pramac Yamaha team for 2026 in the lead-up to the Barcelona weekend, was buoyed by the performance of Yamaha stablemate Fabio Quartararo, who qualified second, finished second in Saturday’s sprint after Alex Marquez’s late crash, and was fifth in Sunday’s Grand Prix at a circuit where Yamaha was predicted to struggle.
“He’s able to let the bike roll a little bit more, he’s able to carry the corner speed but still get a good exit,” Miller said when asked how Quartararo was making the difference.
“For me, my difficulty here has been the last two corners to either have corner speed or a good exit, I can’t put the two together. He’s able to put the two together, and he’s able to do that for the majority of the track.
“He’s able to carry the speed, but not over-spin the bike on the exit [of the corners]. He’s doing amazing things on a dinosaur, and I take my hat off to him.”
Miller gained 10 places after his opening-lap disaster to end up where he started in 14th. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images
F1 CHAMP’S MOTOGP LINK AS STEINER CELEBRATES
Max Verstappen is the latest Formula 1 name to be linked to MotoGP, with Sky Sports Italy reporting in the lead-in to Sunday’s race in Barcelona that the four-time F1 champion is looking to invest in a MotoGP team.
On Friday in Catalunya, former Haas F1 team principal and Drive to Survive cult figure Guenther Steiner was announced as taking over the Tech3 team from 2026; Herve Poncharal’s team, which has been in MotoGP since 2001, took its first podium finish of the season on Sunday when Italian rider Enea Bastianini finished in third place.
The report on skysport.it said: “Max Verstappen, through his entourage and his father Jos, is reportedly knocking on the doors of Honda and Aprilia to indirectly gauge the willingness of their respective satellite teams, LCR and Trackhouse, to sell 100 per cent of their shares.”
Further reporting from the-race.com indicated that while Verstappen’s inner circle is interested in MotoGP, that interest is still more conceptual than being advanced to the point of talking to specific teams.
Verstappen’s name being linked to MotoGP and Steiner’s investment comes after Formula 1 owners Liberty Media became MotoGP’s majority owners in July after acquiring 84 per cent of MotoGP from rights holder Dorna in July for 4.3 billion Euros (A$7.7 billion).
“I’ve always loved MotoGP … I’ve never had time to enjoy it because I was always working,” Steiner said after the purchase of Tech3 was made public on the eve of the Catalan round.
“I have a lot to learn, I’m very conscious of that.”
Bastianini’s podium – his first since crossing from Ducati at the end of last season after he was replaced by Marc Marquez – came one race after he’d crashed at the Hungarian Grand Prix and miraculously avoided injury when he slid across the track in front of the majority of the pack on the opening lap.
“Enea was on fire,” Poncharal said after the race.
“He was really cross with what happened in Hungary and he wanted revenge. I think today he showed he has mastered the [KTM] RC16 quite well now, and now we get to count on him for the rest of the season.
“I think Guenther is a lucky bastard. He’s just come in, got a podium …”