Sometimes you are so good at something that the only perso♐n to compa𝔉re to is yourself. That was certainly the case for Marc Marquez at the end of the Aragon Grand Prix, as he cruised across the line to score his fourth victory of the 2025 season.

Expected to be dominant at the Sp🔜anish venue, Marquez really took that to heart as he topped every single session: FP1, Practice, FP2, qualifying, sprint, warm-up and the grand prix. The last time that happened was 10 years ago at the German GP, when Marc Marquez himself achieved the feat.

It’s an impressive record w﷽hen you consider the addition of the sprint to the schedule compared to 10 years ago, and the fact Marquez has now done🐭 so on two very different motorcycles.

Based on Friday form, it was a result that didn’t surprise many - though he was pushed a bit harder than anticipated in the early stages of both races. The 1.107s advantage he held at the chequered flag masked his dominance; he was over two 🍷seconds clear of Alex Marquez going into the final laps before he eased off to safeguard a win only he could deny himself of, and really it looked like he had more to give.

It has strengthened hi𝔉🐈s position in the championship to 32 points, which is the biggest it has been all season, while it ended Ducati’s recent funk of back-to-back grand prix defeats for the first time since the 2022 campaign.

Scene of arguably the most important win of his career last September, he dismissed the notion that his 2025 Aragon GP ꧙🅠success - his seventh in the premier class - held anywhere near the same significance.

But scratch beneath the surface of it and it becomes clear that it is perhaps just a little bit more important in the wider context of the 🍃2025 season than he wants to♎ admit.

Marquez fights through bad thoughts in Aragon domination

The fact the championship lead only stands at 32 points after eight rounds of the 22 this season is testament to two things: the first is the excellent job 168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:Alex Marquez has done in consistently shadowing his elder brother. But perhaps an even bigger reason is the Sunday errors 168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:Marc Marquez has committed too often by his standards.

The Americas Grand Prix weekend should have gone the way Aragon did, but he crashed while leading when he ran too aggressively over a damp kerb at COTA. At Jerez, on course arguably for another win, he fell early on while pushing too hard trying to get past team-mate 168澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果历史:Pecco Bagnaia.

He the💖n crashed while leading again at the British Grand Prix, but was at least spared the ignominy of this by a red flag for an incident further round the track that left oil on the asphalt. He came away from Silverstone with an important third-place finish, but he’d done enough to pressure himself ahead of the Aragon round.

From Thursday he continually stressed a need not to make any mistakes on Sundays and hinted at a change in approach - though exactly what that entailed he would not say. Fꦇrom the off in the grand prix he led and looked like he was controlling the pace, keeping the gap behind around the 0.5s mark in the first five laps 💮before pulling the pin to get his advantage up to over a second by the start of the ninth tour.

But as he hit cruise control thoughts of crashes past began to creep into his he♛ad, noticing that his times were fast without putting all that much effort in. So, he dug deeper to put some pressure on himself and keep his focus to avoid another Sunday fall.

“When six, seven laps remained I started to think about those mistakes, how to manage the situation, but then I was looking at the lap time and I was riding🎐 in 1m47s-low without full concentration,” he explained. “Then I decided to i🔯ncrease the speed to be focused again.”

Used tyre pace has been Marquez’s key strength in 2025, and that showed in his lap times once again. He set successive fastest laps from laps seven to nine, then again from laps 11 to 12. He put in the best lap of the the race with three to go, a 1m46.705s that gave him a new race lap record at Aragon by over a second from the previous one set in 2022 by Luca Mari𒉰ni (then on a VR46 Ducati).

A “mandatory” win that sets the tone going forward

After the grand prix, Marc Marquez said it was “mandatory” for his factory Ducati team and h💃imself to win on Sunday at Aragon. A stronghold of his from the past due to its anticlockwise layout and the low-grip surface, he knew he was best-placed to win thജe race.

But it was “mandatory” because he’d thrown away a sure-fire win at COTA and again a likely victory a few weeks later at Jerez. As he noted, “I lost 50 points” because of these errors and the damage those would have done to his ri🔴v🅺als in the championship would have been massive.

Asked if there was an added significance to this win because of how dominant he was during the weekend, he replied: “No, I don’t think so, because we started already in a very good way from Thailand to Jerez. Then it’s true that Le Mans, especially Silverstone, we missed the way a bit but we understood why. And then here ༺I came back, I felt again the same feeling as I had in the pre-season and as I had in the first races.”

On Saturday he made a tight-lipped attempt at explaining what he meant by ‘coming back’ to something that worked before, stating: “It’s true that in Le Mans and Silverstone I was riding with a different ‘spec’𝔉, but here I come back because I wa♑nt the same as the others, then in the Monday test we will have time to try. A few things [were different].”

At Le Mans, he rode with a slightly revised Ducati chassis. It’s unclear if this is what he is talking about, though he further muddied the waters when he also said on Saturday that his bike was𒈔 the exact same as the one the GP24 riders (Alex Marquez, Fermin Aldeguer, Franco Morbidelli) are riding. We know this not to be true because the engine in the factory bike is slightly different, as is the rear right height device.

What we can say with some certainty is that whatever Ducati tried at the Jerez test pꦅrior to the Le Mans round clearly didn’t move things in the direction Marquez had ho🤪ped. Monday’s test at Aragon will hopefully offer a clearer idea as to what he needs to retry.

What is clear is thaඣt at Aragon Marc Marquez was a cut above his factory Ducati counterparts. Bagnaia was over six seconds back in third, while Fabio Di Giannantonio was ninth on his VR46-run GP25. Marquez continues to extract the absolute most out of that package.

If he has now found exactly what he needs to be comfortable on that bike and has exercised the demons of COTA, Jerez and Silverstone, then this 2025 championship race is about to head into a new phas♈e his rivals are more than likely to em🐟erge battered and bruised from.

Hope as Pecco Bagnaia’s title hopes lie on life support

The Aragon Grand Prix felt like somet𝄹hing of a watershed moment for Pecco Bagnaia. He came into it off the back of successive non-scores in grands prix and was still none the wise on how to fix the GP25 to better suit his front end needs. To boot, he was facing questions about his Ducati future as rumours spread in Italy of a shock Yamaha switch in 2026 - something he flat out denies. 

The sprint race was Bagnaia’s season at its worst; zero front end confidence, endless lock-ups on the brakes and a spirit-crushin🐬g ride out of the points to 12th. And clearly, no dir💜ection had still been found.

Ducati team boss Davide Tardozzi told television aft🍷er Sunday’s race that it had become “sick” of hearing the same complaints from Bagnaia because the manufacturer was simply hitting its head against a wall trying to fi🍌nd the solution he needed.

And then it came on Sunday morning. Admitting that it was something the team had never even🐠 thought to do before, Bagnaia’s track engineer had a bigger front brake disc put on his bike for the grand prix and it gave him back a lot of the confidence he had been missing. Specifically, he said he was able to apply less brake pressure but decelerate better, avoiding the front locking that plagued him on Saturday.

That was evident in his battle with KTM’s Pedro Acosta in the early stages. Acosta, the only rider running the hard front tyre, launched raids on the brake🃏s at Turn 1 on lap two, Turn 12 on lap two and Turn 1 on lap four. He made one of those stick, at Turn 12 on lap two, but Bagnaia was able to outbrake him into the penultimate corner and retake the place.

This unquestionably cost him in his battle with Alex Marquez, but he pushed the Gresini rider hard. He set his best lap of the race o𝔉n lap 22 of 23 at 1m46.773s, versus 1m46.843s for Alex🦋 Marquez, while their average pace difference was just 0.026s.

To credit both, Alex Marquez was just 0.093s on average slower than Marc Marquez and Bagnaia 0.119s down. Of course, there is a caveat to note in that Marc Marquez was comfortably controlling things out in front. But maybe had he found himself a few pl🏅ace down in the pack in the early lap♚s, his afternoon could have been a lot harder.

Bagnaia held his hands up and said Alex Marquez’s riding was “perfect”, which meant none of the speed he had led to any pressure tha🤪t could crack the Gresini rider.

The relief around the Ducati camp, and within Bagnaia himself, was palpable on Sunday afternoon. This does feel 🔜like a genuine turning point, even if Bagnaia doesn’t believe he’ll instantly be winning races again from the upcoming Italian Grand Prix.

And whether it will be enough to salvage his title hope𓃲s seems like a stretch at t🔴his stage, with Marc Marquez now 93 points clear and showing at Aragon what he is truly capable of. But at least the real Pecco Bagnaia should now start to show up to races…