When you’re a rider on the cusp of becoming the third ever to win 100 world championship Grands Prix, the last thing Marc Marquez needed was a helping hand.
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On Sunday at the Hungarian Grand Prix, MotoGP’s reigning world champion got two – and was lifted back into title contention as a result.
The Balaton Park track is one of a minority on the MotoGP calendar in that it is anti-clockwise, the short, tight 17-turn layout featuring 10 left-handed corners, accentuating the most outsize of Marquez’s strengths that have seen him clean up at tracks like the Sachsenring, the Circuit of the Americas and Australia’s own Phillip Island over the years.
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The other helping hand?
That Aprilia rider Jorge Martin cleaned out four of the top five riders in the MotoGP standings with a first-corner ten-pin bowling Hungarian howler, which removed all but one potential roadblock to Marquez winning a sprint/Grand Prix double at Balaton for the second successive year.
Marquez, who admitted after the race that he’d only returned to action at Mugello in Italy last weekend, three weeks after he’d had right foot and right shoulder surgeries after crashing out of the French Grand Prix sprint just to be ready for Hungary, came into round eight of the season a whopping 102 points adrift of Marco Bezzecchi atop the championship standings.
A little more than 42 minutes after Martin’s dramatic error, that gap was back to 72 points with 14 rounds and 518 points to play for.
Game on.
Marquez’s first Grand Prix win since last September at Misano was his 100th across all three world championship classes – only Giacomo Agostini (122) and Valentino Rossi (115) had previously hit three-figures – and closed a circle of misery that began when he fractured his shoulder in a first-lap accident with Bezzecchi in Indonesia last year, one round after he’d won his seventh premier-class world title at Motegi in Japan.
That drought gave this milestone more perspective, he said.
“Another comeback … but the comeback still is not finished,” he said.
“We won, but it’s a left-corner [circuit]. There were only three right corners with a hard braking point, so it helps me to breathe.
“Since Indonesia, I suffered a lot. I already understand that life can change from one day to another. But experience when you have crashed again is hard on the mental side.
“I try to do my 100 per cent, I need to try. I feel like I’m still far from my performance, the way I want to ride. But I’m still fast …
“The championship is super long … I don’t feel like I’m ready to fight, honestly speaking. This weekend, yes … but at Mugello we were 10 seconds behind the leader. So, let’s see.
“But you know me, if I am here it is to fight, every race, every practice. I would like to enjoy it. I put a lot of pressure on myself on my career, and now I realise that after all what happened, I need to enjoy and be a bit easier to myself. I want to be more relaxed, with the same intensity.”
Intense was the buzzword on Sunday after Marquez engaged in a thrilling battle with KTM rider – and next year’s factory Ducati teammate – Pedro Acosta, who has been Marquez’s closest thing to a rival in Hungary for the past two years since the Balaton Park circuit debuted on the calendar in 2025.
Last year in the Grand Prix, Acosta was second to his compatriot. This year, he was second in qualifying, second in the sprint race. And on Sunday, Acosta rolled the dice by using the soft-compound rear tyre for the race where his other rivals on the first two rows of the grid went for the medium.
Acosta had to make the most of his superior early-race grip, pass Marquez and bolt. He did all three after taking the lead on lap two and escaping to a 1.6-second lead on lap five, but Marquez walked him down.
By lap 14, the Spaniards swapped places and paint, making contact at the final corner as Acosta retook a lead he’d lost seven turns earlier. But once Marquez muscled back past at the turn 9-10 chicane a lap later, Acosta was done.
Acosta – who now holds the unwanted record of most podiums (13) without a maiden Grand Prix victory after his 49th start on Sunday – had no regrets.
“We made a good show for the fans, some good passes. I think everyone can see that I never give up,” he said.
“I’m quite happy with my [tyre] choice. I started to miss a little bit of stability, and then I was struggling a bit. When he passed me, he just went away.”
Marquez relished the head-to-head, and savoured its consequences.
“When a fighter meets another fighter, the battle is there,” Marquez said.
“It was on the limit, we had two or three contacts, but always with the correct space. It was two laps … if there was a third one, me or him finish in not a good way.
“One hundred wins is a big number. My career already, I did more than I expect. For that reason, now it’s time to be more patient.”
APRILIA SEETHES AFTER MARTIN’S CRASH WIPES OUT SERIES LEADER
Patience was something Martin lacked on Sunday, with Aprilia experiencing the highs and lows of MotoGP within a seven-day period across two Sundays at Mugello and Balaton Park.
After Bezzecchi had led Martin in a hugely-significant Aprilia 1-2 at the Italian Grand Prix – Aprilia’s first-ever win on Ducati’s home turf – Martin, like Acosta, elected to use the soft-compound Michelin rear to get off to a fast start and mitigate his lowly eighth place on the grid.
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One corner into the race, Martin was too fast for his own good.
The Spaniard pulled across the front of Honda’s Luca Marini off the start line, arrowed down the inside line of Balaton Park’s tight first right-handed turn, then lost control of his bike and slammed into the side of Bezzecchi, whose crashed bike took out Aprilia stablemate Raul Fernandez, plus Ducati pair Fermin Aldeguer and Fabio Di Giannantonio.
First (Bezzecchi), second (Martin) and fifth in the championship (Fernandez) were out on the spot. Di Giannantonio (third) was able to rejoin in last place and advance to 12th to at least score four points on a day where he’d started from fourth place. Aldeguer’s non-finish – after he’d qualified a season-best third – was his first of the year.
Fortunately, after serious accidents that marred the Catalan Grand Prix two rounds ago that still see Ducati’s Alex Marquez and Honda’s Johann Zarco out of action, all the riders involved were left with minor contusions, Fernandez perhaps the luckiest as he was sent skywards from his Aprilia.
Martin, Bezzecchi and Fernandez – three-quarters of Aprilia’s line-up – didn’t speak to the press after the race. Fernandez – out of contract with his Trackhouse Aprilia team and battling to stay on the grid for next season – took to social media to try to downplay the incident, saying “this is part of our sport”.
The race stewards took a dimmer view, slapping Martin – who will move to Yamaha next season – with a double long-lap penalty for the next Grand Prix at Brno in Czechia in a fortnight’s time.
Aprilia Racing CEO Massimo Rivola fronted the press, and didn’t hold back.
“This is a cold shower that we truly could have done without,” he said.
“I’m saddened by what happened, clearly both Marco and Raul were not at all at fault, and I also apologise to Team Trackhouse and the other riders involved. We know that there is always a dose of risk in racing, but I think knowing how to safely tackle the first turn is of utmost importance.
“Jorge’s mistake is a difficult one to digest. It’s a mistake a world champion shouldn’t make.”
Martin – who took Bezzecchi out at the first corner of the sprint in Japan last September and fractured his own right collarbone, the final injury of a horror title defence – scored just four points in Hungary for finishing sixth in the sprint.
Bezzecchi, winner of six of the previous nine Grands Prix dating back to last year, had his lowest-scoring weekend of the year with seven points, while Di Giannantonio (four points) and Fernandez (six) had their worst events of the year, too.
Good news for Jack Miller in Hungary | 00:28
‘A BIT LUCKY’: MILLER’S SEASON-BEST SHOWING, AGIUS RETURNS TO PODIUM
Jack Miller was one of the beneficiaries of Martin’s first-corner mistake on Sunday, the Australian converting his fourth-row start into fifth place at the end of the first lap before finishing eighth for his best Grand Prix result of the season.
The Pramac Yamaha rider had scored just three points – all for 15th-place Grand Prix finishes in the three rounds – leading into Hungary, but spent nine laps of the race in fourth place before finishing 23.283secs behind Marquez for his best result since last July’s German Grand Prix, where he also finished eighth.
For the second successive weekend, Miller was Yamaha’s best-performing rider, with stablemates Toprak Razgatlioglu (11th), Alex Rins (13th) and Fabio Quartararo (who retired from last place with four laps to go with a technical issue) all qualifying and finishing behind the out-of-contract 31-year-old.
“A better weekend for us,” Miller said after advancing to 20th in the championship standings with 11 points.
“I obviously got a bit lucky with what happened at turn one to avoid the carnage and make the most out of it. I’m missing a bit in the fight, just trying to come off the corners and try to nurse the soft tyre all the way until the end.
“I spent 24 laps trying to defend the position, but unfortunately when you’re missing nearly 15km/h down the straight, it’s hard to defend. Points today are a bonus, and we got lucky that we were able to come out unscathed and do a decent job.”
Miller’s compatriot Senna Agius took the third podium of his Moto2 season with third place to consolidate fourth in the championship, Dynavolt IntactGP teammate Manuel Gonzalez winning his third race in succession to open up a 49.5-point gap atop the standings.
Compatriot Jacob Roulstone, in his Moto2 debut as a stand-in rider at Honda Team Asia, was 22nd, while Aussie Joel Kelso finished 12th from 16th on the grid in Moto3.
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