There's a new name at the top of our MotoGP 2025 rider rankings, with an eighth different rider picked as the weekend standout following the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring.
But it was very, very close, on a weekend where virtually all of the MotoGP grid either performed admirably or had a solid excuse - at least among the riders, if not so much one of the five manufacturers.
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: 6th Grand Prix: 2nd
Was Fermin Aldeguer the quickest Ducati rider this weekend? Was Aldeguer better than Marc Marquez? No. I don't think there's a particularly defensible case for either claim.
Was Aldeguer stunningly effective in a way he hadn't really been in recent rounds in 2025, or maybe at all in his rookie season so far? That he absolutely was, and this weekend that kind of elevation in his game deserves the number one spot.
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The Sunday performance speaks for itself, of course, with Aldeguer one of very few riders this season to genuinely worry Marquez a little - through both tyre life and the fact he was obliterating all the other Ducatis, including Marquez, in the third sector. And the sprint was as good as it was always going to be given the moment at the start.
What most caught my eye, though, was Q2, in which Aldeguer trudged through a slow first run trying to catch a tow, then just decided to do laps by himself and found an enormous chunk of time to qualify a quarter of a second off pole.
If he can be not even 0.25s but 0.3-0.4s off pole consistently, he will win before the season is out.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 1st Grand Prix: 1st
Marquez goofed considerably in Q2, spooking himself by looking at the leaderboards and seeing himself in fourth - which immediately prompted a crash from pushing too hard.
'Who cares?' I hear some of you say. And, look, fair enough.
At the end of the day it's still 37 points, still wins 11 and 12 in a row, still his first-ever Red Bull Ring triumph in MotoGP, still a pair of tactical masterclasses and still a title race that isn't just over but is hilariously, insultingly over, as the best rider on the grid equipped with the best(-ish) bike on the grid continues to gleefully run up the score.
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 4th Grand Prix: 3rd
It is difficult to overstate the whiplash that has been induced by Marco Bezzecchi's turnaround in form on the Aprilia. Since around Silverstone time, he appears to have been the clear second-best rider in MotoGP.
In some moments of this weekend he almost looked like the best - whether it be through a miracle pole, enabled by a Q1-to-Q2 tweak on the bike (and Marquez's crash, and having Pecco Bagnaia as a reference), or through his victory bid on Sunday that he says was doomed by an unspecified issue on the bike.
He should've been much better on Friday - as Q1 participation could've wrecked his weekend - and was only par-for-the-course in the sprint, but if those sound like nitpicks, then yes, you're right, they are.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 3rd Grand Prix: 4th
The only mark against Pedro Acosta's weekend - and it's really not a big one - was that he apparently ran himself out of fuel in Q2 via his own miscalculation, then couldn't deliver a tidy lap in the final seconds.
But starting seventh didn't seem to affect the end result of the weekend much, as Acosta thrived with the new RC16 aero and the improved turning it afforded him.
For all the hand-wringing, he's been stellar for a good chunk of the season now.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 13th Grand Prix: 6th
At a track where he clearly finds himself in a good groove, Joan Mir kept an impressively brave face after Saturday - where he first didn't really put qualifying together and then had his sprint race immediately sabotaged by the start shenanigans (though making a bit of a meal out of Turn 1 also didn't help).
On Sunday, he had one of his best Honda rides yet, fast and canny in battle against bikes that really should've had his number.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 7th Grand Prix: 5th
Enea Bastianini still looks a little too wild on the RC16, which is coaxing mistakes out of him - whether in Q2, where an untidy third sector cost him a potential pole shot, or in the Sunday race at Turn 1 while trying to fend off Acosta and chase after Alex Marquez.
But the pace all throughout the weekend was undeniably strong. He had had so much difficulty with the early phase of weekends in 2025, struggling to rewire his brain from how he used to tackle these tracks on the Ducati, but was rapid out of the blocks here - and particularly thrived in cooler conditions, though his race pace on Sunday was also mega, while Saturday was hindered by the start mess.
Bastianini says he is still using up too much tyre, front and rear, to truly look like the Enea of old, but on the limited evidence of Brno and now the Red Bull Ring, we're getting there.
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 2nd Grand Prix: 10th
Alex Marquez did a lot of good work here. The fact that the on-paper results don't reflect that is no injustice, but simply a consequence of his bad mistake at Brno - which cannot and does not influence his position in these rankings.
Though looking half a step behind the factory Ducatis on Friday, he was the top Desmosedici rider in qualifying and put up a good fight against brother Marc on Saturday before a mistake in the second part of the Turn 2 chicane let Marc through - though Alex maintained afterwards he believed he was toast anyway.
He felt very slightly irked by just how much the long lap cost him on Sunday (the time loss was twice as big as from the Brno long lap, he reckoned), but also admitted that he took on a "discretion is the better part of valour" strategy after being relegated to 13th.
That wasn't too inspiring - he seemed to acknowledge as much - but the main target for the weekend seemed to be limiting the points damage to Bagnaia, who he outscored handily instead.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: 11th Grand Prix: 15th
Fabio Quartararo didn't look as far ahead as usual relative to the other Yamahas here, especially over one lap, though this may have been at least somewhat connected to the painful Friday crash he appears to have been blameless in.
He was still the lead Yamaha rider in every single session bar the Sunday morning warm-up, and his run to 11th in the sprint - with all the positions gained at the start - can be a particular badge of honour given the bike was impressively hopeless this weekend.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 9th
After maybe the best Friday performance of his MotoGP career so far, Raul Fernandez probably cost himself a full row on the grid with a small crash during Q2.
The start dramatics in the sprint helped him establish himself in fifth, but the ride height device - the failure of which would ultimately remove him from the race - was already acting up when Binder relegated him to sixth.
Burning up his tyres in battle with Binder again contributed to a slightly beige performance on Sunday, but the tyre fall-off was at least insufficient to cost him a solid points haul to add to his potentially career-changing recent run.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 5th Grand Prix: 7th
It wasn't game-changing but Brad Binder - who feels he has found a way to be "safer" on the front - needed a steadying weekend like this after a very worrying Brno.
He did just sneak into the top 10 on Friday, and was, by his own admission, no good in qualifying, but the race pace looked effective - even though the deployment of it in the sprint was undeniably helped by the seas parting in front of him (aka the Bagnaia and Aldeguer starts).
Sunday didn't look too strong, but was conditioned by contact with Fernandez, which damaged the aero fairing and also compromised fuel consumption.
But that contact happened also because Binder didn't qualify well and couldn't do his usual trick of opening-lap gains - which is a reminder, if needed, of how badly he needs to improve single-lap performance.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 9th Grand Prix: 12th
Johann Zarco's weekend is just a bit of a pain to assess.
The pluses: a big-time effort on Friday to bank a Q2 spot, made more impressive by the fact he'd had to rely on his laptime from the penultimate run because of a late issue; a sprint point secured with the help of a gamble that Zarco feared could make him look silly (he was the only rider with the medium rear) but that paid off.
The minuses: Needless, by his own admission, crashes in pre-qualifying practice and then Q2, and just an overall lack of comfort and thus race pace compared to Honda stablemate Mir.
Mixed bag. Sometimes the cliche description is the most apt.
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 16th Grand Prix: 16th
You'd be forgiven for not noticing that Alex Rins was out there this weekend - but the cruel irony is that it was actually his best weekend in a while.
The single-lap gap to Quartararo, egregious at many points this season, was in the same 0.1-0.2s range on Friday and Saturday. The races were fine, Rins clearly the second-best Yamaha rider of four in both.
He said during the weekend that he'd committed to training a more extreme riding style change - brake slightly later, turn in slightly later, V shape instead of U - and that it was paying off. And it looked like it was, or at least it did for anybody who didn't (understandably) ignore Yamaha's whole embarrassing weekend.
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: 12th Grand Prix: 13th
Luca Marini's weekend looks worse than it was. He flashed some really interesting race pace in practice, but struggling on the soft rear tyre late on on Friday did irreparable damage.
He did Honda's quickest lap of the weekend in Q1, a lap he described as "fantastic", but had the misfortune to have gone up against two riders executing tidy laps on frankly quicker bikes in that session.
The sprint was written off by the logjam created on the left side of the grid, and he was just unlucky off the line on Sunday - losing out in the second phase of acceleration, getting squeezed onto the entry kerb by Jorge Martin, then apparently getting nerfed at Turn 3.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 8th
After the race, Bagnaia reeled off a list of sessions in which he was "super fast, super constant" - which, of course, and he said as much, were all the sessions that don't really matter.
Let's take Saturday aside for a second - Bagnaia described it as "unacceptable", clearly hinting at a dodgy rear tyre, while tyre supplier Michelin has insisted its preliminary analysis showed no defect. For now this'll remain a 'he said, they said', but the bike clearly looked unrideable when he parked it.
But Sunday was very rough, and it was rough in a very Bagnaia 2025 way, except here the pace didn't just sag in the early laps but never recovered at all, leaving him to be bullied by bikes that last year he barely ever had to think about.
It's a race Ducati and Bagnaia would be wise to go over with a fine-toothed comb, because surely it contains the answer - the comparison to Marc Marquez aside - for why he isn't running where he should be.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 18th Grand Prix: 17th
A crash on a contaminated track hindered Miguel Oliveira's Friday, forcing him to run the unfavourable second bike, which also had a fourth-to-third gear downshift issue - but it's not like the Yamaha was a Q2 contender anyway.
Oliveira then outqualified team-mate Jack Miller for the first time this season, but deemed that "useless" given Yamaha's overall performance - and was overall understandably downbeat by just how little the M1 was giving him.
"I was spinning up until I was braking, in sixth gear, I was spinning upright," was his description after the sprint, and it got no better in the race.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 14th Grand Prix: 11th
Franco Morbidelli's ranking is inflated ever-so-slightly by the fact he was making his return from injury, though he appears to be back to good fitness.
Largely anonymous in one-lap performance - neither great nor terrible - he was one of those most affected by the start nonsense in the sprint, though then didn't help himself with a series of mistakes of his own.
Sunday was tidier - and he said he pulled off the "overtakes of my life" on Martin and Zarco - but these were only needed after a subpar start had put him in a bad position into Turn 1, with a loss of five places relative to his grid slot.
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 17th Grand Prix: 18th
Miller places low here as, on the balance of things, the fourth of four at Yamaha this weekend, but riders were so obviously not the problem when it came to the Japanese manufacturer's appalling Red Bull Ring showing.
For his part, Miller was probably unwise to drag his M1 back to the pits on Friday after an engine failure just to avoid a front tyre heat cycle (though this decision by all accounts did not cause the track contamination like many believed), and slumped a bit too much in the two races even relative to his fellow Yamaha riders.
But, again, he shouldn't be losing any sleep over not getting more out of this M1 this weekend.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 15th Grand Prix: 14th
Ai Ogura felt he could've been in Q2 on Friday, but didn't exploit the peak of the tyre on his final run - with one lap he ruined by himself, another done in by traffic.
Would a top-10 then have changed his weekend? Possibly a little, but Ogura was clear at that point already that he just didn't have very good pace, struggling on corner entry and over-stressing the front, and the rest of the weekend largely confirmed that.
He was tentatively positive about how the grand prix had gone, though, and you can kind of see why. After losing a lot of time fighting Miller, he was 13s back from Bezzecchi just short of the race's halfway point - and finished only 15s back from Bezzecchi in the end, running strongly in clean air.
Qualifying: 14th Sprint: 10th Grand Prix: DNF
Nobody was 'awful' this weekend, or did anything particularly egregious, which makes picking last place a bit of a bummer.
Of course, this was by no metric at all a good Martin weekend. He dented his confidence by crashing on Friday; he messed up the start procedure on Saturday so went straight at Turn 2 with the holeshot device still engaged; he shunted out of the grand prix on Sunday, unhurt but out of breath for half a minute.
But it's also really, really easy for Aprilia and Martin to put behind them, as the pace seemed reasonable enough and the quarter of a second deficit to Bezzecchi in Q1 was perfectly acceptable given Martin's experience on the bike is still so limited.
It's all fine. He'll be good in no time.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 8th Grand Prix: DNF
Di Giannantonio and Martin traded places multiple times in the draft of who should be last.
Di Giannantonio 'wins out' in the end because of Martin's experience deficit, and because the VR46 rider never got to show his strengths, after his weaknesses were on full display.
He had a rear vibration on Saturday - which left him a "sitting duck" - and the engine fireball on Sunday, though by his own admission, his grand prix was hardly perfect before that.
The damage had been done on Friday, when he couldn't put the lap together when all the other Ducatis made Q2, and Saturday, when he was found lacking in Q1, putting that down to the fact he didn't have a good Friday lap to "polish" up.
Qualifying: 21st Sprint: DNS Grand Prix: DNS
Maverick Vinales tried to defy his expected recovery timeline and get to the end of the Austrian GP weekend, but ultimately bailed out after a single Q1 run.
What laps he did do weren't horribly slow, but it would've been nice to see Pol Espargaro ride in relief of Vinales again - after he'd done such an impressive job at Brno. But with Vinales already ruled out of the upcoming Balaton Park round, Espargaro should get at least one more outing.
