Winners & Losers from MotoGP’s Japanese Grand Prix

At first glance, a 37-point haul for Marc Marquez hardly suggests an unusual or intriguing weekend. But Motegi almost always provides novel sub-plots – and 2026 was, in fact, no exception.

Last-corner penalties, first-lap crashes, a new track surface, Honda’s ups and downs at home and Michelin banning one of its own products were just some of the stories fizzing beneath the top line. While Marquez should be saluted for dealing with everything thrown at him and drawing almost neck-and-neck with Martin in the points race, that’s pretty much expected these days. So let’s look a little deeper as we examine the winners and losers from MotoGP’s Japanese Grand Prix.

Winner: Enea Bastianini

Two years ago, Enea Bastianini took a comfortable fourth place at the Japanese Grand Prix. Such results were pretty much minimum requirement for a factory Ducati rider – but they’ve been hard to come by since he moved to Tech3 KTM for last season. We’ve really only seen flashes of the Bastianini who was impressive enough to earn that works ride in the first place. 

This year’s fourth place at Motegi put the cherry on top of his best weekend of the year – and La Bestia will be hoping that this hint of his old self is no flash in the pan. Encouraging is the fact that Sunday’s ride, in which he very nearly edged past Marco Bezzecchi after a string of late lap records, was not entirely down to his renowned management skills on a tyre everyone had to learn as they went along. He had already made it straight into Q2 on Friday, qualified a commendable seventh on Saturday and would have had a sprint podium but for a tiny track limits on the last corner. 

Beating Pedro Acosta to a grand prix finish on another KTM is always worthy of a mention too. Bastianini managed it way back at Jerez, but this was only the second time it had happened all year.  

Loser: Alex Marquez

Alex Marquez, Gresini Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

It all started so well. The younger Marquez brother topped the times in Friday practice. You got the feeling that here, at last, he might be able to get an increasingly frantic autumn back on track. Qualifying was a little disappointing, but the middle of the second row still set him up for a decent pair of races. 

That all fell to pieces in the braking zone for Turn 3 of the sprint race, when he took out both Fabio Di Giannantonio and Acosta after an ill-judged attempt to pass the former. Every now and then, the ‘old’, tempestuous Alex Marquez surfaces – and this was one such moment. It would have had his critics nodding sagely. 

Marquez doesn’t always help his cause when things start to go wrong on a weekend. Japan provided another example of him compounding his errors. Presented with a double long lap penalty for the sprint mistake, he was unable to bring it quietly home for a few points. Instead, he botched gear changes twice, leading to crashes in both the warm-up and in the grand prix. If the man himself described that as “unacceptable” as he cemented his place at the top of the 2026 official crash charts, who are we to argue? 

Winner: Somkiat Chantra 

Somkiat Chantra, HRC Honda

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

The MotoGP refugee’s one-off (for now) comeback to replace the ill Joan Mir was not meant to be a flag-carrying effort for Honda at Motegi. After all, Chantra was languishing 21st in the World Superbike Championship and his struggles as a MotoGP rookie in 2025 were still fresh in the memory. But his story turned into one of the happy ones on a strange, mixed weekend for the factory. 

Chantra became accustomed to life at the very back of the MotoGP field last season, often by a considerable margin. So to see him at the top of the timesheets midway through the session on Friday morning was quite something. Admittedly there were special circumstances there, but he backed that up with respectable work when it counted. He even outqualified factory team-mate Luca Marini to take 15th on the grid. 

While Marini got the better of him in the grand prix – race fitness may have been a factor there – Chantra still beat no fewer than seven men across the line on Sunday. There was no way you could dismiss his effort as simply the result of Yamaha having taken up permanent residence at the back of the field while he’s been away. 

And lest we forget, the Thai rider also won a race this weekend… edging Acosta in that not-so-serious karting encounter on Sunday morning!

Loser: Fabio Di Giannantonio

Fabio Di Giannantonio, VR46 Racing Team

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

Like Alex Marquez, Di Giannantonio looked to be on course for a par weekend as he got off to his usual decent start. He cruised into Q2 and then qualified sixth for the races. Would he be able to finish a race higher than he started it for the first time since the Assen sprint?

His start wasn’t a bad one, but that put him in prime position to be skittled by Alex Marquez (see above). Apart from being annoyed by the whole thing, the incident left Diggia with pain in both his ribs and his hip. Luck certainly wasn’t running for him in Japan. 

The injuries didn’t improve as he had hoped overnight and the VR46 Ducati rider “struggled a bit to be free on the bike” from the get-go on Sunday. So, while he nosed into the first corner in sixth, he wasn’t up for the jostle and was down to 11th within a few corners. He finished the race, but in a lamentable 18th position. That made for his first zero-score of the season and underlined the lean run he has had since the summer break. After looking like an outside championship contender earlier in the season, he’ll now need to keep a close eye on Raul Fernandez if he even wants to hang onto sixth spot.

Winner: Michelin’s ‘hard’ rear tyre

Pedro Acosta, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing, Ai Ogura, Trackhouse Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

Michelin has endured its fair share of criticism for its rear tyres in recent MotoGP seasons. If the riders weren’t forbidden from voicing their thoughts in public, that criticism would have been even more prominent. And when a couple of soft rears – notably Martin’s and Pecco Bagnaia’s – cooked to pieces in the sprint, it wasn’t a great look either. 

But things turned around dramatically on Sunday as the French manufacturer was finally able to bask in some glorious praise. Once it forced the riders to try the ‘hard’ rear (actually soft rubber with a reinforced carcass) they had been ignoring all weekend, it turned out the racers loved it. It is rare to hear them raving about a tyre after a race, but rave they did.

It might be considered ironic that it took a chunked soft tyre and a bunch of emergency meetings for Michelin to finally get such positive feedback at the end of a grand prix. And that the accolades came so close to the end of its contract as it makes way for Pirelli next season. But credit where it’s due – and you suspect the marketing team will want to bottle some of those quotes for future use.

Loser: Pedro Acosta

Pedro Acosta, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

The fairytale had come true in Austria. And fresh MotoGP winner Acosta was being talked up as a potential repeat victor given his and KTM’s liking for Motegi. But the Japanese Grand Prix reminded us all that fate doesn’t often dish out back-to-back fairytales. 

The newly laid surface at Motegi rather tore up that widely-quoted circuit form book, but Acosta was there or thereabouts anyway. Second-fastest on Friday and third in a tight qualifying session, he seemed a reasonable bet going into the sprint. After all, he and the team had weight off their shoulders and didn’t really have a championship fight to worry about. 

We’ll never know what Acosta could have produced in the sprint, however, because he was the first of Alex Marquez’s lap one victims. On Sunday, he just wasn’t at the races and was unable to explain why in the immediate aftermath of his seventh place. Disregarding non-finishes, it was his worst grand prix result since the 10th spot at his bogey circuit at Jerez.

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