Marquez on match point: two points on Martin are enough in Portimão

• Marquez leads the championship with 431 points, 60 ahead of Jorge Martin and 74 ahead of Marco Bezzecchi
• If he scores two points more than Martin in the Portimão Sprint, he is world champion
• In the manufacturers’ standings, Ducati is now only eight points ahead of Aprilia

The first match point has gone begging, the second follows in just under two weeks. In Lusail, Marco Bezzecchi won from pole position and led every one of the 22 laps. Marc Marquez finished second, Raul Fernandez third. To clinch the title in Qatar, Marquez would have had to win while Jorge Martin failed to score. Neither happened. Even so, the factory Ducati rider scored more points than any of his rivals that weekend: 32 out of a possible 37. The 2026 MotoGP season now has only two rounds left: Portimão from 20 to 22 November and the finale in Valencia from 27 to 29 November.

What does Marc Marquez need in Portimão to win the title?

Marquez will be world champion as early as Saturday if he scores at least two points more than Jorge Martin in the Portimão Sprint. A Sprint win is therefore enough in any case. Depending on how his rivals fare, however, a mid-field finish could also do the job.

The maths is simple. After Qatar there are 74 points still up for grabs, after the Sprint in Portugal 62. Martin is 60 points behind. If the gap grows to 62 points in the Sprint, Martin could at best draw level, even by winning every remaining race. In the event of a tie at the end of the season, the number of Grand Prix wins decides. Marquez has won seven Sunday races, Martin only one.

If it doesn’t work out on Saturday, a modest result on Sunday should be enough. And after that there would still be Valencia. In the Sprint, Marquez has been the strongest rider in the field this season anyway: he has won ten short races so far.

If he takes the title, it would be his eighth in the premier class and his tenth across all classes. That would put Marquez ahead of Valentino Rossi, who has seven premier-class titles and nine in total.

Why is Marco Bezzecchi still in contention on paper?

Bezzecchi is exactly 74 points behind Marquez, as many as are still available. He would have to win both Sprints and both Grands Prix, and Marquez would have to fail to score a single point. In a tie, Bezzecchi would then have eight Sunday wins, one more than Marquez.

The Italian takes a sober view himself. After his win he said he would need a miracle, but none had come his way this season. He doesn’t want to dwell on it. He sees fighting Marquez and Martin for the title as a privilege. He wants to enjoy the last races and take as much as possible with him for the future. A realistic goal is the runner-up spot, as he is only 14 points behind his teammate Martin.

A look at the whole season shows how it came to this. Bezzecchi was at one point 102 points ahead of Marquez, but failed to score eleven times. Marquez did so six times, all of them before his shoulder surgery in May. Martin has seven pointless races.

Martin raced in Qatar two weeks after breaking his radius at Phillip Island. In the Sprint he climbed from eleventh on the grid to third, and in the Grand Prix he finished seventh. It was his first full race distance since the crash. For Portimão he expects to be almost back at 100 percent. In his own words, though, he doesn’t want to think about the championship. His priority is to end his time at Aprilia well and to win more races before his move to Yamaha.

How did Marquez secure his points in Qatar?

Marquez deliberately let the leaders go early on to save his front tyre. Only in the second half of the race did he attack and take second place.

He was worried about overworking the right side of the front tyre in the opening laps and then struggling with it for the rest of the race. So he preferred to accept a deficit of one and a half to two seconds in the first three or four laps. At one point he even dropped back to fourth, as Pedro Acosta passed him on lap three. He took the position back on lap six. He couldn’t have kept up with Bezzecchi anyway. The Aprilia rider had already been around half a second faster in practice.

Raul Fernandez, meanwhile, was in trouble in second place. A fuel warning came up after just a few laps, so he turned down the engine power. On lap 13 Marquez set a 1:52.558, the fastest lap of the race and a new lap record at Lusail. That took almost nine tenths out of Fernandez. At the start of lap 20 he went past on the main straight. Third place would have been fine for him, he explained afterwards. But he had seen that Fernandez had problems and took the four extra points, because you never know what might still happen.

Bezzecchi won by 3.083 seconds. It was his answer to the Sprint, in which he had crashed after contact with Marquez. It was his sixth win of the season and Aprilia’s ninth Grand Prix win this year. He also made history: he is the first premier-class rider to take his first twelve wins at twelve different circuits.

What is Marquez’s plan for the last two races?

Marquez is switching from attack to management. From now on, what counts for him are the points he needs, not every single win.

He has taken a lot of risk in recent races, says the 33-year-old. Now he wants to work out exactly how many points he really needs. Portimão in particular is on his mind. It can get cold there at the end of November, and the track constantly goes up and down hill. The most important thing for him is to finish the races. Until then he has set himself a simple routine: go home, stay focused, train, eat, sleep, and repeat every day.

By his own account, he feels no rush. It has been a difficult season with many ups and downs for every rider. What matters to him is that he was the rider with the most points in Qatar.

What does Aprilia say about losing the title fight?

Aprilia boss Massimo Rivola does not see the title as a missed opportunity for his team. For him, Marquez won the championship, not Ducati. The Spaniard made the difference, in Qatar too.

Rivola praises how cleverly Marquez manages his tyres and how he plans his weekends. He took maximum points when it was possible and won at the most difficult tracks. Rivola wants to treat the points Aprilia left on the table this season as a lesson for the future. Still, he hasn’t written off the season entirely. It is only over once everything has been decided.

For Aprilia it is now about the other two standings. In the team standings, the factory team leads the factory Ducati team by 124 points. Rivola compares this classification to Formula 1’s constructors’ championship, because it adds up the points of both riders. In the manufacturers’ standings, Aprilia is only eight points behind Ducati. In Rivola’s view, Aprilia would deserve that title. At the same time, he suggests changing the scoring system. Currently only the best rider per manufacturer counts in each race, which means a single Marquez can practically carry Ducati to the front on his own. Rivola openly admits that four Aprilias are sometimes not enough to beat Marquez.

Any of these titles would be a first for Aprilia. The manufacturer from Noale has never won a riders’, teams’ or manufacturers’ title in MotoGP. Ducati is the reigning champion in all three classifications.

Ducati sees the overall package ahead

Ducati team manager Davide Tardozzi considers Marquez today not only very fast but also very mature. The race in Qatar was a good example of that, he says. Marquez knew that Bezzecchi was faster, let him go at the start and then gave everything for second place in the middle of the race.

On the subject of the four Aprilias, Tardozzi points to his own camp: there are six Ducatis on the grid, and sometimes one of the others has won too. In the end, he says, it is the overall package that wins: a fast rider, a competitive bike and functioning sporting and technical leadership.

Tardozzi describes the 102-point deficit after Mugello as painful. But it was precisely this defeat that gave the team the drive to believe in the comeback. Marquez always described his physical condition openly to the team, so it was clear that recovery would take months. Ducati is currently without Francesco Bagnaia. He broke two bones in his right foot in his Sprint crash and needs surgery. He wants to race again in Portimão, but that depends on how he recovers after the operation.

Why is Valentino Rossi bringing up the 2015 feud again?

Rossi is currently releasing his autobiography, and on television the talk also turned to 2015. He says the affair with Marquez still won’t let him go, even after more than ten years.

Rossi wrote the book together with motorsport journalist Giorgio Terruzzi. It runs to more than 300 pages and was published in Italy this week under the title “La mia storia”. The English edition, “My Story”, will be released by British publisher Little, Brown on 25 February 2027 as a hardcover priced at £25 (approx. €30 / $34). An audiobook has also been announced and can already be pre-ordered. There is no information yet on a German edition. The publisher promotes the book by saying that Rossi speaks unfiltered for the first time about his fiercest rivalries, including the clashes with the then 22-year-old Marc Marquez in 2015. Marquez himself said in September that he might read the book, but only after his career is over. One of the key chapters covers the collision at Sepang in 2015, after which the relationship between the two broke down. On Sunday evening Rossi was a guest on Fabio Fazio’s show “Che Tempo Che Fa” on the channel Nove.

There he explained why the story makes him particularly angry. In 2015, Marquez was not even fighting for the championship; the title was contested between him and Jorge Lorenzo. Marquez only cared about making him lose, and in the end he succeeded. When he thinks about it today, he feels exactly the same as he did that evening in Valencia. The fact that this is still the case after so long worries him a little. Sometimes he tells himself in the mirror that he should rather focus on other defeats. But in sport, a defeat simply hurts much more than a victory brings joy.

For context: in autumn 2015, Rossi accused Marquez at a press conference in Malaysia of having ridden against him in the previous race in Australia. In the race at Sepang, the two then fought a hard duel that ended in a collision caused by Rossi. Rossi was penalised and, because of his penalty points, had to start the Valencia finale from the back of the grid. Lorenzo became world champion. Rossi thus missed out on his eighth premier-class title, exactly the title Marquez can now win in Portimão.

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