The 2025 Aragon Grand Prix was hardly MotoGP's best foot forward, as a relatively lively sprint was followed by a deeply processional Sunday race - and as Ducati showed its Silverstone angst was, for now, just a blip by locking out the podium in both.
It was very, very clear who was the best rider in the class this weekend, but the fight for second-best - at least as far as these rankings are concerned - was a close one.
Agree or disagree? Quiz Val on his rankings in the comments on this Patreon post and he'll reply in his debrief video for The Race Members' Club later this week
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 1st GP: 1st
Marc Marquez didn't get the help of last year's weather-related track grip 'resets', yet proved not to need it in the end - leading every session he took part in.
Outrageously dominant at the start of Friday, he was right to feel that - as is convention this year - rivals would close in on him with more track time and more rubber on track, but none truly tested him.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 5th GP: 4th
Pedro Acosta feels like a rider transformed since his post-Jerez arm pump surgery - but this may have only added to his growing impatience, with him describing the gap to the Ducatis ahead on Sunday as "painful" despite this being his most successful weekend this year.
He probably wasn't head and shoulders the fastest KTM rider this weekend, but executed things perfectly to be best of the rest behind the Ducatis in every single session that mattered.
Aiding this was the call to put on the hard front tyre, which made him the only outlier from the medium-medium convention and left him quite nervous, but paid off in giving him a better chance to fight - even if his duel with "gentleman" Pecco Bagnaia, Acosta admitted, was only ever going to end one way.
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 2nd GP: 2nd
Alex Marquez rode very, very smartly again, showing a clarity of vision throughout the weekend over what results he had come here to get.
His brother was out of reach, Alex accepted, so consolidating second and minimising the points loss was the name of the game. To challenge Marc would require senseless risk-taking - "you will take it and maybe it won’t even be enough".
Most encouraging was how he soaked up and negated Bagnaia's mid-race charge on Sunday. The GP23-to-GP24 upgrade has been obviously huge this year, but it seems undeniable that the younger Marquez has developed a lot more tools in his own armoury, too.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 3rd GP: 6th
Fermin Aldeguer's Sunday was largely defined by being terrorised by Franco Morbidelli, who tiptoed up to the very limit of the rules with aggressive two counter-attacks at Turn 15, but also previously - according to Aldeguer (who it must be said called the fight "fun") - punted him wide at Turn 1, in a move not quite captured by the TV cameras.
But he was in the end happy enough to accept sixth in that race, especially after having bagged a sprint podium in large part thanks to a canny medium tyre gamble.
He said it was a Gresini team decision but one that he insisted on sticking with once his crew started having second thoughts about it due to most of the grid preferring the softs.
Good work, good yield.
Qualifying: 11th Sprint: DNF GP: 7th
Joan Mir gets ever so slightly penalised for the fact I just can't quite feel he maximised qualifying - his four best sectors came in four different laps, normally not the recipe for success - and for the uncertainty of what his sprint would've looked like had he not been taken out by an over-ambitious Jack Miller.
His underlying pace over long runs was really convincing, though, and there was much to like about the methodical execution on Sunday.
"I’ve never been happy with a seventh position during my career - but now yes," he said. It's demonstrably not true because a seventh place at Valencia secured Mir the title in 2020 - but here, like then, he has earned the happiness.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 4th GP: 5th
Morbidelli was slightly incredulous at the framing of his riding against Aldeguer as aggressive, and in general is probably a bit fatigued by his reputation as an on-the-limit rider in track etiquette terms - though if I can't say that reputation is undeserved.
He put together a really nifty weekend, though, brought alive by a big uptick in one-lap pace from Friday to Saturday. His front-row qualifying - which at one point even looked like it could be pole - put him in the mix for big points, even if the pace wasn't quite totally there.
But, interestingly enough, it was early-race pace rather than late-race pace that was the issue, which is a major break from Morbidelli's Ducati convention.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: DNF GP: 13th
"Really? Ahead of one of the actual podium finishers?" You bet - and I'd do it again.
This was a high-quality wildcard outing for Augusto Fernandez, who did what test riders generally do not do these days - i.e. mixed it up with the regular riders for his manufacturer, and did so all throughout the weekend.
The caveat has to be that clearly something worked quite well on his development Yamaha, whether it was the new engine spec (supposedly a bit more top speed) or something else - but if so, kudos for helping develop it.
He was second-highest of the Yamahas in the sprint when his M1 conked out, then finished as the second-best Yamaha in the race. Only qualifying and new-tyre pace was a bit off, but that's totally normal for a tester.
"My plan is to prove that I have the level to be here - and then also for Yamaha to be able to test things at the same pace as the official [factory-contracted] riders," he said. Both of those causes were advanced at Aragon.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 12th GP: 3rd
Both Bagnaia and his Ducati team were overcome with the sense of relief following his Sunday podium, the potential for which was unlocked by a roll-of-the-dice morning brake disc change.
There was a healthy contrast between his Sunday and a dreadful sprint race in which he was not just unable to do his usual defensive Saturday ride - but was struggling to keep his line at all, making errors that would've been unthinkable for Bagnaia last year.
But it also drives home the power of narrative because for now all that has been accomplished by the Sunday change is restoring Bagnaia to his level of the Thailand season opener - which is still not enough.
To his credit, he's clearly very aware of that, but at least he's out of crisis territory.
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: 10th GP: 10th
A genuinely good weekend from Trackhouse's much-doubted rider, who either responded very well or - more likely - managed to deftly ignore the pressure of the team calling up Moto2 points leader Manu Gonzalez for a Monday test.
So-so on Friday, Raul Fernandez was somewhat happy to qualify 13th rather than make Q2 thanks to securing the clean part of the grid - and it paid off at the start in the sprint, though not so much in the Sunday race.
But he did well not to unravel after that initial loss of positions in the grand prix, and ultimately finally ran a comparable race to Aprilia benchmark Marco Bezzecchi.
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 8th GP: 8th
Clearly the fastest Aprilia rider and picked up OK points in both races. So why the relatively low position?
Bezzecchi himself put it best: “It’s not a good result, with this pace. With this pace, we should do something more.”
His continued single-lap struggles bit him again on Friday - the dreaded soft-rear-pushing-the-front issue - but it was the Q1 crash, brought on by touching the inside kerb at Turn 3, that really torched the weekend.
In both races - though particularly the sprint - he was quick and incisive fighting through from the back, but the damage had already been done.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 14th GP: 11th
Alex Rins had the performance to take on his fellow Yamahas here and duly finished as its lead rider on Sunday, aided by an eyebrow-raising 1m47.0s on his penultimate lap that was nearly six tenths of a second better than the next-best Yamaha race lap.
But that only served to anger Rins, who lamented the positions he'd lost early in the race, finding himself unable to brake like he wanted - and described it as basically the story of his season.
His verdict was that "they" - Yamaha - "need to fix something", but it's clear he's having more trouble than his M1 peers when it comes to maximising fresh rubber, as both qualifying and that early phase of the race feel like a Yamaha strength this season.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 6th GP: 9th
Ranked higher than his weekend probably deserves, just by virtue of salvaging his weekend with last-gasp passage through Q2 and a pretty solid sprint, aided by the inspired call to take on the medium rear.
But there is little question Fabio Di Giannantonio was slower than a Ducati rider should've been at Aragon, hamstrung even worse than Bagnaia - but a bit less in the limelight - by what Di Giannantonio has been describing as a "filter" that numbs the front feeling on the Ducati GP25.
He hopes a Bagnaia-like switch to a bigger brake disc will pay off similarly for him in the Monday test - and sort of hinted it's what he wanted to start the season with already.
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: 9th GP: DNF
Brad Binder summed it up better than I could after his crash from fifth in the grand prix. "When I went sliding off, I thought ‘what a waste’. But s**t happens."
He had been very impressive in qualifying, and though the sprint got complicated, I can hardly fault him for that. Binder had lost the stupid Aragon grid lottery - he had already had "a sick feeling" when he qualified sixth, on the dirty inside part of the straight, and wheelspun out of contention, which a lot of riders seemed to agree was more down to luck than skill.
Having impressively recovered to ninth from that nightmare start, he was even more conservative off the line on Sunday and had put himself in great position to fight with and perhaps even overtake KTM team-mate Acosta for fourth when he suffered a crash that confused him - with less load on the front tyre.
Another DNF and a 41-point gap to Acosta in the standings is not so easy to justify, but I do believe this was a genuine step forward in performance.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: 15th GP: 15th
Miguel Oliveira had a reasonable couple of races. At Silverstone he wasn't in the conversation with the other Yamaha riders, but here - though probably just about fifth of the five in overall performance - he did not look out of place.
Given there's a process of building up race fitness after his injury absence, that checks out (and earns him some positional grace in these rankings), though the single-lap performance is an issue to be tackled as soon as possible.
Mostly though, he's just in a position he doesn't deserve to be in, having to fight for his future in a limited, injury-conditioned timeframe. Maybe a fit Oliveira would've lost that fight - who knows - but I don't think a fair judgment on his potential on the Yamaha can be made in the next few races.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 7th GP: 18th
A deeply irritating weekend in which Maverick Vinales returned to his Aprilia spec: fast in pace but unsettled in Q2 by a pair of rear tyres he felt weren't right, so finding himself in a grid position that he couldn't really make work.
He rode a par-for-the-course sprint, then seemed to really struggle to make moves and make them stick against clearly slower riders on Sunday. This came after being crowded out onto the outside kerb at Turn 2 on the opening lap by Di Giannantonio put him in a melee that he clearly desperately wanted no part of.
A late chase after Mir ended with a needless crash through being "sucked in" by the Honda's slipstream, and once back on the bike he put in the third-fastest lap of the race.
“We cannot permit ourselves to be in the third row. We need to be maximum second row, maximum," was Vinales' summary. Maybe he's fast enough to deliver on that - but he needs to be more robust in his arsenal to counter in-weekend disruptions.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 11th GP: DNF
Fabio Quartararo described his grand prix as "s**t" and his weekend as one to forget.
After overcoming Friday's horror show - in which he and other Yamahas suffered from a bad mismatch between the electronics set-up and the soft rear tyre in time attack mode - Quartararo was hamstrung by chatter both on the soft in the sprint and, to his surprise, on the medium in the main race.
Even beyond that he just didn't seem to have his usual edge over his stablemates at a track that historically doesn't agree with him, and it had looked like a good salvage job until he crashed out of 10th on Sunday.
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 17th GP: 12th
Enea Bastianini continues to find the KTM RC16 antithetical to his riding style and believes this cannot be fully resolved until KTM brings him a redesigned seat - which it apparently will do, but only after the summer break.
He is uncomfortable, and cannot get the bike to turn after releasing the brake. "Every time, if the track is 5km, I do 5.5km," was how he put it.
Save for one moment in the weekend, he just clearly wasn't fast at all. But what an interesting moment it was - the Sunday warm-up, in which in the coolest conditions Bastianini set by far his best laptime of the weekend.
That's really quite unusual, and will hopefully help him find some answers already before the summer break.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 18th GP: 17th
For a rider whose last experience racing at Aragon was in World Superbikes seven years ago, Lorenzo Savadori acquitted himself well in terms of pace - even if that's not really his job description as Aprilia’s stand-in/racer-tester.
He was competitive in the sprint, though struggling with an overheating front and far less equipped to deal with it than true MotoGP regulars, but then kind of botched his one truly winnable battle this weekend - against Somkiat Chantra - by going off repeatedly on Sunday.
But that would've been for a point or two at best, and at the end not even that - and I would be shocked if Aprilia particularly cares, especially as the development work seems to be going well.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 16th GP: DNF
Johann Zarco knew on Friday already that something wasn't right and the race pace in particular was lacking - and so it proved.
He was very anonymous in the sprint, then slightly better in the race after a bike rebalancing, only to crash out while trying to work his way past Miller, caught out by a front tyre temperature spike.
It was a "bad weekend", he admitted. And it's true that his bad weekends this season - COTA, Jerez, now here - have been really ropey, just as his good ones have been really, really good.
Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 19th GP: 16th
There were finally some signs again of gentle progress for the Thai MotoGP rookie.
It looked really rough in the sprint - with Somkiat Chantra a rather horrifying 31 seconds off the winner, struggling with what he felt was a too "open" traction control, perhaps a case of too much too soon.
Reeling that in for Sunday allowed him to go faster than in qualifying and at least beat Aprilia tester Savadori, in what looked like at least a half-second step from one day to the other.
Qualifying: 14st Sprint: 13th GP: 14th
Miller's ranking is not a real reflection of his performance, which was unremarkable but fine in the grand scheme of Yamaha's crummy weekend.
There were certainly moments in the weekend where he looked like the fastest Yamaha. On Sunday he was sizing up a move on Quartararo before he went off and his race unravelled from there with chatter, while on Saturday he could well have beaten Quartararo for top Yamaha honours if not for a long lap penalty.
But said long-lap penalty was more than well-earned for a truly clumsy crash with Mir that rightly earned Mir's ire.
It wasn't malicious, but it doesn't have to be to be frowned upon.
