Even when he’s not on the MotoGP grid – as he wasn’t this weekend at the Australian Grand Prix – Marc Marquez has a way of sucking the oxygen out of every room.
No matter the rider or their nationality, the seven-time MotoGP champion’s CV casts a heavy shadow. But if you’re a Spanish rider trying to make their name? That shadow is more like an eclipse.
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Consider, then, the lot of Raul Fernandez, a rider whose world championship performances before he got to MotoGP justifiably earned him the tag of ‘next big thing’ among the armada of Spanish riders on the ladder to MotoGP, but one whose premier-class exploits had been so underwhelming that he was considered in some quarters to be fortunate to still be on the grid.
Sunday at Phillip Island shut those discussions down.
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Yes, there was context behind Fernandez’s first win in his 76th MotoGP start, a career that began in 2022 after a 2021 Moto2 runner-up finish to Australian teammate Remy Gardner that netted him eight victories.
In three previous MotoGP seasons, he’d never finished better than 16th in the standings. After finishing second in Saturday’s Australian Grand Prix sprint, he rose to a position higher than he’d ever been before – 11th.
Before Sunday, Fernandez had never led a single lap in a Grand Prix. But as his impediments to a first victory vanished one by one, he was there to capitalise on what became the most open Phillip Island weekend in years.
Marquez was back home in Spain after right shoulder surgery following the Indonesian Grand Prix a fortnight earlier, which came one round after he’d sealed this year’s title in Japan.
The rider who crashed into the Ducati superstar to necessitate that surgery, Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi, had pace to burn at the Island, but had to serve two long-lap penalties in Sunday’s 27-lap race as punishment for clattering into Marquez.
Phillip Island’s fastest man for the past three years, Jorge Martin, was home in Andorra rehabbing the latest injury in a world championship defence that never got out of the starting blocks.
Francesco Bagnaia, who Martin beat to the 2024 title, was having another all-too familiar 2025 weekend of woe at a track where he’d taken podiums for three straight years, finishing second-last in the sprint and crashing – out of 12th – in Sunday’s Grand Prix.
There was an open goal awaiting someone to slot a winner into it. Fernandez obliged.
How much of an outlier was this win? On Sunday, just seven other riders on the grid – three of them injury replacements for Marquez, Martin and KTM’s Maverick Vinales – had never won a premier-class Grand Prix before. Of the remaining four, Somkiat Chantra (Honda) and Ai Ogura (Aprilia) are 2025 rookies.
Unexpected doesn’t begin to describe it.
Until Indonesia two weeks ago, Fernandez had never finished on a podium in a sprint or Grand Prix. He had the pace to do both in Mandalika, but became embroiled in needless scraps in the Grand Prix with slower riders after finishing third in the sprint.
Second to Bezzecchi at Phillip Island on Saturday showed what might be possible, and when the Italian’s Indonesia penalties bit hard on Sunday, Fernandez capitalised.
Fernandez was one second behind Bezzecchi when the leader took his first penalty on lap five and dropped to third, and led by three-tenths of a second when Bezzecchi’s second penalty was served two laps later. Stuck in sixth, Bezzecchi’s speed was strangled by the rivals in front of him on a track where passing places are hard to come by, even with his superior pace. Fernandez took advantage.
Fernandez spent what he called a “super long” race at the front after he cleared away, which was precisely what he didn’t need. Last year in the sprint race in Catalunya, Fernandez took a shock lead, pushed too hard too soon, and crashed out. He beat himself up for his mistake, and wondered if it would ever come again. Before Sunday, he’d never ridden a single Grand Prix lap in a top-three place.
Trackhouse Aprilia team principal Davide Brivio described Fernandez as having “grown up” on Sunday, his team’s victory meaning all 11 MotoGP teams have now won a Grand Prix.
Fernandez, still processing his breakthrough, saw it similarly.
“I cannot believe, still,” Fernandez said, more than an hour after the race finished at Phillip Island, and as the rain that had threatened all afternoon finally began to tumble.
“I am thinking how many times, how much work we did to get here. The team never stopped to believe in me. In the difficult moments, you know that Aprilia support me even more.
“This morning when we have a meeting with the team, we thought to fight for the podium was an unrealistic position. I never thought we had the chance to get the victory. But when I overtook Pedro [Acosta] and had a very similar pace to Marco [Bezzecchi], I think ‘maybe today is the day’. The last five laps was super long for me.
“I tried to be focused on me, and not think a lot … but the last lap, the last sector, I start to cry inside my helmet in the last sector. This morning, I never thought this was the day to get this victory.“
When will Fernandez’s next win come? Will it owe itself more to speed than circumstances? Will Australia be seen as an anomaly, or a start to something bigger? For now, the Spaniard couldn’t care less.
Context and caveats could take a back seat, as Sunday’s travel plans to Kuala Lumpur for next weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix were being hastily re-arranged for a victory celebration long in the waiting.
‘WARNINGS’ A SIGN OF EARLY EXIT FOR MILLER
Jack Miller’s best Saturday of the 2025 season turned into a sombre Sunday, with the Australian crashing out on lap five from sixth place a day after his run to fourth and a podium near-miss in the sprint race 24 hours earlier.
From third on the grid – his best qualifying since the 2023 Japanese Grand Prix and the first front-row MotoGP Phillip Island start for an Australian since Casey Stoner took pole position in 2012 – Miller was shuffled back to fifth place on the opening lap behind fellow Yamaha rider and pole-sitter Fabio Quartararo, but fell at Turn 6 after multiple “warnings” on the preceding laps, his outside shot at a podium punctured by quarter-race distance.
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Miller’s succinct download of his day – “pretty deflated” – led to a more expansive assessment of a weekend where Yamaha showed promise, but then regressed to the mean in the race, Quartararo fading from pole to an 11th-place result, and 2022 Australian Grand Prix winner Alex Rins (seventh) the only Yamaha rider to finish inside the top 10.
“Obviously it’s not how we wanted today to end,” Miller said.
“It was a positive weekend all round and I felt decent at the start of the race, and I was in the front group but maybe struggling a little bit more than I had done all weekend.
“At Turn 6, Turn 2 as well … I was having to force the bike a little bit more to make it turn. I had a couple of warnings going into Turn 6, just a little bit of vibration going in, and on the third time she finally said ‘no more’.
“I’m disappointed to let everybody down, let the team down, let the fans down. After all, it was a strong weekend, we showed great pace, so I’ll try to take the positives and learn from the negatives and understand what was the difference was today.”
The Australian Grand Prix has just one more year to run on its current contract at Phillip Island; the remote Victorian coastal track first hosted the world championship in 1989, and has held the Australian round of the series continuously since 1997, save for covid cancellations in 2020 and ’21.
With no guaranteed future beyond 2026, Miller said the race “needs to be on the calendar” going forward after race organisers announced that 91,245 fans attended the three-day weekend, the largest overall crowd figure since 2012.
“It’s a fantastic event,” Miller said.
“You look at the crowd out there today – we had five Aussies riding out there today – and for me that’s one of the best crowds we’ve had all year.
“We’re such an isolated country, such a vast country – people come from great distances to watch the race. You speak to people from Western Australia – it’s like going from the top end of Europe to the bottom to watch a race. They travel far and wide, it means a lot for them to have a home race on the calendar.
“Phillip Island is one of the most spectacular circuits on the calendar … it needs to be on the calendar, and I’m sure it will be.”
AUSSIE YOUNG GUNS HAVE PODIUM PARTY
Miller’s early exit elicited a groan from the 37,000-plus crowd who braved high winds and a threat of rain for Sunday’s trio of races, but the performances of compatriots Senna Agius and Joel Kelso in Moto2 and Moto3 respectively saw the majority of them head home happy.
Sydneysider Agius, went two better than his run to third in last year’s Moto2 race at Phillip Island, which was his first world championship podium.
Since then, the 20-year-old has won a Grand Prix – at Silverstone earlier this season – and came into Sunday’s race as the man to beat after his metronomic long-run practice pace, and led every lap – and by as much as six seconds – before settling for a dominant 3.684-second win.
“After five or six laps I was seeing that I started to have an advantage, and after that was just a long, lonely race – it was really hard just trying to keep concentration,” Agius said.
“It’s a huge moment to win at home. I could see the crowd and hear them on the last lap … I just was thinking ‘one corner at a time’. My first victory [at Silverstone] was just a fight to the end, but this one was quite lonely. I didn’t want it to end, but I wanted it to end.”
Agius said a pre-event catch-up with two-time MotoGP champion and six-time Phillip Island winner Stoner gave him confidence he could make the most of a weekend where he embraced the extra pressure of performing in his own backyard.
“I saw Casey on Wednesday and I said ‘it’s not a normal weekend’, and he told me to treat it like a normal weekend,” Agius said.
“He kept telling me to keep present and keep calm, especially when things are not happening like you want in this weekend.
“Casey’s such a role model for us. He’s such an idol of mine, and being with him on Wednesday with a really nice thing to do from him.”
Kelso, meanwhile, had his own equal career-best moment in the lightweight Moto3 category, the Darwin 22-year-old finishing second on Sunday to Spanish world champion Jose Antonio Rueda to match his second place at the French Grand Prix at Le Mans earlier this year.
Rueda and Kelso were in a class of their own on Sunday – third-placed Alvaro Carpe was 12 seconds adrift after 21 laps – and while Kelso was just eight-tenths of a second from victory after starting from pole position, he was rapt with the performance.
“I tried my absolute best, I was saving the tyres … as soon as Rueda went to go in front, I said ‘go for it mate, I’m going to save the tyre’,” Kelso said.
“But Rueda, he’s too good, f**king hell … saving the tyre, he’s so good at it. The best we could do was second.”
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