Japanese Grand Prix 2026 MotoGP rider rankings

The two main MotoGP title contenders separated themselves from the field again in the Japanese Grand Prix at Motegi - but does Marc Marquez's 37-pointer warrant P1 in the rankings, or is there another candidate?

Find out Val's ruling below - and then quiz him about it in the comments on this post in The Race Members' Club and he'll reply in his Q&A recording later this week.

Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 1st GP: 1st

One of the easier P1 selections this year (and Marquez's fourth this season, for reference).

The Ducati didn't have the clear edge over the Aprilia at Motegi some may have expected - but Marquez did have a clear edge over everyone else.

Friday to Saturday to Sunday, he was simply too strong - too in tune with the various twists of the weekend with the new surface and revised allocation, too comfortable running at consistent top pace, too precise in turning P2 into P1 in both races.

Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 3rd GP: 2nd

Championship-spec Jorge Martin is turning up here, though Marquez has shown that won't necessarily be enough.

But Friday had promised a much more damaging weekend for Martin - who needed Pedro Acosta's help to ensure a Q2 spot - and yet he turned it around completely with an "unbelievable" overnight improvement.

Excessive tyre spin cost him on Saturday - he was maybe unlucky (and maybe careless) to touch the green paint on the final lap, but was anyway lucky that other strong riders had been taken out.

Sunday, then, was really, really good - even though keeping Marquez behind for the full distance always seemed impossible.

Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 4th GP: 4th

A throwback to both mid-2025 Enea Bastianini (the one who could briefly make the KTM work) and to Ducati-era Bastianini (who would occasionally deliver mind-bending laps at the end of the race).

The biggest breakthrough, I think, was actually in navigating Friday and then qualifying well - though probably this was just a reflection of a higher-overall level of performance by Bastianini this weekend.

When he's fast over one lap, you know he'll be fast over a race distance. And he was, with only the finest margins separating him from podium finishes.

Acosta's DNF in the sprint complicates intra-KTM comparisons somewhat, but the 14.6s gap between them at the finish on Sunday leaves little doubt Bastianini was the RC16 benchmark this time.

Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 9th GP: 12th

Fabio Quartararo has been one of MotoGP's best riders again since the embarrassment of Aragon at the end of August.

What appears to be a minor underperformance in qualifying - relative to his own standards, because he obliterated the other Yamahas again - means it wasn't a hugely eye-catching weekend, but it was a really professional one.

He rode a strong sprint in fending off Fermin Aldeguer for the final point, and was the Yamaha standard-bearer in the main race, too - though was limited by excessive fuel consumption from very early on, a common Yamaha issue but one that seems to affect him more than some of his peers.

Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 14th GP: 13th

This was a delightful MotoGP redemption weekend for Somkiat Chantra, whose 2025 in the category quickly devolved into a waste of everyone's time - but who, though his exit was totally justified, is better than that year suggested.

He found a bike on which "everything was correct" from the first run, tweaking only some engine brake settings for a couple of corners, and was properly competitive, just three tenths off the best Honda in qualifying and beating team-mate Luca Marini.

He looked more than a little timid in the early phase of both races - and apparently got roughed up a little by Johann Zarco on Sunday, before recovering well into the points.

The only caveat is that I felt similarly good about Taka Nakagami's stand-in effort at the previous race - and I think it's fair to ask whether Honda's regulars need to do some soul-searching about the performance they're bringing to the table.

Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 6th GP: 3rd

The roll of the dice on medium tyres for the sprint was the biggest issue with Marco Bezzecchi's weekend - as, despite not encountering the same awful blistering as fellow medium-tyre runner Jack Miller, he simply had no pace and came home in a sixth position flattered by attrition.

Good pace on the same tyre earlier in the day meant there was some logic, but the gamble backfired.

Yet equally surprising was that, having seemingly arrived into the weekend on top of Martin and the other Aprilias, Bezzecchi suddenly had no answer to his team-mate in the most important sessions.

But also, these 20 points could have been zero. He very nearly had the same crash in the damp early in FP1 that took Nakagami out of the weekend.

Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 8th GP: 5th

Raul Fernandez came to Motegi with lingering worry about his performance at so-called 'stop-and-go' tracks this season - and was relentlessly positive about his feeling on the weekend in that context.

He was struggling on corner entry on Friday but had underlying top-10 performance comfortably and showed it on the other two days, with the grand prix ride to fifth under pressure from Acosta and Ai Ogura particularly impressive (also because he had to manage "very big consumption" on the fuel side).

Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 2nd GP: DNF

The Sunday crash, from "just touching the throttle and losing the front" while not really pushing, took the shine off the weekend - but the Saturday podium was more valuable to Diogo Moreira and Honda than any realistic result on Sunday would have been.

"One of the most talented riders I've ever seen, riding every different type of bike," good friend Marc Marquez raved, referencing Moreira's abundance of dirt-track skill but also, of course, his performance in MotoGP so far this season.

Add to it that he was fresh off surgery to remove a screw from his left wrist, and that puts some extra gloss on the achievement.

Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: DNF GP: 7th

At a track where so much was expected of Acosta, he places the lowest he's been in these rankings since Jerez five months ago. That reflects, more than anything, the fact that for the first time in a really long time someone within KTM had his number - which will be easier to take after the Austria win.

Acosta cannily latched on to Bezzecchi in Q2 to secure a front row start, but didn't capitalise in either race.

He says the principal issue on Sunday was simply a mismatch between his bike and the hard rear tyre - but admitted that alone can't explain "that Enea was that fast and I was that slow".

Obviously the sprint was a write-off due to the Alex Marquez induced pile-up - but he was in the firing line to begin with because he was being overtaken by Bastianini.

Qualifying: 11th Sprint: 5th GP: 6th

Fourth of four Aprilias in most sessions, Ogura looked more like you would have expected he would at his first race back post-injury in Austria a fortnight ago - though still he was never terribly far off.

He battled locking on Friday and lacked acceleration on Sunday, which didn't help to get through on Trackhouse team-mate Fernandez (the "messy" battle with Acosta didn't, either).

But it was a healthy return of points in the end (thanks also to a strong sprint), given he seemingly just wasn't really in the groove.

Qualifying: 6th Sprint: DNF GP: 18th

Somewhat of a 'default' ranking for Fabio Di Giannantonio, who was banged up through zero fault of his own after the multi-bike crash in the sprint.

He was putting together a fairly promising weekend before that (though left it until the last second to secure a Friday top-10), but just wasn't fit to achieve anything much after the "big hit" to his ribs and hip on the right side.

Qualifying: 13th Sprint: DNF GP: 8th

It was a far, far, far-far-far cry from the heights of his 2025 outlier glory weekend, but did look more like the respectable Austria than the truly dreadful Pecco Bagnaia weekends that came right before.

He made a Q1 error but the pure pace was Q2-marginal at best, and the sprint wasn't going anywhere great before he so dramatically ran out of rear rubber.

In all that context, the grand prix was quite good - but the contrast to last year was upsetting for Bagnaia. "It's not a lack of feeling," he insisted. "I cannot do what the fastest riders do."

Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 10th GP: 9th

Aldeguer, who had had leg surgery in the lead-up to Motegi in the hopes of aiding his continued recovery from the off-season femur fracture, probably should have run with Acosta and the Trackhouse riders - but made his own weekend too difficult.

He narrowly missed out on a Q2 spot on Friday - 0.004s the difference - and then botched Q1, lapping slower than the day before and placing himself on row six.

Options were limited from there, as Aldeguer made tidy but unremarkable progress.

Qualifying: 16th Sprint: 11th GP: 10th

Marini had to salvage a "really bad" weekend, which was compromised by a seemingly innocuous early crash on Friday afternoon - that cost him a key tyre set, he lost feeling and even when the opportunity presented itself to follow Marc Marquez for a fast lap, he couldn't capitalise.

He was outmatched in Q1 again and quiet in the sprint but found joy in the hard rear on Sunday, smoothing things over with a 10th place as, somehow, Honda's top finisher - which he so often is without having lights-out pace.

Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 13th GP: 16th

Alex Rins's weekend was unfortunately more notable for the showy lift he got from Miller than anything he could do on track.

Crashing on his first flying lap on Friday afternoon probably didn't help, but ultimately it was a Japanese GP very much in the Rins-at-Yamaha mould - outmatched badly over one lap, quietly solid in race pace, completely unnoticed.

Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 15th GP: 14th

What fresh twists await us in the final races of the Maverick Vinales/KTM partnership, we shall see, but this was a nicely conventional return.

Vinales wasn't faster than pre-absence but nor was he, really, slower despite the lack of recent mileage - both for muscle mass and in the fact he "doesn't trust" the bike yet.

He was nowhere in qualifying but solid enough in both races, though he did run low on energy at the end thanks to Motegi's physical nature.

Qualifying: 22nd Sprint: 17th GP: 17th

Toprak Razgatlioglu had only done Motegi in a video game before, but seemed to do OK relative to his recent form - even if qualifying is still missing completely.

He also blotted his copybook in the sprint by going off at Turn 1, but remains less bothered by any individual result (a last-lap defeat to Rins in the GP was met with indifference) than by an overall lack of feel on braking.

He says he is "still not riding relaxed", and that this is "the biggest problem".

Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 7th GP: 20th

Just a bit of a mess overall, recovered somewhat with the three points in the sprint. Zarco was fast enough but clearly on too much of a knife edge, as evidenced by the four crashes.

Crash one was while chasing after Alex Marquez on Friday (he was very lucky it didn't cost him Q2), crash two was late on in Q2 because he "wanted too much", crash four was in the grand prix trying to set up a move on Vinales.

But crash three proved most damaging - as Zarco, by his own admission, forgot the rule about re-firing his bike at the side of the track, so was hammered by the stewards for doing so while in the opposite direction to the racing line.

That double long-lap penalty did more damage than any of the incidents.

Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 18th GP: 11th

Brad Binder's Sunday potentially sheds some light on that of his KTM team-mate Acosta - as he and his crew also missed the mark with this hard rear tyre. He said they "toned everything down a few steps" on the set-up trying to protect the centre of the tyre, but instead just blunted his performance to little gain - as "I think we could have done three race distances on it".

So the race was under-par, and the weekend before it likewise, Binder optimistic about going through in Q1 after Friday but crashing instead (which physically limited him for the rest of the weekend) and falling again in the sprint.

Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 16th GP: 19th

This was another weekend that Miller found really, really frustrating, the tone set by a Q1 "f**k-up" that denied him a shot at a more representative grid position.

He was one of two riders running the medium rear in the sprint - Bezzecchi's was mostly fine, but his ended up with "blisters all over".

But that was still the better race of his two. He was left very irritated by what he believed was an overly-conservative approach from his crew to setting tyre pressures - and was in serious trouble, suffering "moment after moment after moment" and then crashing (and remounting), after which he claimed the rear tyre actually cooled down and was nicer to ride.

Qualifying: 14th Sprint: 12th GP: 15th

Franco Morbidelli was surprisingly peppy after the grand prix, which feels out of step with the end result combined with his pedigree and accomplishments as a rider - but there's only so much energy he can expend on this go-nowhere season, and I can accept that.

A deficit of 35 seconds to the winner without the same mitigation that his VR46 team-mate Di Giannantonio had in terms of injury is brutal, and the rest of the weekend was a bit better than that (particularly Q1) but not much better.

Qualifying: 5th Sprint: DNF GP: DNF

This was one of Marquez's best weekends of the year up to Saturday afternoon, and easily his worst from there on.

I believe there's not insignificant mitigation to his role in the multi-bike crash on Saturday, as it seemed he wasn't coming in crazy hot - and was just caught out by Acosta cutting back after being overtaken by Bastianini.

But it was still an error, and Sunday - already compromised by the double long-lap - was very poor in execution, too, from the crash in the warm-up to the sudden exit from eighth in the race caused by an accidental upshift.