Why Marc Marquez bets on Jorge Martin to win MotoGP title

Martin toppled reigning champion and long-time title leader Francesco Bagnaia from the head of the 2023 standings with victory in Saturday’s Mandalika Sprint race.

It was the seventh race in a row that the Pramac rider had taken points off factory Ducati star Bagnaia and means the young Spaniard holds a seven-point advantage heading into Sunday’s grand prix, with five further rounds remaining.

“I’ve said already, and I will say again today, that if I need to bet on somebody, I bet on Jorge. But why? Because he doesn’t have any pressure,” explained six-time MotoGP champion Marquez.

“[Martin's] on a factory bike, but not in the factory team. He's not defending the title. If he wins the championship, it’s amazing. If he finishes second, it will be OK because the normal thing is that Pecco wins.

“Pecco now is suffering with what [it] is [to] defend a title, that sometimes it's more difficult to defend a title than to win it.”

“Martin, from what I understand, has a full factory Ducati, exactly the same bike as Pecco. But just in the Pramac team, that has Ducati engineers,” Marquez added.

“So it's more dependent on defending the title or not, the pressure that you have.”

Marquez's team-mate Joan Mir (2020) and Yamaha's Fabio Quartararo (2021) are the other current riders to have a MotoGP title under their belts.

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Marquez’s Mandalika Sprint race ended on the opening lap when he slid off moments after passing Aleix Espargaro for sixth.

But even if he had stayed on, the departing Repsol Honda star insisted he didn’t have the pace to even finish in the points today.

“One of my strong points is always the first laps and [from the] statistics it looks like it's working good, but when you are taking risks from the first lap, sometimes this can happen,” he said.

“I went into Turn 11 a bit too fast. I had to overtake Aleix in turn 10 and then I missed a bit the brake point. I thought that I was under control but it wasn’t. So fully my mistake.

“But already I saw in FP2, before qualifying, that our position was 9th, 10th, 11th. And looking at the pace of the Sprint race, I think even if I finished I would not score points.

"The pace was too fast for our level now.”

Riding injured? ‘It's always that line: Superhero or stupid!’

Jorge Martin was joined on the Sprint podium by injured VR46 riders Luca Marini and Marco Bezzecchi, who are both returning from fractured collarbones. In Bezzecchi’s case, just one week ago.

Marquez knows all too well the dangers of riding straight after surgery, having re-damaged his newly plated right-arm at Jerez 2020.

“When you do these kinds of things, you can be a Superhero, or in case you crash or something and you destroy it again, then there will be big trouble. So it's always that line: Superhero or stupid!

“Today they were Superheros and it was amazing the way that they rode to be on the podium. I mean of course it's not only the bike. When someone does something like Marini and Bezzecchi today, it means those riders are very fast, very good and strong.”