How Márquez won it

The race was shaped at the first corner. Raúl Fernández, starting from his first MotoGP pole, and Marco Bezzecchi, second on the grid, both went down at Turn 1 as the pack braked hard behind them. Two front-row Aprilias were out before the end of the first lap.

Jorge Martín, from fifth on the grid, came through to lead and built a gap of more than a second. Then, with five laps left, he suddenly eased off and let Márquez through. The reason was tyre pressure. According to Grande Prêmio, Martín explained that the changing temperature and humidity at Mandalika cooled his front tyre more than expected. With the pressure below the minimum and no way to raise it while leading in clean air, he let Márquez pass to tuck in behind him and avoid a possible eight-second penalty. “We win and we lose together,” he said of the Aprilia set-up error.

Martín stayed in Márquez’s wake until the second-to-last lap, when he ran wide and dropped to fourth. Ai Ogura took second on the Trackhouse Aprilia, half a second behind Márquez, with Fabio Di Giannantonio third. “You have to chase luck,” Márquez said afterwards. Pedro Acosta was sixth after a long-lap penalty for track limits.

Championship standings after the Mandalika Sprint

With 210 points left (25 in Sunday’s Grand Prix and 185 across the last five rounds), a four-point lead is almost nothing. Martín needs to outscore Márquez by five points on Sunday to go back in front: winning with Márquez second would do it, and so would finishing third with Márquez sixth. A Márquez non-finish, the outcome of every previous Mandalika Grand Prix, would hand the lead straight back. The Grand Prix starts at 15:00 local time on Sunday (08:00 UK, 13:00 Bangladesh). For how the points work, see our guide to championship scoring.

What makes Márquez’s Mandalika record strange is that there’s no clear pattern. It hasn’t been the same problem each year:

As Grande Prêmio put it in its analysis of the run, the four weekends don’t point to a single recurring weakness: a medical issue, a crash, a mechanical failure and a collision. That’s both reassuring and worrying for Ducati. Nothing is broken that needs fixing, but nothing guarantees it won’t happen again. His one Mandalika podium came in the 2024 Sprint, so he can be fast here. He just hasn’t got to the end on Sunday.

Márquez’s perfect Motegi weekend, a Sprint win and a Grand Prix win, turned a 12-point deficit into two. Martín finished second in the Grand Prix, a strong recovery after his Saturday tyre problems and penalty.

Each round is worth up to 37 points: 12 for a Sprint win and 25 for a Grand Prix win. With six rounds left, 222 points remain. At Mandalika, the maths is simple: whoever finishes ahead in the two races leaves Indonesia leading the championship. If Márquez finishes ahead of Martín in either race by enough places, he takes the lead for the first time since the summer. A Márquez non-finish on Sunday, on the other hand, could hand Martín a lead of 20 points or more.

Bezzecchi, 49 points back, is still in the fight mathematically and is the joker in the pack: if he takes points off both of them, it keeps him in contention. Our guide to how racing championships are scored explains the points systems in more detail.

Mandalika is hot, humid and hard on tyres, and Michelin usually brings a heat-resistant rear tyre with a stiffer construction. That matters for the title fight. In an analysis for Motor Sport, quoted by MotoGPNews, journalist Mat Oxley argued that the stiffer casing reduces grip across most of the tyre but not at the edge. That suits riders and bikes that carry high corner speed, like the Aprilias, more than the stop-and-go style that has worked so well for Ducati.

Oxley pointed to Fermín Aldeguer, last year’s winner, as the Ducati rider Márquez should study, because Aldeguer “uses more corner speed” than other Ducati riders and suffers less with that tyre. He suggested Márquez would be looking at Aldeguer’s braking data, trying to carry more speed into and through the corners.

There’s form to back the theory. Italian site GPOne noted that Bezzecchi won the Mandalika Sprint in 2025, and that the Aprilias went well at several of the remaining tracks last year, including Phillip Island, Portimão and Valencia. Qatar, where Márquez won both races in 2025, looks like his strongest remaining venue, and Sepang was a weak track for Bezzecchi.

Two other storylines are worth watching. Honda test rider Aleix Espargaró replaces the injured Joan Mir, and Bagnaia, eighth in the standings, will be looking for a much better weekend than last year, when he crashed out. For the riders’ 2027 plans, see the MotoGP 2027 rider line-up.

The Pertamina Mandalika International Circuit on the island of Lombok is a 4.3 km street-style track with 17 corners. It brought MotoGP back to Indonesia in 2022, a quarter of a century after the series last raced in the country at Sentul in 1997.

Martín’s Mandalika record is mixed too: a crash from the lead in 2023, then victory in 2024 on his way to the title. In 2025, Pedro Acosta finished second and Álex Márquez third behind Aldeguer, while only 14 riders made it to the flag. Our profiles of Pedro Acosta and Álex Márquez, and our Gresini Racing guide, cover two of last year’s podium finishers.

Both the 13-lap Sprint on Saturday 10 October and the 27-lap Grand Prix on Sunday 11 October start at 15:00 local time (WITA, UTC+8).

In the UK, the weekend is live on TNT Sports, with free highlights on YouTube afterwards. It’s the same weekend as Formula 1’s Singapore Grand Prix, which starts at 20:00 local time on Sunday, so motorsport fans can watch both.