MotoGP Race Report: Ducati's House. Ducati's Rules.
Back at Mugello, Aprilia won the Italian Grand Prix and celebrated by announcing that Mugello was their house now.
"Questa adesso e casa nostra."
Lovely. Confident. A little bit cocky. Exactly the sort of thing you should say after walking into Ducati's front room and beating them in it.
Ducati apparently kept the spare key.
Three months later, Misano delivered a fairly emphatic reply. Marc Marquez won, Alex Marquez finished second and Ducati took its sixth consecutive Grand Prix victory at the circuit. Aprilia's best finisher was Jorge Martin, 14 seconds away in fifth. Marco Bezzecchi, the man who looked most likely to stop all of this happening, made it as far as Turn 13 on lap one.
It was difficult to imagine a more Aprilia start to the afternoon.
Bezzecchi had pole, the home crowd, genuine winning pace and one very obvious problem to solve. Marc Marquez had beaten him away and outbraked him at the start repeatedly across the weekend. If Bez wanted to control the Grand Prix, he needed to stop that happening.
So he did.
Marquez launched well again, but Bezzecchi was having none of it. He braked later, held the Ducati out and took the lead. It was assertive, committed and exactly what the occasion required.
About half a lap later he fell off.
Coming through the frighteningly quick right-hand section after Curvone, Bezzecchi lost the front at Turn 13 and slid out of a race he had spent all weekend looking capable of winning.
The cruelty of it was that Aprilia boss Paolo Bonora had said on the grid only minutes earlier that the message to his rider was patience. Don't overstress it. Let the long race come to you.
Bez instead got the lead immediately and then asked too much of the front tyre before the first lap was finished.
He sat in the garage afterwards for several minutes looking like a man who had just remembered leaving the oven on while boarding a flight to Australia.
For a rider with a real chance of becoming world champion, it was a horrible mistake. Not a mechanical failure. Not somebody else's accident. Just a very fast motorcycle, a tiny margin and one expensive lapse of judgement.
Bezzecchi's disappearance should have made the rest straightforward for Marquez.
Jorge Martin had other ideas.
Martin arrived at Misano openly admitting he did not have the outright pace of Bezzecchi and Marquez. For a while on Sunday, somebody had forgotten to tell the motorcycle.
He attacked Marquez into Turn 4, squeezed through and took the lead. Then he started edging away.
This was not supposed to happen. Martin had spent much of the weekend being discussed as the third man in a two-man fight and suddenly he was at the front of Aprilia's home Grand Prix with clean air and the world champion behind him.
For a few laps it looked excellent.
Then Marquez stopped being polite.
The Ducati came back onto Martin's rear wheel and Marc used Turn 6 to retake the lead. It was neat rather than violent. A lap or so later Alex Marquez arrived and did essentially the same thing in essentially the same place.
Martin went from leading the race to third without anybody needing to throw a motorcycle at him.
Then Pedro Acosta arrived.
There are weekends when the KTM looks like a motorcycle and weekends when it looks like a personal grievance Pedro Acosta has agreed to wrestle in public.
Misano started closer to the second category.
By Sunday afternoon Acosta was somehow fighting for the podium again.
He spent the race making the RC16 do things it appeared reluctant to do, particularly through the fast stuff, where the handlebars were occasionally having a separate conversation from the rest of the bike. In the slower braking zones he was magnificent.
He fought Alex Marquez hard early on, lost out, regrouped and then went after Martin. The move came at Turn 8 and with it went Aprilia's final place on the podium.
Acosta finished third, only 2.326 seconds behind the winning factory Ducati. Considering where KTM had looked earlier in the weekend, it was another of those rides that makes you wonder what he'll do when somebody eventually gives him a bike that doesn't require quite so much negotiation.
Fermin Aldeguer came home fourth after setting the fastest lap of the race, another Ducati in the top four and another little red flag for everyone who hoped Borgo Panigale might be losing its grip.
Once Marc had retaken the lead, the second half of the race became increasingly familiar.
He found the extra few tenths, stretched the gap and made the whole thing look calmer than it had any right to. Alex, meanwhile, had produced a superb recovery from ninth on the grid after a miserable qualifying Saturday and settled into second.
The margin at the flag was 0.657 seconds. Close enough to look respectable, never quite close enough to suggest Marc had lost control.
It gave Ducati a one-two at Misano, Marc his seventh premier-class victory at the circuit and the factory a sixth successive Sunday win here.
It also did something rather more important.
Marc Marquez now leads the MotoGP World Championship.
Technically, he doesn't have a points advantage at all. He and Martin are level on 274, with Marc ahead on countback. But that sentence would have sounded completely deranged when MotoGP last visited Italy.
After Mugello, Marquez was 102 points behind. Seven Grands Prix later, the deficit has gone.
He has taken 85 points out of Martin and 135 out of Bezzecchi across that run. The bloke who effectively wrote off his own championship after returning from another operation is now sitting at the top of it.
There are still eight rounds to go, so nobody sensible is engraving anything. But the direction of travel is difficult to miss.
Francesco Bagnaia's weekend somehow became worse.
On Sunday he crashed at Turn 2 on lap five.
That makes four DNFs in his last five Grands Prix. Watching a double world champion and Ducati's most successful Grand Prix rider reduced to simply trying to trust the front of his motorcycle is becoming genuinely uncomfortable.
The strange thing is that it happened on a day when Ducati otherwise looked almost embarrassingly healthy.
So, about that house...Aprilia were entitled to enjoy Mugello. They went to Ducati territory, beat Ducati and celebrated accordingly. 'This is our house now' was funny because they'd earned the right to say it.
That's how sport works.
Unfortunately, sport keeps receipts.
At Misano, Bezzecchi started on pole and crashed from the lead before completing a lap. Martin led, was passed by both Marquez brothers, then by Acosta, and eventually finished fifth. Ducati finished first, second and fourth, won here for the sixth year running and left with a Ducati rider leading the championship for the first time in 2026.
Nobody from Bologna needs to say anything.
They've changed the locks.
