Jorge Lorenzo disavows Ducati: "Marc Marquez is not well"

Marc Marquez ended the Spanish Grand Prix with 0 points in the basket after retiring during the second lap of the Jerez race. A bitter weekend at home for the world champion, who also had won Saturday’s Sprint Race, but leaving some doubt is his physical and athletic condition after last season’s shoulder injury. Aspect that wanted to highlight former colleague and rival Jorge Lorenzo, who in fact disavowed Ducati’s official version of the affair.

“Officially Gigi Dall’Igna said that Marquez would show up in Jerez at 100 percent of his condition. And Marc himself, a rider who usually doesn’t go for excuses, asked that there be no talk about his arm – noted Lorenzo speaking live on the Spanish channels of ‘DAZN’ -. But from the outside his gestures say otherwise. Already on the grid in Austin he often touched his shoulder, while in Jerez we saw a peculiar image at his crash at Nieto-Peluqui. On the bike he made a strange movement with his shoulder in the air, and that tells us that he is still not 100 percent well.”

Lorenzo, moreover, expressed big doubts about his former rival’s return to great levels. “I can’t say how Marquez’s shoulder injury will develop. It will have to be seen if he can fully recover, because he may never again be the shoulder he had before his fall in Indonesia,” is the Majorcan’s anathema to the former Yamaha, Ducati and Honda man.

This is not the first time Lorenzo has sounded the alarm bell about his compatriot’s condition. Back in March, after the Thai Grand Prix, the five-time world champion expressed similar concerns to the microphones of ‘Marca.com,’ singling out his right shoulder as the central problem: “You can see that in left-hand turns he is limited. This could shorten his career.” A reading that, in light of what happened in Jerez, now seems more prophetic than ever.

For that matter, even from inside the paddock come signals that confirm the difficulty of the moment. Davide Brivio, navigated manager now in force at the Trackhouse team, had already anticipated the situation in the days before the Spanish Grand Prix: “It would seem that Marc is not 100% of the form, so he is riding in a condition that is not his and he has to make up for the physical deficiencies.” A merciless diagnosis that finds further confirmation in the words of Marquez himself after the Jerez crash: “This weekend I was worth fourth-fifth position. I made the pole and won the Sprint, but in both cases under very special circumstances. We have to grow little by little as a bike-rider package.”

The Jerez crash further aggravates an already complicated standings situation for the world champion. Marquez is now -44 points behind Marco Bezzecchi, the world leader with Aprilia, and the gap is likely to become difficult to close if the physical problems persist. Making Andalusian Sunday even more bitter for the Ducati Lenovo team is the overall context: that of Jerez represents the ninth consecutive race without podiums for the factory team, the worst fast for more than 12 years. Box-mate Pecco Bagnaia, who retired on lap 14 due to a technical problem with the front end, also contributed to the rout of a team that has not been on the podium since the Japanese Grand Prix of 2025, a day that had coincided precisely with Marquez winning the world title.

Benefiting from the official Ducati’s crisis is above all Aprilia, which placed four bikes in the first six positions in Jerez. Not surprisingly, the Noale-based manufacturer’s CEO Massimo Rivola commented bluntly, “We are also benefiting from the fact that Marc Marquez is clearly not right. We have been working great over the winter, and Marco Bezzecchi has the advantage of starting further up the grid than others.” Words that lucidly photograph a reversal of hierarchies that until a few months ago seemed hard to imagine, and that risk weighing ever more heavily on Marquez’s rainbow ambitions should his shoulder fail to return to provide him with the riding fluidity that has made him the most dominant rider in recent MotoGP history for years.