Catalan Grand Prix Review

Winner

Fabio Di Giannantonio won the Catalan Grand Prix.

Full classification

What happened

Alex Márquez's Ducati was still cartwheeling down the front straight, front wheel already torn off, when the debris caught Fabio Di Giannantonio and put him on the ground too. That was lap 12 of what was supposed to be a 24-lap Catalan Grand Prix, and it wasn't even the last time the red flag came out.

The chaos started when Pedro Acosta's KTM, leading comfortably after taking pole in 1:38.068, cut power exiting Turn 9. Márquez, running close behind, had no time to react and clipped the rear of the slowing bike. His Gresini Ducati speared off, shed its front wheel, and the wreckage collected both Di Giannantonio and Raúl Fernández in the debris field. According to MCNews's race report, Di Giannantonio "went down after being unable to avoid the aftermath", which makes what happened next genuinely strange: he still won the race.

This one needed three separate starts to reach a finish. The second attempt, over a shortened 13 laps, lasted about as long as it takes you to read this sentence before Johann Zarco made contact with Luca Marini at Turn 1 and took out Francesco Bagnaia in the same movement. Zarco didn't take the third start; Crash.net's coverage of the restart chaos noted the injuries from that crash were serious enough — ligament damage and a fractured fibula — that he was taken to hospital. Marini and Bagnaia, remarkably, both continued.

By the time the field lined up for a third and final attempt — 12 laps, effectively a sprint dressed up as a grand prix — Di Giannantonio had recovered from his earlier spill and gone to work. He passed Bagnaia by lap four, moved past Joan Mir with five laps left, and made the pass that decided the race on Acosta at Turn 10 with three laps to run, holding the inside line through the following corners before easing clear. He crossed the line 1.466 seconds ahead of Fermín Aldeguer, with Bagnaia 4.320 seconds back in third. It was Di Giannantonio's second premier-class win, his first came in Qatar in 2023, 910 days earlier.

Acosta's day did not end there, and this is where you have to hand out blame rather than shrug. On the final lap of the final restart, Ai Ogura tried a pass on Acosta at the very last corner, misjudged the braking, and put Acosta into the gravel. Ogura crossed the line in what would have been fourth; the stewards handed him a three-second penalty for the move, dropping him to eighth in the final classification. Three seconds sounds trivial until you notice how tightly the group behind Bagnaia was packed after two red flags shredded the field, that single penalty cost him five positions. Acosta, who had already lost track position through no fault of his own earlier in the race, didn't finish at all. Two incidents, neither of them his doing, and a DNF to show for a pole lap that had been well clear of the field.

The stewards weren't finished. Post-race, five riders — Joan Mir, Alex Rins, Jack Miller, Toprak Razgatlioglu and Raúl Fernández — were hit with 16-second penalties apiece for low tyre pressure, a sanction MotoGP has leaned on increasingly hard this season. Mir's penalty was the one that mattered: it stripped him off the podium entirely, dropping him to 13th and promoting Aldeguer to second, handing Ducati a podium lockout. Bagnaia faced the same investigation and walked away clean, Crash.net reported stewards accepted his low reading came from a leaking wheel rim rather than a pressure violation, which is either bad luck or a very convenient rim to spring a leak on exactly this Sunday.

Buried in all of it is a smaller story worth a mention and nothing more: Saturday's sprint had already been won by Alex Márquez, holding off Acosta by 0.041 seconds, reportedly the closest sprint finish MotoGP had produced. Twenty-four hours later Márquez was in hospital and Acosta was picking himself out of the gravel for the second time in one Sunday. Whatever thread connects those two results, nobody's written it yet.

What none of the reports out of Montmeló explain is why Enea Bastianini's KTM Tech3 never rejoined for either restart. He's simply listed as a non-finisher, no crash described, no mechanical failure named, no reason given at all.