Yes, before you say it, you’re right – the 2026 Australian Grand Prix at Phillip Island didn’t quite happen. We are grading an extremely incomplete weekend.
But a MotoGP race did happen at Phillip Island and was potentially, unfortunately, the most pivotal MotoGP race of the year in terms of the title fight. It was also a really good one, and clearly treated as a proper contest by the participants.
Because of this, and the relevant preceding context of the weekend’s 1,276 MotoGP laps before the sprint, here is our ranking of the premier-class performers at Phillip Island.
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 1st
When it comes to riders taking on Marc Marquez in a title fight, I think the myth does almost as much work as the man. His rivals cannot help but feel the inevitability with which his triumphs are spoken of, and they certainly cannot ignore his track record.
But you need some myth-making to keep the myth at its most potent. And Marquez’s performance on Saturday morning was exactly that – a ritual humiliation of the rest of the grid that sent a message of ‘you really should beat me in the dry, because you can’t live with me in the wet’.
The lap that he crashed on at the start of Q2 began with a 24.394s first sector. Over the rest of Q2, only Johann Zarco even got within a tenth of that. Marquez wasn’t fighting Zarco, or his brother, or Jack Miller – he was fighting the ground.
The more conventional sprint conditions made him sweat a bit more, but he was relentless in keeping the pressure on Martin – which turned a likely defeat into a pivotal victory.
Admittedly, brother Alex went easy on him, and Fabio Di Giannantonio may have been quicker, too. But I don’t actually believe that Marc was ever losing that race once Martin went down – regardless of familiar or manufacturer ties.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 7th
If this wasn’t the best Miller has looked as a MotoGP rider at Phillip Island, it wasn’t too far off at all.
He was the quickest Yamaha rider in every session that ran, and quickest by a lot in wet/mixed conditions, living up to his reputation.
A fifth-to-eighth in the sprint (then eighth-to-seventh thanks to Ai Ogura’s post-race penalty) was widely recognised as valiant given the Yamaha’s lack of performance on the main straight. “Poor guy was standing still” was how Brad Binder described it.
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 2nd
A high-quality weekend from a rider who I’ve never really associated with Phillip Island success – despite track characteristics that should suggest a degree of favourability.
While Marc made the rest of the grid look like ‘little brothers’, Alex proved the most credible combatant, and perhaps could have won the sprint had he avoided the early tussle with Acosta.
Once it was just down to him and Marc, though late in the race, Alex pretty clearly settled for second. I can’t say I blame him in this particular situation.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 5th
The performance picture within the KTM ranks across the various conditions of this curtailed weekend is a little murky, but there’s little question Acosta got the most out of the RC16 – despite finding the bike insufficiently stable.
He adopted a ‘charge, then defend’ strategy for the sprint, with a very impressive first run through the Southern Loop corner and then ultimately no real hope of beating the bikes ahead but enough pace to coast comfortably to an impressive top-five.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: DNF
The standout of a diminished Honda roster – by a lot in the wet, by a negligible/unclear margin in the dry.
There’s a lot to be said for Zarco’s sheer dependability when it comes to a damp track, and his medium front gamble in the sprint (nobody else ran it) looked to be paying off in the early laps of the contest.
We’ll never know what the downside would have been later in the race because an apparent electronics problem removed him from the contest.
Qualifying: 14th Sprint: 9th
You should know that the Phillip Island round of this past World Superbike season was Lecuona’s worst – though much more through an extremely compromised pre-season and sped-up bike adaptation than any kind of track-specific struggles.
Here, save for a couple of crashes, he was super-good again as a stand-in for Fermin Aldeguer. He is clearly faster than one Ducati regular (Franco Morbidelli), maybe faster than another (Pecco Bagnaia) and faster than his race results suggest, given a certain MotoGP-rustiness does come out in the early laps of races.
This is now three weekends of extremely credible MotoGP production from Lecuona on short notice. I didn’t believe it before – but I am legitimately starting to wonder whether Lecuona, who will again deputise for Aldeguer at Sepang, could be more in this paddock in the future than just a cameo hero.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 3rd
Di Giannantonio is very good at Phillip Island – but dry Phillip Island rather than wet Phillip Island, which meant that his sprint ride was always going to have to make up for a suboptimal qualifying.
He was very lucky, in hindsight, to just sneak into Q2 on Friday – then unlucky to encounter Ai Ogura-shaped traffic on what he believed would’ve been a much better qualifying lap (by two-three tenths) than what he ended up with.
His ride in the sprint from lap two was unimpeachable. Lap one was pretty-pretty bad.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 4th
Bezzecchi was very lucky to get away relatively scot-free with a very clumsy crash into Alex Marquez in Friday practice.
He bounced back from that to end the day quickest, and generally looked through the weekend’s dry-weather portions like the favourite to win.
Unfortunately for him, Q2 wasn’t one of those dry-weather portions, and after a credible performance with more water on track in the preceding practice, he surprisingly struggled in qualifying.
Losing more ground at the start in the sprint (he got boxed in behind Raul Fernandez’s still “low” bike, so lost out to Diogo Moreira and Enea Bastianini) meant it was only ever going to be a salvage job, despite his searing pace.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 8th
Another weekend of solid proof that the second 2027 factory Honda seat – now officially assigned to Moreira – is in good hands.
On Friday morning, at first MotoGP contact with the track, he had found the Honda “impossible to ride”, but it was quickly dialled in and served him well over the rest of the weekend, enabling him to pick up a couple of consolation points for LCR after Zarco’s misfortune.
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: 6th
More competitive than usual as of late – though, like his peers, limited by how the bike behaved in the wind.
A big smoky engine failure to start things on Friday didn’t help, but Binder did a solid job in Q1 and made the most of the start to score a good result in the sole race.
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: DNF
Honestly very impressive for as long as his battered right hand allowed him to be.
Still braking with the middle finger rather than the recovering index finger, Fernandez showed a speed befitting of the defending Australian GP winner (which I guess he still is!) on Friday, and even in the less favourable conditions of Saturday morning.
Inflammation around the fracture meant he had to bail out on the sprint, and Sepang seems in a bit of doubt.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 10th
This certainly wasn’t one of the better Quartararo weekends – he struggled for front feeling even in the dry, and didn’t get anything out of qualifying despite seemingly having the right strategy.
A 10th place from the sole race of the weekend was a solid return, though primarily a consequence of other riders’ misfortune and a more aggressive start than some of his Yamaha peers managed.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 12th
Rins outqualified Quartararo for just the second time this year – by three tenths, too – but just didn’t do enough in the dry to rank ahead of his team-mate.
Last after the opening lap, he made impressive progress through some stragglers before running out of options behind the KTM of Enea Bastianini.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: DNF
A disastrous crash that I have to judge harshly yet I struggle to – because I think Martin saw the same thing that I did, i.e. the spectre of a 10-second Marc Marquez victory in the rain on Sunday at a track which Aprilia had the dry-weather bike to dominate at.
He had assembled a very impressive weekend through practice and qualifying, and through the opening lap of the sprint, but looked ragged and desperate in his attempts to deal with Marc – and so lost the bike, the race and potentially the championship.
I hope he recovers very swiftly and gets an unlikely second chance of taking the fight to his relentless Ducati rival.
Qualifying: 11th Sprint: 11th
Bastianini doesn’t like to deal with any kind of wind on the RC16, so had approached Phillip Island with some trepidation – but vastly overperformed expectations on Friday by waltzing to a Q2 spot.
His bike’s electronics set-up proved unfit for purpose in the wet (and he didn’t get the chance to verify the fix on Sunday), and the sprint pace was mildly disappointing despite a lively start.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 13th
The wet-weather limitations feel increasingly existential for Ogura in MotoGP right now – there is no doubt he is a productive rider, but he does not want to carry a glaring weakness through the years. As he himself admitted at Phillip Island: “I have to plan something! I cannot continue like this for all my career.”
Despite his lack of affinity for the circuit, all the dry-weather bits were totally fine. But he would’ve qualified a distant last if not for the Friday Q1/Q2 split.
He rode a reasonable sprint but hadn’t made quite enough progress in the early going, and then had the accrued points thrown away for a tyre pressure breach, rendering the weekend a waste.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: DNF
Still unfortunately just not fit to ride a MotoGP bike at the level of his ability – particularly at a punishing track like Phillip Island.
Things looked slightly better in the rain, which makes sense, but overall it’s very sad and frustrating, and the only hope now is that shedding the pressures of a full-time schedule will enable Vinales to look like himself again at some point down the line, hopefully in a Ducati test role.
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 15th
Out of practice with the 1,000cc bike and Michelin rubber, Fernandez struggled for pace in the dry – his fastest lap in the sprint nearly two seconds worse than his peers managed, and his predicament such that he quickly lost touch with the pack and couldn’t maintain sufficient front tyre pressure to avoid a (meaningless) post-race penalty.
A minor positive, though, is a commendable performance in the wet qualifying, to beat both Quartararo and Rins.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: DNF
The motivation to dig out any extra meaning from these late-season Pecco Bagnaia weekends is, to put it mildly, waning. He’s tired of the bike, the bike seems tired of him, and the remaining sessions are all busywork.
He was very poor here – he “didn’t do a great lap” on Friday but probably just didn’t quite have the performance for Q2 anyway, then underwhelmed in the Saturday morning rain. He did feel a shot at passage through Q1 was thrown away by the decision to go for a single extended wet medium rear run – but I am honestly not convinced he could have found enough laptime.
He was unusually cagey on the “problem” – seemingly not a mechanical problem – that took him out of the sprint, which was already by then a total write-off.
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 14th
A dreadful low point in a season bursting at the seams with them. It would be better for everyone involved if VR46 sent him home on a get-right mission ahead of his World Superbike switch, and brought in Lecuona to do the remaining rounds.
This might sound harsh, and it is harsh, but nothing at all is working for Morbidelli. He had clearly hoped, not without reason, that a wet-weather curveball would allow him to compensate for his total mismatch with the Ducati GP25 – but even in the wet, this normally assured rain rider looked totally lost.
“Now I seem to not extract anything from this ’25 package” was his blunt admission.
