Marc Marquez started the Aragon GP with his ride height device stuck down. Six laps later he had the lead, and the title fight has a new second place.
Marc Marquez took the lead of the Grand Prix of Aragon at Turn 15 on lap 6 of 23, and nobody headed him again. The 1.754 second win over Pedro Acosta completed a 37 point weekend, sprint and Grand Prix both, and it rearranged the championship: Jorge Martin still leads, but his cushion is 19 points, and the man behind him is no longer his team mate.
The margin understates how close the race came to going wrong at lights out. Marquez admitted in parc ferme that he had left his rear ride height device engaged off the line, and the Ducati ran deep at Turn 1 with the device still compressed, sparks trailing on the exit. Marco Bezzecchi cut back through at Turn 3, Martin shouldered past as well, and after a handful of corners the two factory Aprilias led with Marquez fourth. By the end of lap 1 he had forced his way back past Martin, a move that ran the championship leader off line and let Acosta through too.
What followed was the actual decision of the race, and it took five laps to arrive. Marquez closed the gap of around six tenths to Bezzecchi, attacked at Turn 15 on lap 6, and the pair ran side by side down the back straight at over 300 km/h before Bezzecchi ceded at the final corner complex. Acosta swept around the outside of the Aprilia in the same exchange, and the podium order was set with 17 laps to run.
Set, but not settled. Acosta sat within a second of Marquez for ten laps; on lap 10 the two posted identical lap times while Bezzecchi, third, went faster than both. Crash reports the KTM's second place as the marque's first podium since Balaton, and Acosta earned it the hard way, holding the gap under a second until Marquez began trading in lap records late in the race and finally broke the tow. Acosta had spent Saturday night criticising his own messy sprint, which included missing his grid slot. Sunday was the correction.
Behind the lead three, the racing compressed into two duels that lasted until the flag. Enea Bastianini caught Diogo Moreira with five laps left and made the pass for eighth stick on the final lap; Brad Binder pipped Jack Miller for tenth in the same window. Fermin Aldeguer, back from the vertebra fracture at Assen, took sixth on his return. Johann Zarco, back from more than 100 days out with the knee injuries from the Catalunya restart crash, served the double long lap penalty issued for causing that accident and still scored a point in 15th.
Saturday belongs in the same account, because the weekend's two halves compounded. Bezzecchi took pole with a 1:44.962, the first 1:44 MotorLand has recorded and 0.089 seconds clear of Marquez, whose own final attempt ended with the front letting go at Turn 14 while he was 0.013 up. The sprint went to Marquez anyway, by 1.140 seconds over his brother Alex, with Bezzecchi third. Pole position produced two podiums and no wins; the Ducati produced two wins from second on the grid.
By Saturday evening the shape of the pursuit had already changed. The sprint result moved Marquez past the absent Ogura into third in the standings and left Martin's lead at 29 points over Bezzecchi overnight, a number that lasted less than 24 hours. Sunday morning's warm-up complicated the picture further: Bezzecchi topped it by 0.474 seconds from Acosta, with Marquez third at 0.743, which read at the time like an Aprilia answer and turned out to be nothing of the sort.
Yamaha's weekend deserves its own paragraph, because it went wrong on every axis available. Both works M1s failed to escape Q1 on Saturday, Fabio Quartararo's engine let go during the sprint, and on Sunday the four Yamahas finished 11th, 13th and 18th with Razgatlioglu's crash accounting for the fourth. Quartararo, 18th at the flag, said after Saturday's failure that he knew something was wrong before the engine gave up. For a project whose own lead rider has said development on the current bike has stopped, a blown engine and no top ten is a data point the winter cannot arrive fast enough to bury.
The tyre sheet offers no alibi for anyone. Every rider started Sunday's race on the medium compound front and rear, so the spread at the flag measured riders and machinery, not strategy. Martin's reading of his own weekend was blunt: fifth in the sprint, fifth in the Grand Prix, and an admission to media that he cannot make speed on the low grip MotorLand surface. Two fifth places at a track that rewards nothing you bring to it is a survivable result. It is also 16 points against a rival's 37.
Attrition did championship work of its own. Francesco Bagnaia crashed out of seventh early, extending a slump he described at Aragon in terms of struggling to do normal things on the bike. Raul Fernandez, the Silverstone winner, retired with a technical issue while running near the front group, and Franco Morbidelli and Toprak Razgatlioglu also crashed. Ai Ogura never started the weekend, out injured from a training accident, and his absence cost him fourth in the standings to Fabio Di Giannantonio.
Championship arithmetic now reads Martin 256, Marquez 237, Bezzecchi 232, and Crash notes that any of the three can mathematically lead the championship after the next round. Before Aragon, Martin's lead over Marquez was 40 points. Bezzecchi finished ahead of his team mate in both races and still lost a place in the standings, which is the kind of arithmetic that happens when the man doing the scoring wins everything on offer. Crash records the win as Marquez's sixth consecutive in the premier class at MotorLand and his eighth at the circuit overall, a run that long ago stopped being about home advantage. The San Marino Grand Prix at Misano runs 11 to 13 September, with nine rounds left and 24 points covering three riders.