Marc Marquez is the King of the Aragon Grand Prix with six premier class victories in northeastern Spain, four more than any other MotoGP rider including Jorge Lorenzo.
Just four times over the previous 14 runnings of the Aragon GP ahead of the 2025 race have non-Spanish riders won at MotorLand Aragon. Casey Stoner even secured two of those wins over the first two editions, as the Australian won for Ducati in 2010 and with Honda in 2011.
Spanish success then exploded with Dani Pedrosa, Marquez, Lorenzo and Alex Rins giving their home crowd a hero to hail at every Aragon GP from 2012 to ‘20. Marquez and Lorenzo even won every Aragon GP from 2013-19 between them, and the former won again in 2024.
Marquez scored his first win on a Ducati at the 2024 Aragon GP for satellite team Gresini, for whom he also won the Sprint Race that weekend, after leaving the factory Honda outfit. The Cervera native even achieved his sixth pole position and fourth fastest lap for the Aragon GP.
Marc Marquez ‘destroyed’ Jorge Lorenzo’s 2018 Aragon Grand Prix with a Turn 1 crash
Lorenzo had the chance to add to his two Aragon GP wins from 2014 and 2015 with Yamaha when the 2018 MotoGP season hit the circuit in Alcaniz, as well. Yet an incident at Turn 1 on Lap 1 of 23 with Honda hero Marquez saw the then-Ducati rider crash out of the Grand Prix.
Palma native Lorenzo edged his Ducati teammate Andrea Dovizioso to pole position for the 2018 Aragon GP by only 0.014s with a 1:46.881 lap. Marquez secured P3 on the grid with a 0.079s deficit to Lorenzo, yet the Honda rider got a strong start to fight for the lead into T1.
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But Marquez bogged down on the exit of Turn 1 after shooting up Dovizioso’s inside, which forced Lorenzo to react and he highsided. The three-time MotoGP champion also suffered a dislocated toe and a subcapital fracture of the second metatarsal on his right foot due to it.
The incident enraged Lorenzo, who pointed the blame entirely at Marquez after the Honda rider’s move for the lead of the 2018 Aragon GP ‘destroyed’ the Ducati star’s race and foot. Dovizioso also got the lead with Marquez running wide, but the Honda hero won by 0.648s.
Lorenzo explained after the 2018 Aragon GP, via quotes by Autosport: “From the outside, [it looked like] I entered too fast, leaned too much and entered too wide on the dirty part [and] that’s why I crashed.
“From what I experienced, I entered on the normal line – as I did the last seven years – but I watched Marc go to the inside, very aggressively, not making the corner because you saw where he finished, in the green [paint].
“When he saw I was there, he tried not to let me pass into the corner, and I didn’t have any option [but] to go to the dirty part because we were very wide and the other riders were already coming. If I didn’t want to lose five or six positions, I had to open the throttle.
“In Misano, the crash was completely my fault. This time, Marc destroyed my race [and] destroyed my foot, destroyed also the big possibility I had to win.”
Jorge Lorenzo and Marc Marquez became teammates at Honda for the 2019 MotoGP season
Lorenzo and Marquez’s incident in the 2018 Aragon GP came just two weeks after the Ducati star also failed to convert pole position into the win at the San Marino Grand Prix. But unlike at Aragon, the Spaniard could only blame himself for crashing with two laps to go at Misano.
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Dovizioso was strolling to victory at Misano with Lorenzo and Marquez occupying the rest of the podium places as the 2018 San Marino GP approached a finish. Yet Lorenzo lost his front tyre into Turn 8 and would only finish in 17th place plus 46.614s off the lead after re-joining.
The two incidents combined to mark the start of a sorry end to Lorenzo’s time at Ducati. The Palma native would only finish one further Grand Prix for the Borgo Panigale factory in 2018, as he came P12 in Valencia. Ducati replaced Lorenzo with Danilo Petrucci for the 2019 term.
And despite the tensions that boiled over after Lorenzo and Marquez’s incident in the 2018 Aragon GP, the two Spaniards became teammates at Honda in 2019. Lorenzo replaced Dani Pedrosa at Honda, yet he retired at the end of 2019 after failing to get a single top-10 finish.
