- Marc Marquez left Sepang on Sunday with a 44-point lead over Jorge Martin and 67 over Marco Bezzecchi, per Motorsport.com, after trailing Bezzecchi by 102 points five months earlier.
- The Ducati Lenovo Team rider says his shoulder and arm “don’t recover completely” and that he has found a different way to ride.
- Team manager Davide Tardozzi says Marquez is covering the damage with focus, and a first chance to clinch the title arrives at this week’s Qatar Grand Prix.
Nine Titles, One Stubborn Shoulder and a Win He Refuses to Celebrate
“The shoulder and arm don’t recover completely.” Marc Marquez said it after he won the Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang on Sunday, 1 November, and he offered it as a plain fact about his working life. “It’s about adapting, persevering and finding a different way to ride, looking for things that can help me,” he went on. “But this second half of the season has helped me a lot. Mentally, fighting for a championship is what makes me go fast.”
The win was his seventh grand prix victory of 2026 and the 80th of his premier class career. He started second on the grid, passed his brother Alex, the pole-sitter, on the run to Turn 1, and finished 4.1 seconds clear of Pedro Acosta, who split the two Marquez brothers on the podium. Marquez said he was “approaching it like a time attack and taking risks” and “super focused from the beginning.”
He trailed Bezzecchi by 102 points five months and a day before Sepang. He now leads Martin by 44 and Bezzecchi by 67, with three races left, and the Qatar Grand Prix at Lusail on Sunday 8 November gives him a first chance to clinch. The target is specific: he must outscore Martin by 30 points and Bezzecchi by 8.
The Champion Who Will Not Celebrate Early
Marquez gave the title talk no room. “Yes, it’s more than just a victory, but we still have to get the job done,” he said. Asked directly about the championship, he drew a line under it. “I don’t want to fall into the trap, starting here in front of the microphones, of thinking that it’s already done,” he said, and he came back to the calendar: “there are few races left but many moments.”
His reading of the weekend was precise. Martin, his closest challenger, was injured and eventually withdrew from Sepang. Marquez treated that as an opening. “Jorge was injured, and you cannot afford to give Bezzecchi any momentum,” he said, and he pointed to the circuits ahead as ones that suit the Aprilia rider. From the first practice session he attacked as if chasing a single lap time, then managed the race “in the best possible way.” In the rain-threatened sprint on Saturday he took a different line, vowing to “never lead the race,” and finished second to Acosta.
Asked what the next of those moments would be, he looked to the break. “The next moment is going home and resting,” he said.
From 102 Points Down to the Front
The 102 point gap followed a run of injuries. Marquez broke a foot at Le Mans. A nerve problem, which had emerged early in 2026, was fixed only when that injury pushed him to bring a planned operation forward by a week. He missed the Barcelona round and returned at Mugello, where he struggled.
Tardozzi, the Ducati Lenovo Team manager, remembers it well. He recalled Marquez “struggling in Mugello after not participating in Barcelona, after that bad crash in Le Mans, 102 points from Bezzecchi,” and said “that was almost mid-season.” Then he spoke about where the team stands now. “Being here in Sepang with three races to go, with 67 points ahead of Bezzecchi,” he said, and added that “it makes us proud about our engineers, about the work, and about our rider.”
From Mugello onward, Marquez has been either excellent or worryingly off the pace, and his only podiums of the year have been wins. He has seven. A sprint victory at Phillip Island, together with an injury to Martin, swung the fight clearly his way. Jorge Martin’s Mandalika mistake had already put him back in front of his rival earlier in the autumn.
A Shoulder With a History Back to 2013
Born in Cervera, Spain, in 1993, Marquez has won nine world titles: the 125cc crown in 2010, Moto2 in 2012, and MotoGP in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2025.
A crash at Silverstone in 2013 dislocated his shoulder. Five years later he had surgery on his left shoulder, which had become so weak that it came out almost every time he crashed, and even when he celebrated the 2018 world title at Motegi. A second shoulder operation followed in the winter of 2019. Then, at the 2020 Spanish Grand Prix, he fractured his right humerus, and four major operations marked the years that followed. That injury still affects him six years later. The crash in Indonesia last year that involved Bezzecchi added more complicated shoulder injuries.
He won the 2025 title anyway, his seventh premier class crown and the first in six years, and he did not call it free. “I paid a very high price to achieve it in every aspect, especially physically and mentally,” Marquez said. In August he raced a damaged shoulder into a tight title fight, and Sepang adds a new line to that story.
Covering It With the Brain
Tardozzi spoke about the limits plainly, and his praise comes from inside Marquez’s own team. “He’s clear that he’s suffering,” Tardozzi said. “His right shoulder, his right part, the arm, is not perfect, is not 100 per cent.”
The remedy he describes sits in Marquez’s head and in his daily schedule. “He’s covering this with the brain, the focus,” Tardozzi said. He pointed to the routine away from race weekends: “The focus he has every day in the training, in the gym, with road bikes in the small race track.” Then came the line that says the most: “I never saw in the past a guy so focused every minute of the day.”
Marquez has made the change in his riding public. He has altered the way he rides, as he said himself after the race in Malaysia, and he links his speed to the fight itself. A championship battle, in his own words, is “what makes me go fast.” The body sets the limit, and the head decides how close to it he rides.
A Family Affair and a Qatar Week With Questions
The Marquez family has two riders nursing shoulders. Alex Marquez, the Gresini Ducati rider who started Sunday’s race from pole, carried a shoulder injury from the Catalan Grand Prix and settled for third. He worked as a rear gunner for his brother in the first half of the race, then lost second place to Acosta on lap 10. Marc Marquez pointed to him when the subject came up: “This weekend, I was like Alex Marquez. Let him explain it to you and you’ll understand.” Alex will have surgery on that shoulder and miss Qatar, and he has called his brother lucky in public while the title chase runs on.
The Qatar race arrives with a dispute attached. Yamaha announced that its teams and riders would not travel to Lusail, and MotoGP answered that the manufacturer could face sporting penalties. Tardozzi, asked before Yamaha’s statement, said he was “not concerned.” Marquez said he would head back to Spain and arrive in Qatar at “the latest time possible, Thursday evening.” Asked at the press conference whether MotoGP should race there, he said only: “I prefer to say nothing.”
What an Eighth Title Would Mean
An eighth MotoGP championship would equal the record, and his tally of world titles would reach ten. In 2027 he will share the Ducati team with Acosta, the rider who finished second at Sepang.
Marquez plans to rest at home this week and fly to Lusail with a shoulder that is not 100 per cent and a lead that is large. Qatar is the third-last round, so two races follow it if the title stays open. His own forecast is the same as on Sunday: few races left, many moments.
