The Mugello MotoGP sprint drove home a major theme of the 2025 season, which is that the '25 title fight only exists as a contest between two. In one corner, Marc Marquez. In the other corner, Marc Marquez's DNF rate.
Marquez had spent the entirety of the Italian Grand Prix weekend so far talking about damage limitation relative to rivals Alex Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia. For both of them, Mugello is on the higher end of the circuit favourability chart - for Marc it is one of the worst.
He offered up the same talking point again after the sprint, though it felt more than a little difficult to take seriously. "That was not the main target," he insisted of the win. "The main target was to try not to lose a lot of points."
I don't doubt that assessment is earnest, but it clashes with the objective reality of Marquez absolutely blowing the start due to having to play around with the launch control device - and then it costing him nothing as he executed a blink-and-you'll-miss-it charge back to the lead.
Just milliseconds before the start 👀
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) June 21, 2025
This is what happened to @marcmarquez93 👇#ItalianGP 🇮🇹 pic.twitter.com/iUd0x46N1S
This tipped his hand as to how much performance is hiding in reserve. Marquez presumably couldn't afford to hang around in the slipstream spiking his front tyre temperature in the Mugello heat, so he cut through his rivals like a knife through butter, the pace to do so available on demand.
The paradox of his season is underlined by the fact that it genuinely feels like the start issue made it easier for this win to happen.
Any sign of weakness from Marquez in 2025 has come when he has been trying to pace himself in the early laps, modulating the speed with the tyres at peak grip, trying to control how much he pushes.
It's almost as if his underlying performance in 2025, so clearly the best on the grid in every race save for massive outliers (like Silverstone with its weird tyre stuff and Le Mans with the weather), has been giving him too many options of how to attack races, and he's been getting lost in the possibilities.
Unbelievable scenes 🤯 🤯 @marcmarquez93 tried but could not save this one and crashed 💥#SpanishGP 🇪🇸 pic.twitter.com/eP4fXZADZH
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) April 27, 2025
If it's armchair psychology, it's only a little bit. Marquez has spoken a lot about his grand prix errors at Circuit of the Americas, Jerez (above) and Silverstone, and seems to have largely zeroed in on focus and concentration and strategy as being the answer - rather than anything to do on the bike to give him more margin.
But the Mugello sprint, in those early laps of peak tyre grip, gave him no real options. The only option was to gun it to the front, and faced with that clarity Marquez executed the fightback with shocking ease.
His brother seemed to more or less expect it, but Bagnaia sounded genuinely stung post-race. "Honestly, I feel a bit disappointed. Unluckily this season I can't do what I know how to do," he acknowledged.
Bagnaia should be stronger on Sunday. He may well win - but the range of conditions and layouts in which he has his team-mate's number this year seems slim-to-nonexistent.
For himself, and the rest of the MotoGP grid hoping to make a dent in Marquez's supremacy, DNFs remain the only possibility. There is nothing else.
He has been so fast that no conventional in-race setback that isn't a straight-up crash is enough to stop him coming through. Arguably, today it may have even helped.
