Qatar Grand Prix, analysis, Maverick Vinales, KTM, Marc Marquez

Marc Marquez – even at north of 350km/h – heard the bike draw alongside him to his right before he laid eyes on it.

When he saw that it was it was an orange-hued KTM, he wasn’t surprised. Until he realised who was riding it.

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“The first time I saw one KTM inside me at the first corner I say ‘[Pedro] Acosta’?,” Marquez revealed after winning the Qatar Grand Prix.

“But, no. It was Maverick [Vinales]. He was riding in a very good way. It was incredible, his performance.”

Incredible? Yes. Surprising? For Vinales, perhaps not.

A decade into his MotoGP career, the 30-year-old Spaniard is still more mercurial than Maverick, capable of days where he looks like the best rider on the grid, and others where you forget he’s even at the racetrack.

Qatar was a case in point. Vinales, having barely fired a shot all season, finished 1.8 seconds behind compatriot Marquez, who has largely run rings around the rest this season, and on a KTM machine that hadn’t been able to spot the podium with a telescope in Thailand, Argentina and Austin leading into Lusail.

Vinales being Vinales, it didn’t last.

Around 90 minutes after the podium ceremony, Vinales was stripped of second place after his KTM had been found to have run with lower than mandated tyre pressures for more than 60 per cent of the race distance. A 16-second time penalty pitched him back to 14th in the classification. The celebratory champagne, suddenly, had a bitter aftertaste.

Simply put, Vinales had been too fast for his own good.

With MotoGP’s convoluted tyre pressure rules – and the penalties that hit those who breach them – teams start races with tyre pressures higher or lower depending on where they expect their riders to be racing in the field.

The deeper you run in the pack, the more disturbed ‘dirty’ air you ride directly into, the resultant heat lifting your tyre pressures to the extent that your tyres balloon, and you lose grip and performance. If you’re expecting to run at the front, you might start races with more pressure than rivals buried in the pack, simply because you have less dirty air to ride into.

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Before Qatar, Vinales hadn’t raced a single Grand Prix lap in the first three rounds in better than 13th place. But in Doha, he spent all 22 laps inside the top five, five of those 22 in the lead. With his team setting a perfectly understandable low pressure at the start – expecting he’d be in the pack and his tyre pressure would rise – those laps Vinales spent up front saw his tyre pressures plummet. The penalty was a slam dunk.

It was the most Vinales way possible to lose a podium, and the most Vinales response imaginable when he did.

“I don’t care too much to be honest, I have the trophy at the moment which is the most important. And, I hope, the [financial podium] bonus as well,” he laughed.

“I’m happy with the result and the performance. It was nice to be back to where I think we can be.”

THE RESULT NOBODY SAW COMING

Marquez wouldn’t have been able to recount Vinales’ 2025 results to pinpoint accuracy when he made his post-race comments in Qatar, but he was right to be taken aback by his compatriot’s cameo at the front.

Nothing that had happened previously this season indicated such a result was imminent, except for that Vinales – perhaps more than any other rider on the grid – has the ability to temporarily throw the form book in the bin.

In the Thailand season-opener – which doubled as Vinales’ first race weekend for KTM after he came across from Aprilia in the off-season – the Spaniard qualified 18th of the 22 riders, finished the sprint outside the points in 14th, and left Buriram scoreless after finishing 16th in the next day’s Grand Prix.

Argentina next time out was better, slightly. A desperately off-the-pace 20th in qualifying and 18th in the sprint race, Vinales finally got off the mark for the season with four points for 12th in the Grand Prix, 22 seconds behind race-winner Marquez.

In round three in Austin, Vinales finally made it into Q2 and qualified 10th, had a mechanical retirement from the sprint, and finished 14th in a bizarre Grand Prix where he was left running down the grid without a bike after the original start was aborted, and where he finished 42secs adrift of race-winner Francesco Bagnaia.

PIT TALK PODCAST: In the latest episode of Pit Talk, hosts Renita Vermeulen and Matt Clayton review Marc Marquez’s victory at the Qatar Grand Prix, discuss the podium finish that wasn’t for Maverick Vinales, what Aprilia do with Jorge Martin sidelined again, and preview this weekend’s Spanish GP at Jerez.

In three rounds, Vinales had amassed six points. But then came Qatar, where he’d won on his Yamaha debut in 2017, and again to open the season in 2021.

Sixth in qualifying was a massive improvement, while 10th in the sprint – despite being his best short-form result of 2025 – was something of a disappointment after he’d been one of eight riders to gamble on the soft-compound Michelin rear tyre, which quickly ran out of grip across 11 laps and saw him drop back.

The next day, and after the entire grid rendered tyre offsets irrelevant by all 22 riders using the medium front/medium rear Michelins for the 22-lap distance, Vinales was a new man. After passing former Yamaha teammate Fabio Quartararo on lap one for fifth, Vinales was in podium contention by lap three when Alex Marquez barged Ducati stablemate Fabio Di Giannantonio off track in a clash that saw Marquez hit with a long-lap penalty, and Di Giannantonio falling all the way to the back.

On lap 10, Marquez had to take a second glance when Vinales passed him for second place at the first corner. One lap later, Vinales rounded up Ducati’s Franco Morbidelli and, stunningly, took the lead.

For the next five laps, he had Marquez – and the rest – in his rear-view mirror.

With seven laps to go, Vinales ran too deep into turn six and Marquez pounced; after Marquez set consecutive fastest laps on laps 17 and 18, it was game over for Vinales and the rest. But Vinales pressed on, and after 41 minutes of racing, he was just 1.8secs adrift of the rider who has won seven of the eight starts this season.

By the time he’d returned to his jubilant Tech3 team mechanics for the podium ceremony, race control revealed Vinales was being investigated for a possible tyre pressure breach that had an air of inevitability about it; when the 16-second time penalty changed the results well over an hour later, the air hissed out of the celebratory balloon.

Still buzzing, Vinales was only willing to verbalise the positives.

“It was nice to be back to where I think we can be,” he said.

“I feel like at home when I was leading the race, to be honest. I was feeling really good. I keep a good rhythm, not enough to beat Marc [Marquez], but we are building it. I’m very happy to ride on my level. I see many good points from my side and my bike.

“We need to be happy. We work on a good way, calm and we believe in ourselves and that’s what we achieve. This needs to be the fire for the next step, so I can’t wait to be back on the bike. We fought against the Ducatis and we show our potential with the KTM.”

Tech3 team boss and paddock veteran Herve Poncharal – enthusiastically verbose at any time when speaking with the media – took a bigger-picture approach after his team lost 18 world championship points almost as quickly as they’d been earned.

“To be honest, our team never expected Maverick to lead for five laps,” he admitted.

“If he had stayed with the group containing Marc [Marquez], ‘Pecco’ [Francesco Bagnaia] and maybe [Franco] Morbidelli the whole time, his tyre pressure would have stayed within the prescribed limit.

“The disappointment is enormous … [but] I’m not criticising these tyre pressure regulations. The Latins say ‘dura lex, sed lex’ which means ‘the law is harsh, but it is the law’. The rules are the same for everyone and I don’t like people who ignore the rules or do anything to avoid the penalties when violations occur. At the same time, I can’t even describe how frustrated I feel.

“I think Maverick rode like he was in a trance, because he felt completely at one with his bike. He even said he didn’t take too many risks, he was in a state where mistakes hardly ever happen. This finish was such a boost for the [KTM] project and a huge boost for the other three [KTM] riders because they now know the bike is capable of podium finishes.

“Normally in such a situation the team has to cheer the rider up … when Maverick sensed a penalty, the whole team was devastated. But Maverick came into the pits and said ‘let’s celebrate, let’s take a celebratory photo, we finished second and I don’t care about the trophy, I can pass it on to ‘Pecco’.’ His attitude was fantastic.”

A CAREER OF CONSISTENT CHAOS

It’s that speed – and bigger-picture thinking – that sees Vinales keep on getting chances in MotoGP despite never quite being able to live up to his obvious potential for any sustained period. His career performance timeline is spiky and bizarre, but consistent with his modus operandi.

The 2013 Moto3 champion, Vinales came to MotoGP with Suzuki in 2015 as a 20-year-old after a single Moto2 season in 2014 yielded four wins and a third-place championship finish. By 2016, he’d won a race (the British Grand Prix of that year) and finished fourth in the standings, showing Yamaha enough that it signed him to replace two-time MotoGP champion Jorge Lorenzo, who departed to Ducati after a long, tense period as Valentino Rossi’s teammate.

Vinales won his first two races with Rossi in the sister garage – and three of the first five of 2017 – to stay in the title fight until late in the season with Marc Marquez (Honda) and Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati), while the following three seasons produced four more wins and a trio of top-six championship finishes.

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Then came 2021, and the season that best defines Vinales’ volatile career.

The winner on opening night in Qatar, Vinales didn’t feature at the front again for the following five rounds, Yamaha replacing his crew chief (and Vinales ally) Esteban Garcia with Silvano Galbusera, Rossi’s former chief engineer.

Then things really got strange.

Two rounds later in Germany, Vinales had a miserable weekend where he qualified 21st and finished 19th on a bike teammate Quartararo placed on the podium, Vinales publicly pinning a lack of rear grip on his team and being made to use Quartararo’s bike set-up, which he felt didn’t mesh with his riding style.

A week later, as rumours surrounding his exit from Yamaha swirled, Vinales took a stunning pole and finished second in the Dutch TT on a bike he later claimed hadn’t been changed one bit from a week earlier, and while looking utterly miserable on the podium. A day after the race, Yamaha announced Vinales wouldn’t see out the final season of his contract in 2022.

In the next round in Austria, Vinales didn’t finish the race after deliberately trying to damage the engine of his YZR-M1 machine by over-revving it, his sabotage clear in Yamaha’s telemetry and captured by the onboard camera on his bike. Yamaha suspended Vinales for the next race, and before the following round at Silverstone, ousted him with immediate effect in a decision described as “mutual”, and after Vinales had already signed with Aprilia for the following season.

The Aprilia project had been largely spinning its wheels as Yamaha and Ducati had become MotoGP’s front-runners, but Vinales took three podiums in 2022 and 2023 before the third round of 2024 in Austin, where he took a breathtaking pole and won both the sprint and Grand Prix.

To this day, Austin ’24 is the last time Ducati didn’t win a Grand Prix – the Italian brand is on a 21-race undefeated Sunday run heading into this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez – and Vinales became the first rider in premier-class history to win Grands Prix with three different manufacturers.

It’s a stat that best encapsulates his occasionally otherworldly talent, and the chaos and combustibility that gets in the way of him capitalising on it for bigger prizes.

Of course, there was more. While Aprilia wanted him to stay as it swapped out retiring veteran Aleix Espargaro for eventual 2024 world champion Jorge Martin for 2025, Vinales instead quit Aprilia two months after his first victory in three years to sign with Tech3 KTM for 2025, leaving a ride with Aprilia’s factory squad for a seat with KTM’s ‘B-team’ alongside former Ducati racer, Enea Bastianini.

At least until Qatar, it was a move that didn’t make a lot of sense.

SO, WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

Jerez this weekend – a track where Vinales has multiple podium finishes – should be a track where the Spaniard should shine. But there a large space between ‘should’ and ‘will’.

You never quite know what Vinales might deliver. He could be at the front fighting with the rampant horde of Ducatis looking to equal Honda’s 22-race all-time winning streak from 1997-98 this weekend. He could be so far down the grid that we barely see him on the TV coverage, and forget he’s even in the race until the standings are shown afterwards. As Qatar showed, predictions are next to worthless.

It’s an unpredictable cocktail that makes Vinales so compelling, so frustrating, so confusing. For any other rider, it would be a death-knell to their career longevity. For Vinales, it’s all part of the experience, and why you can’t take your eyes off a rider who sits in 18th place in a 22-rider world championship after four rounds.

“I know what I’m capable of, so we just need to keep focused, patient, and keep doing the work,” he said in Doha.

“What matters most to me is the performance we’ve shown. We’ve been fighting against amazing riders and bikes, but we believe in our project, in KTM, and the work we’re doing.”

With seven wins from eight starts this season, Marc Marquez clearly hasn’t made a lot of mistakes in 2025. But he was wrong to be surprised by Vinales’ shining showing under the Qatar stars.

The rider who races in the widest possible window of extremes could finish on the podium or at the back this weekend, and the MotoGP world would collectively shrug.

Forget the analysis, and enjoy the ride.