Started third, finished fourth. The history books will show Marc Marquez banked a decent haul of points and moved on after Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix, but no less of an authority than three-time MotoGP world champion Jorge Lorenzo feels Marquez’s performance showed why his compatriot has another world title in his future, despite his winning drought blowing out beyond 1000 days.
In what was a Spielberg procession akin to MotoGP’s cure for insomnia, Marquez provided a welcome jolt of electricity to a dominant exhibition by world champion Francesco Bagnaia, who continued his stranglehold over the Red Bull Ring to lead all but one lap and annex a hat-trick of Austrian GP victories.
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Nearest title rival Jorge Martin, fighting pain from a nasty gash to his left thumb sustained in a bizarre bathroom mishap earlier in the weekend, had nothing for Bagnaia after being passed on lap two and finished second.
Bagnaia’s teammate Enea Bastianini, third in the championship, came from seventh on the grid to third at the end of the first lap, and spent all 28 laps in third place.
The top three in the championship standings, all on the class-leading Ducati GP24 machine, finished in that same order after 42 minutes of racing watched, by most, with a yawn.
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Marquez? After a series of pre and early-race tripwires were in keeping with his wretched Red Bull Ring record – it’s the only track that’s been on the calendar for the majority of his MotoGP career where he’s never won – he launched a comeback that left Lorenzo shaking his head, and factory Ducati team manager Davide Tardozzi – who Marquez will ride for next season alongside Bagnaia – making a bold prediction.
“With him, you never get bored,” Lorenzo told Spanish TV network DAZN.
“He put on a show. I think we haven’t seen his last title yet.”
Tardozzi, speaking to GPone.com, was looking similarly further afield.
“We’re not blindfolded, we know that Marc has great potential,” Tardozzi said.
“We’ll enjoy next year, but he’ll win a race before the end of the season.”
FROM CALAMITY TO COMEBACK
Marquez’s race began to unravel half an hour before the lights went out at Spielberg; walking from the Gresini Ducati team’s hospitality to the pit box ahead of the formation lap to the grid, he was almost knocked off his feet by two of his mechanics running out the back of the garage holding a wheel from his bike. It soon emerged why.
When Marquez’s mechanics were about to fit his front tyre to his bike, a tyre valve snapped off the wheel rim; in the rush to affix the preheated Michelin medium-compound tyre to a new rim, the tyre’s temperature had significantly cooled, meaning Marquez had two tyres at differing heat settings for the pre-race warm-up lap.
Marquez spent the warm-up lap desperately braking and accelerating to get some extra heat into his front tyre, but accidentally managed to disengage his front holeshot device for the start of the race by braking aggressively as he entered his third-place grid slot. With no time to reset it, Marquez’s bike wildly wheelied off the line seconds later as his rivals leapt forward in unison, and he made contact with Ducati’s Franco Morbidelli at the first corner and ran wide across the run-off area, rejoining in 14th place.
PIT TALK PODCAST: In this week’s episode of ‘Pit Talk’, hosts Renita Vermeulen and Matt Clayton dissect the key moments from Round 11 in Austria, how Pecco Bagnaia was able to reclaim the championship lead over Jorge Martin, look at Marc Marquez’s charge after a horror start and assess Jack Miller’s weekend of promise that ended with a crash.
With the Red Bull Ring layout punctuated by big braking zones into slow corners followed immediately by long straights, and with the 32-degree track temperature making the race one of tyre conservation than outright performance, all looked lost for Marquez after he immediately shipped over three seconds of lap time to Martin and Bagnaia up front, and had 11 bikes between him and the podium.
From there? As Lorenzo commented, “his recovery made the race spectacular”.
By lap four, Marquez had passed Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo, GasGas rookie Pedro Acosta and KTM wildcard Pol Espargaro to get back inside the top 10. A robust pass of his Gresini teammate and younger brother Alex Marquez for ninth followed on lap six.
He overtook Aprilia pair Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Vinales by lap eight, then brushed the back tyre of Jack Miller’s KTM with his arm in an optimistic passing attempt gone wrong at the Turn 2 chicane on lap 10, inheriting sixth when the Australian crashed at the same corner a lap later.
It took until lap 17 to finally pass Ducati GP23 rival Marco Bezzecchi for fifth with a forceful move at the same chicane, and Marquez then conjured an audacious ambush of Miller’s teammate Brad Binder at the left-handed Turn 6 where passes are rarely attempted, let alone completed, for fourth. “When he passed me, the next lap I could see he pulled a couple of tenths [of a second] just in that one corner,” Binder said afterwards.
Bastianini was in a race of his own in third, but with clear track ahead of him, Marquez really let loose. From laps 20-25, he was faster than Bagnaia up front and hacked nearly three seconds off Bastianini’s considerable advantage before realising sustaining that pace was futile, rolling out to do his slowest two laps of the race on the final two tours, finishing 13.836secs behind Bagnaia and 6.479secs behind Bastianini.
On a GP23 that’s some way in performance behind its successor in the Ducati stable, Marquez left fellow GP23 riders Bezzecchi (sixth) and Alex Marquez (10th) in his wake. Morbidelli, the other GP24 in the field and who ran similarly wide with Marquez at the first corner, was eighth and 13.841secs behind him at the chequered flag.
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In a race where the top three combined for precisely one overtake and where the gaps between Bagnaia to fifth (Binder, 18.620secs) and 10th (Alex Marquez, 30.268secs) were the biggest they’ve been all season, Marquez issued a reminder why Ducati took the nuclear option to sign him for next season over promoting Martin, even if that meant the spurned Spaniard may leave – which he did, to Aprilia for 2025 – while not re-signing Bastianini, who inked his own escape contract with KTM.
“He improvised a lot in all the overtaking moves he made, especially the one on Miller who was about to hit him,” Lorenzo said.
“Marc … is the king of improvisation. Without that mistake at the start, he would have finished on the podium.”
Tardozzi – whose lead rider Bagnaia said last week that his upcoming alliance with Marquez “could be super good or a disaster” – was impressed, but not surprised.
“I said Marquez would fight for the victory on Sunday, if we look at the second half of the race he was the fastest rider on the track,” Tardozzi said.
“With a good start, he could’ve competed for the podium and maybe even the win.”
With Aragon in Spain – an anti-clockwise circuit that plays to Marquez’s strengths and where he’s won on four of his past six visits and six times in all – next on the schedule, a victory drought that stretches back to October 2021 for a rider stuck on 59 MotoGP wins may be a step closer to belatedly breaking.
Austria’s recovery showed that, even on a year-old Ducati that’s been rendered largely impotent by its successor in the hands of every other rider, the speed is still there.
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