Marc Marquez claimed yet another 2025 pole position on Saturday at the Qatar Grand Prix, edging his brother Alex (Gresini Ducati) into a familiar second place.
Two major shocks emerged from the baking hot afternoon session at Losail. One was Marquez’s factory Ducati team-mate Francesco Bagnaia falling on his final run, condemning himself to a lowly 11th position on the grid and making a repeat of his victory in America last time out unlikely.
The second big surprise was Fabio Quartararo completing the front row on the factory Yamaha. The 2021 Doha GP winner briefly headed the timesheets with just over a minute of the session remaining, but was then pipped in quick succession by the Marquez brothers.
Fourth and fifth places were claimed by the consistently competitive VR46 Ducatis, with Franco Morbidelli getting the edge on Fabio di Giannantonio on this occasion. Maverick Vinales (Tech 3) repeated his fine qualifying form from the Americas GP by rounding out the second row as the leading KTM rider.
Johann Zarco (LCR Honda), Fermin Aldeguer (Gresini Ducati) and Quartararo’s team-mate Alex Rins will make up row three.
Rookie Trackhouse rider Ai Ogura was the only Aprilia representative to make it into Q2 and responded by qualifying 10th ahead of Bagnaia. Unusually slow in this session was factory KTM rider Pedro Acosta, who could only manage 12th.
Francesco Bagnaia, Ducati Team
Noushad Thekkayil - NurPhoto - Getty Images
Earlier in Q1, Ogura booked his passage into Q2 with a dominant performance. His fastest lap from the first runs at the beginning of the session would have been enough for him to sit out the final attack on fresh rubber, but the Japanese rookie used the opportunity to rub his rivals’ noses in it by going even quicker.
Ogura ended the session with a best time of 1m51.104s and an impressive margin of 0.408s over Rins, who was thus able to join team-mate Quartararo in Q2.
Aprilia had little to celebrate apart from Ogura’s strong improvement on Friday, with factory rider Marco Bezzecchi the fastest to miss out on passage to Q2. But at least the Italian was a tenth quicker than his team-mate Jorge Martin, who
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