It wasn’t just the violent drama of the crash itself that meant Alex Marquez’s tangle with Pecco Bagnaia stole some of the headlines from Marc Marquez taking his first-ever MotoGP grand prix win on something other than a Repsol Honda at Aragon.
It was also the hint of MotoGP’s oldest feud entering its second generation as the incident and its aftermath quickly brought back memories of the series’ most infamous moment in its modern history.
Bagnaia is, of course, mentored by Valentino Rossi - a man no stranger to fights both on and off the track. The most bitter of those ended up being with Marc Marquez.
Rossi’s feud with Marquez kicked off in 2015, when the then-Yamaha racer accused Marquez of interfering in his title fight with team-mate Jorge Lorenzo.
It escalated into contact between the pair at Sepang and a subsequent back-of-the-grid start for Rossi at the final round of the championship that effectively ended his title bid, and it set the tone for a relationship that’s been at best frosty since.
There have been signs that the Marquez/Rossi animosity has been passed on to the next generation before now, of course.
Rossi protege Marco Bezzecchi, in particular, has on occasion fired shots at Marc Marquez, and Bagnaia and Alex have clashed before, most recently when the factory Ducati rider accused the younger Marquez of being a ‘showman’ at Mugello three months ago when Bagnaia was handed a penalty for cruising on the racing line in Marquez’s path.
However, Sunday evening at Aragon was when it became clearest that the battle between the Marquez and Rossi camps is still smouldering, as Bagnaia delivered a blistering tirade aimed at the junior Marquez brother while being backed up by his fellow members of Valentino Rossi's VR46 Academy.
Bagnaia accused Alex Marquez of deliberately causing contact between the pair by refusing to roll off the throttle. It’s talk that (on the surface, at least) Marquez fans are likely to attack as a conspiracy theory, although-slow motion TV pictures of the incident (and according to Bagnaia, Ducati’s internal data, too) seem to back up his claims to an extent.
Similarly, Bezzecchi accusing Marquez of being ‘either blind or deliberate’ when he failed to spot that Bagnaia was overtaking him isn’t exactly calming words - but they’re very much from the Rossi playbook after a number of his run-ins with the elder Marquez between 2015 and his retirement in 2021.
For his part, Alex Marquez didn’t quite calm things down anything either, by striking a rather unconciliatory tone that seemed more to enrage the Italian camp than anything else - something that means the incident is even less likely to be forgotten quickly.
And, of course, stuck in the middle of all of it is Marc - who will take over from Enea Bastianini as Bagnaia’s factory team-mate in 2025. That reality left him playing a rather diplomatic role - not quite rushing to his brother’s defence as he downplayed the contact as a blameless racing incident.
Footage from the pre-podium cooldown room, though, suggested Marc more or less shared Alex's view of what happened - and, in any case, it is difficult to imagine that Marc won't be sticking up for Alex if there's lingering tension, given how famously close the Marquez brothers are.
There has already been much speculation about what exactly next year is likely to bring as Marquez steps into Bagnaia’s world - but if Sunday’s antics are anything to go by, it could well be that we’re in for a no-love-lost relationship between the two new team-mates, one fuelled by the echoes of a feud that’s bubbled under the surface of MotoGP ever since Sepang 2015.
