Marc Márquez shuffles the deck—don't you suspect he's pulling our leg a bit?

There’s the MotoGP of chatter: Marc Marquez isn’t well, he rides with one arm, he only wins where you turn left. Then there’s the MotoGP of expectations: Bezzecchi’s record piles on pressure, Aprilia can win even where Ducati is favored. Then the GP comes along and sets things straight: when the lights go out and the engines scream, the chatter drops to zero. The real MotoGP disproves the eve’s sophistry.

Marc Marquez cleaned up at Motorland Aragon for the eighth time, banking a full load of points that launches him, throttle wide open, toward a tenth World Championship. The numbers and the trend we’ll analyze below say so. All the doubts that surfaced after the lackluster showing at Silverstone—just ten points against the 32 of championship leader Jorge Martin—vanished like mist in the sun. “Marc isn’t well,” the mainstream insisted. “Despite the surgeries, at 31 he’s not the same anymore.”

After Silverstone, there was a strong suspicion that the rider himself was feeding these rumors. Think about it: what all-time great in any sport, if he’s not in shape—or worse, has chronic issues—broadcasts it to everyone, rivals included, right in the decisive phase of a championship? No one. In Great Britain the performance wasn’t there because the Ducati, on a track that’s never been particularly favorable, struggled more than usual, especially failing to exploit Michelin’s specific tire allocation. The Marc of old would have thrown it down the road trying to fix things; instead, he settled for seventh. Pure strategy: if he doesn’t make mistakes, this Marquez can win the tenth title even by making do with ordinary finishes when and if the technical package doesn’t help. After what we saw at Aragon, it’s very hard to believe Marc isn’t already back to top form. You can’t ride a MotoGP bike the way he did this weekend unless you’re fully sound.

The starting point is the peculiarity of the current World Championship standings: Jorge Martin leads with 237 points, which means an average of 18.2 out of a maximum of 37 between Sprint and GP. The average is low because the three riders who will fight for the title—Martin, Marquez, and Bezzecchi—have had to deal with plenty of setbacks. Jorge started without testing. Marc fractured himself in the Le Mans Sprint, missing two GPs, France and the following one in Catalonia, returning at record speed and certainly not at his best at Mugello. Bezzecchi opened with three wins in three GPs but then got a disqualification in the Netherlands and sat out Germany with a fracture. Since the injury—i.e., from the Italian GP onward—Marquez has scored 180 points (with 4 wins) against Martin’s 129 (zero wins) and Bezzecchi’s 90, who last won precisely at Mugello. Momentum is pushing the Ducatista.

With the Aragon double, Marquez has passed Bezzecchi and closed to just 19 points from Martin. The Spaniard has won only one GP (France), a bit too little to keep up with two rivals who very often are faster than he is. Nine GPs remain—maybe eight, because Qatar risks cancellation. So there are 337 or 296 points still to award. Aprilia has two aces on the table against Ducati’s one, but who knows if that’s an advantage, because internal competition could become a problem they won’t have in the other box, given that the only Ducatista currently keeping the pace is Alex Marquez, the brother of the title contender. The next tracks, Misano and Zeltweg, run clockwise. In Romagna MM93 won even with a poorly operated arm, and at the second one the Desmosedici has always made a clear difference. I’ll reiterate what I said after Silverstone: Marc Marquez is more favored than ever to win this World Championship.

For starters, he dominated Motorland with glaring superiority. On Saturday he blitzed Bezzecchi with a masterful start, the result of a world-class braking move. One blow, just one, was enough to erase the challenger’s record pole. In the GP he had the same plan, but the holeshot device staying engaged for three corners torched the overtake and reshuffled the deck. Without that glitch the afternoon would have been a total snoozefest. Instead, we had five and a half laps of fun—the time Marquez needed to claw back and slip past Bez right in the right-left-right transition, as if the Aprilia were standing still. And to think he’s “not himself” anymore...

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