Winners and losers from MotoGP’s Catalan Grand Prix

The Catalan Grand Prix differed significantly from MotoGP’s form book, as it was the first time since Silverstone that championship leader Marc Marquez didn’t have a clear advantage over the rest of the pack.

This paved the way for his younger brother Alex Marquez to end the weekend on top, but only after giving away what seemed like a sure-shot win in the sprint.

One couldn’t help but notice that Francesco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin, who fought for the 2024 title at the same track in November, were reduced to also-rans in a striking reversal of fortunes for the pair.

Here are the winners and losers from Barcelona.

Winner: Alex Marquez (and Marc)

Alex Marquez, Gresini Racing

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For a major part of the season, Alex Marquez developed a reputation for finishing second to his more successful brother Marc Marquez. But with 15 of the 22 rounds complete, another interesting feat must be highlighted: Alex Marquez remains the only rider to defeat the six-time champion in a straight fight for victory. The 29-year-old first outduelled him in the sprint race at Silverstone and again had the measure of him in Barcelona on Sunday as he celebrated the second grand prix win of his career.

Over the weekend, Alex Marquez was sensational over a single lap, taking pole position by over a quarter of a second with a new track record. This is the kind of performance you only expect from qualifying specialists Marc Marquez and Bagnaia when they are performing at their peak.

In Sunday’s race, he was aggressive but composed, snatching the lead back from his elder brother on lap 4 before the latter could run away at the front. He then managed the pace through the middle stages, with the tyre life he conserved early allowing him to pull clear on lap 20.

The error he made on Saturday while in control of the sprint with four laps to go must still sting, and shows he still has a long way to go in MotoGP. But after having gone through such a torrid run since his injury at Assen, the Catalan weekend certainly put the smile back on his face.

Additionally, it was a strong weekend for the Marquez family, with Marc scoring far more points than he likely expected.

Loser: Francesco Bagnaia 

Francesco Bagnaia, Ducati Team

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Francesco Bagnaia went into the Catalan GP weekend with renewed hope after a change in his set-up in Hungary gave him the feeling that he had been missing on his Ducati. However, that hope vanished quickly when he took to the track in Barcelona on Friday and finished “between two test riders” and near the bottom of the pack.

But the real nadir was qualifying, as he finished almost a second off the pace in Q1 and ended up 21st on the grid. Excluding the 2022 Portuguese GP qualifying in which he crashed out on slick tyres on a wet track, this was Bagnaia’s worst qualifying performance since he debuted in MotoGP in 2019. Even Davide Tardozzi couldn’t hide his disappointment in the garage, as he watched the rider who led Ducati’s resurgence in the early 2020s get eliminated in Q1 yet again.

In the sprint, Bagnaia showed limited progress, taking the chequered flag in 14th place in a race that saw only 18 classified finishers. The Italian maintains that the smaller fuel tank mandated for sprints has been hurting his performance since at least the start of the 2024 season, but this was still an incredibly disappointing performance considering his team-mate Marc Marquez took the top spot with relative ease after Alex Marquez crashed out with four laps remaining.

Fortunately, the two-time MotoGP champion managed to redeem himself, climbing to 12th on the opening lap alone. He continued to make steady progress thereafter and kept enough life in his tyres to engage in late battles with Ai Ogura and Luca Marini, eventually finishing a solid seventh. 

Such an impressive recovery ride would automatically earn any other rider a spot in the ‘winners’ section, but Bagnaia’s struggles over the weekend were so severe that his performance can only be viewed through a critical lens.

Even the 28-year-old refused to get carried away with his result on Sunday, saying he wanted to validate his speed in Misano and not give himself “false hope”.

Enea Bastianini, Red Bull KTM Tech 3

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Enea Bastianini scored his first podium as a Tech3 rider last weekend, and he couldn’t have chosen a better place than Barcelona. After all, it was this track where he wrote off a KTM chassis during his first test with the team in November last year.

After a difficult first half of the season where he had largely been overshadowed by team-mate Maverick Vinales, Bastianini had been regaining his form in the last few rounds, with a third place in the Czech GP sprint already indicating that he was on the right trajectory. 

But he took things a step further in the Catalan GP, and it can now be argued that he is performing at the same level as his race-winning campaign with Ducati in 2024.

Apart from a small error in qualifying that left him ninth on the grid, Bastianini didn’t put a foot wrong all weekend, showing some incredibly early-race speed to climb to fourth place. He also didn’t hold back against his stablemate Pedro Acosta, pulling off a stunning move on him for third place on lap 11 – long before the Spaniard started to suffer from tyre degradation on his softs.

Bastianini’s podium also capped off a rewarding weekend for Tech3 as Vinales returned to action after a long injury layoff, and the squad’s takeover by former Haas Formula 1 team principal Guenther Steiner was officially announced to the public.

Brad Binder, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing

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Brad Binder is arguably in the midst of his worst campaign in MotoGP, and the Catalan GP marked yet another race where he fell short of expectations.

Pressure was already building up on Binder before the weekend, with Pedro Acosta having successfully capitalised on the upgraded KTM’s potential to score a sprint podium in Austria and a second-place finish in the Hungarian GP. Bastianini’s resurgence on the Tech3 satellite bike should have also been a cause of concern for him.

To be fair to Binder, he started the weekend in the best way possible by leading a 1-2 for KTM in Friday practice. Having to switch to a spare bike in qualifying also didn’t help matters, leaving him 11th on the grid while Acosta qualified fifth despite losing his best lap to a track-limits infringement.

However, it was the grand prix on Sunday where he underperformed the most. Lining up on the fourth row of the grid, Binder made little progress in the early laps, gaining just one place to grab 10th. Then on lap 7, he touched the white line at Turn 7 and lost the front end of his RC16. 

With Bastianini and Acosta finishing third and fourth, and even Vinales recovering to 13th in his first race back from injury, this was not the result KTM would have expected from a rider it had signed to a long-term contract back in 2023.

Either way, Binder must be worried that Bastianini has now closed up within nine points of him, and Acosta has accumulated almost twice as many points as him.

Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing

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Perhaps the best news for Fabio Quartararo over the weekend was that he would get to test the V4-spec Yamaha M1 at Barcelona immediately after the Catalan Grand Prix.

The Frenchman had been running out of patience with Yamaha for some time, and has been constantly urging it to speed up the development of its new engine for 2026. For Quartararo, the V4 is the only way forward for Yamaha, and it could be the difference between him extending his contract and switching to another manufacturer in 2027.

Augusto Fernandez was already meant to race the V4-powered M1 in the San Marino GP, and it was likely that Quartararo was going to sample it in the official Misano test on 15 September. But the 2021 champion has been keen to try the bike himself as early as possible and help shape the direction the Japanese marque is taking with its new contender.

Hence, in a way, his results in Barcelona were immaterial, but the front-row performance in qualifying and a second-place finish in the sprint are definitely worthy of a mention. Sunday didn’t exactly go his way, as he slipped to the lower regions of the top 10 before recovering to fifth, prompting him to ask why Yamaha’s performance varies so much due to conditions. 

Either way, one of the series’ most talented riders had plenty of positives from last weekend.

Johann Zarco, Team LCR Honda

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Johann Zarco squandered yet another big haul of points with a crash out of fifth place in the Catalan Grand Prix. It’s almost hard to believe that he hasn’t scored a top-10 grand prix finish since he stood second on the podium at the British Grand Prix over 100 days ago.

Once again, Zarco was Honda’s top performer in the race, as a slew of early moves propelled him inside the top five, and ahead of factory rider Luca Marini. With Pedro Acosta suffering a massive drop-off later in the race on the soft rear tyre, a fourth-place finish was most certainly on the cards for the Frenchman.

But with just over half the race to go, Zarco hit the bumps at Turn 10 and slid out into the gravel, marking a premature end to his outing. This was his fifth crash out of a Sunday race in the last eight weekends, extending his unwanted record as the most frequent faller in 2025.

Zarco’s retirement in Barcelona also came as a major blow for Honda, especially with Marini slipping from fifth to eighth in the last two laps due to heavy rear tyre degradation.

The 35-year-old’s troubled run is at least partly down to the Japanese manufacturer, who hasn’t supplied the LCR team with the same parts as the factory squad in the last few races.

But Zarco also believes the RC213V is simply too prone to crashes: “When I speak to the engineers and insist on the feeling not being great, on the fact that I can’t feel the bike, well I’m not wrong – because crashing or not crashing doesn’t depend on much. And I can’t ride like this, because it limits me too much.”

Loser: VR46 duo

Franco Morbidelli, VR46 Racing Team

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On a day when Alex Marquez took Gresini to the top step of the podium, Ducati’s other satellite squad endured a disastrous outing in Barcelona. 

Fabio di Giannantonio retired from the grand prix on just the second lap when Marco Bezzecchi’s incident with Franco Morbidelli triggered a “chain reaction” and forced ‘Diggia’ to slam on the brakes.

Morbidelli later crashed on his own towards the end of the race, turning the Catalan GP into a double DNF for VR46. Morbidelli was already carrying a penalty into Sunday, having taken out reigning champion Jorge Martin in the sprint race.

To make matters worse, the Italian again got into hot water with the stewards, who took action against him for “behaving in an irresponsible manner and disobeying direct instructions from marshals”.

The only silver lining to the weekend was di Giannantonio’s podium finish in the sprint, with the 26-year-old taking third place after Alex Marquez’s crash out of the lead.

Additional reporting by Ben Vinel