The 2025 Qatar Grand Prix deserves to be a calling card weekend for a particular KTM standout, a particular Yamaha standout and a particular Honda standout.
But none of them totally nailed every phase of the weekend. One rider did - inevitably, he must be number one in this edition of our rankings.
The idea behind the rider rankings is to grade riders' performances all through the MotoGP weekend - though primarily the sessions that actually count towards something - in how impressive they really were.
I base it on what I think I know about those riders' machinery, performance level and outside circumstances - but it's not an exact science, and your own ranking may of course differ hugely. It's often more fun if it does.
Qualified: 1st Sprint: 1st Grand Prix: 1st
Marquez had entered the weekend with a bit of trepidation, which maybe overstated his past propensity for struggle at Lusail - he's not been fantastic there, but hardly horrific either.
Still, what phenomenal execution. This looked like a weekend in which he would rein in the daytime session and get reeled in in the cooler, higher-grip evening races, but once all cards landed on the table he'd had the best hand once again.
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The only fault was that Turn 1 moment at the start, losing the rear and getting off the throttle and getting a big whack from brother Alex that could've been so much worse. But it wasn't, and he made up for it by dictating the pack in the early stages in classic Andrea Dovizioso (or maybe Pecco Bagnaia!) style, then asserting his authority once the tyres dropped.
Qualified: 6th Sprint: 10th Grand Prix: 14th
Two things are keeping Vinales off the top spot here. The first one is the tyre pressure penalty - but I could be persuaded there. I don't think the illegal tyre pressures would've massively inflated his performance, and while his claim that he wasn't looking at his dash so had no idea if there was a tyre pressure warning is a bit strange, ultimately it's not really his fault that he ended up in a race scenario they hadn't prepared for - i.e. leading, which will have kept his front pressure down.
But the other thing there's no talking around - he clearly should not have run the soft tyre in the sprint, it torpedoed his chances at points, and Tech3 KTM boss Herve Poncharal's suggestion it was Vinales' preference means there's really no excuse.
And now, for the fun part - this was awesome. Vinales wasn't just suddenly fast on Sunday - he was genuinely super fast and super impressive all weekend, and was squeezing out the most out of a KTM RC16 that he still doesn't really know.
KTM has had precious little to smile about this MotoGP season. It needed this, and Vinales heeded the call, whatever the results say in the end.
Qualified: 3rd Sprint: 5th Grand Prix: 7th
Maybe the most valuable rider in MotoGP this weekend, with the only two blemishes being that he gave up a position via error at the end of the sprint and looked a bit off during the opening laps on Sunday.
But his Friday single-lap performance was good, his qualifying - going by what we know about the Yamaha right now - was otherwordly, and mixing it up with the Ducatis in the sprint was pretty marvellous, too.
Quartararo had begun the weekend insisting he would stop tinkering with the bike until big upgrades come and just focus on a consistent base. Is it a coincidence that, the first weekend he did that, he blew away the other Yamaha riders?
Qualified: 7th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 4th
Basically every bit as good as Vinales - right down to both the ruinous decision to bet on the soft tyre in the sprint and then the 'wait, you're not supposed to be here' performance in the main race.
The Saturday miscalculation is maybe slightly less excusable given this isn't Zarco's fourth weekend on the bike, and it felt like overconfidence stemming from how well he's tended to nurse the tyre.
But the Sunday result, and performance, was phenomenal, and he's overall in the best form of his accomplished MotoGP career.
Qualified: 8th Sprint: 4th Grand Prix: 5th
The lack of a grand prix podium challenge was almost disappointing here - which is a reflection of the ridiculously good weekend Aldeguer had had. He clearly felt this way, too, because he'd gone as far as to suggest his rear tyre wasn't quite right on Sunday.
Earlier in the season, he looked like he might get destroyed by Ai Ogura in the rookie of the year race. This weekend, forget rookie of the year, he looked like someone who could win an actual race this year.
He might be a bit more exposed again on smaller tracks where it's a bit tighter to go into Q2, but Aldeguer's race pace already looks the par and he's making clear progress all around.
Qualified: 4rh Sprint: 3rd Grand Prix: 3rd
Race stint management remains such a glaring weakness of Morbidelli on the Ducati that every in-the-know spectator - including Marc Marquez - met his early charge on Sunday with a 'sure, you do you, brother', rather than a real expectation he might actually win the race.
By Morbidelli's own admission, he thought he was in control of the tyres “but clearly I was not”. So when Marquez and Vinales eased past him, he started to "panic".
That, at least, worked out, and the race didn't spiral out of control.
For whatever shortcomings he currently has, it would be wrong-headed to lose sight of the fact that Morbidelli has been scoring exceptionally well this season. You could argue, and he should argue, that that's the only thing that really matters.
Qualified: 5th Sprint: 6th Grand Prix: 16th
Probably won't have had a real shot at winning, but will have been firmly in the conversation for second if not for the Alex Marquez collision - his pace after that makes it pretty clear.
At a track where he'd delivered his career-saving performance in 2023, Di Giannantonio didn't look too strong on Friday and Saturday - but seemed to both improve on Sunday and put himself in a good position in the race.
At the same time, he gets a bit of extra 'un-credit' for barging into the illness-stricken Joan Mir for no obvious reason as part of his recovery ride.
Qualified: 9th Sprint: 12th Grand Prix: 12th
One of the better Rins weekends in his time at Yamaha, with the ninth place on the grid - delivered by riding alone rather than with a rider in front - a genuine sign of progress, even if Quartararo is still out of reach.
A botched start derailed his sprint, and taking a stone to the arm in the grand prix nearly ruined that, too, but finishing the 22 laps five seconds back from Quartararo given the grid position difference is genuinely respectable.
Frustrated with the M1 still being not too strong in wheel-to-wheel battle - though he did at least giggle about outdragging Luca Marini's Honda with its even worse straightline performance - Rins said "the team cannot ask more from us". On his side, it's felt truer this weekend than most.
Qualified: 11th Sprint: 8th Grand Prix: 2nd
Bagnaia feels he would've had a real shot at his team-mate and the win had he got qualifying right. However you feel about that hypothetical, the fact it's only a hypothetical is, of course, his fault.
Let's not make more of the qualifying error that consigned him to the fourth row beyond saying that it was clumsy and clearly the outcome of poor risk assessment. But in 22 Q2s a season that'll happen.
However, the underperformance with the bike in sprint spec - namely with the 12-litre fuel tank - is concerning, whatever the root cause mechanism. He clearly cannot afford to struggle as much as he did running in the pack on Saturday.
Qualified: 10th Sprint: 7th Grand Prix: 15th
The grand prix was Ogura's first truly bad race in MotoGP, and he owned up right away as to being the culprit.
He said he didn't take good care of the front tyre in the early laps - “focussed on the rear but didn’t really care about the front” - so was out of front grip by the halfway point. “Just wasn’t good enough from my side."
Is he this high because of accountability? Nope. It's dominating Q1, qualifying as the top Aprilia, and riding a superb sprint - that'll do it. He came up short in the most important session, but we can't expect a rookie to deliver all the time.
Qualified: 12th Sprint: 11th Grand Prix: 8th
Not on Vinales' level this weekend, but I suspect Acosta was more in the ballpark than he looked. He was marginally faster on Friday, but Vinales nailed Q2 and he really didn't - and that conditioned their respective weekends.
Acosta described his grand prix in the end as "acceptable, not good" and that's probably apt as far as the whole weekend is concerned, too.
Qualified: 2nd Sprint: 2nd Grand Prix: 6th
Places as high as he does entirely on the strength of his qualifying and sprint, which confirmed again that this career-best level of performance isn't just real but impressively robust.
But while he looks to have little to no culpability in the early contact with his brother on Sunday, he dunked Di Giannantonio's weekend in the trash with his Turn 12 counter-attack and knows it - and probably did not deserve the chance to recover to a seventh place.
Good job to leave your first big error of the season until round four, but there's really no defending the move.
Qualified: 13th Sprint: 9th Grand Prix: 9th
Got showed up pretty badly by Ogura in Q1, but rescued the weekend in race trim.
Bezzecchi had generally been much happier with Aprilia's power output than his predecessors on the RS-GP, but this weekend suggested he may be in a similar boat after all. The bike is too aggressive on the throttle for his liking, and in Qatar the corners are too close together so this gets penalised more.
"To have stability, we have to reduce the power," he lamented - which has left him unable to exploit the bike on fresh rubber.
"Until we have the first drop of the tyre, which makes everyone more similar, I'm always in defensive mode. Then I start to build my pace but it's always a bit too late."
Qualified: 15th Sprint: 15th Grand Prix: 10th
Overshadowed very, very much by Zarco - which isn't great when you consider their contracts are up at the end of 2026 - but kept it neat and tidy to bank some alright points.
Like Joan Mir in Austin, he grew frustrated by the Honda bike struggling for top speed and thus being quite impotent in battle, but he seems to be doing a better job of accepting that (but a worse job of, well, going as fast).
Qualified: 19th Sprint: 18th Grand Prix: DNF
Fernandez would've genuinely ranked pretty high had he just seen out the grand prix without crashing out, and seemed quite aware that he'd soured somewhat the taste of a good weekend, saying he needed "to use all the laps that I have".
The performance was legitimately pretty good. The laptimes weren't headline-grabbing, sure, but for a stand-in he looked more like a MotoGP regular than the imposter who was floundering on the #37 carbon-chassis KTM last year.
Qualified: 21st Sprint: DNS Grand Prix: DNF
Mir's weekend can only really be graded on the Friday. It wasn't a particularly good one - he doesn't feel Lusail is a good fit for his style on the Honda and found himself vibration-limited, particularly in the third sector where he was conspicuously slow - but not a particularly terrible one either.
With gastroenteritis bad enough to rule him out of the sprint entirely, he can hardly be faulted for how the rest of the weekend turned out - especially as the grand prix retirement was apparently due to a technical issue rather than fatigue.
Qualified: 20th Sprint: 13th Grand Prix: 11th
Still adapting, still having vibration issues, still looking for his bike and playing around with specs session to session (and seemingly waiting for something unspecified that Vinales has on his bike that he does not).
Those are the problems. But the big one, the overriding issue that flows from those other issues but also stands as an occasional trait in itself, is that he's qualifying terribly.
So rough has Bastianini looked over one lap on the RC16 so far that it's quite impressive how many points he's already scored - but it's no secret this isn't a real formula to success.
Qualified: 18th Sprint: 14th Grand Prix: 13th
When a rider's post-weekend debrief features the phrase "the speed wasn't disgusting" - well, the implication is the rest of the weekend was.
It was so unusual to see KTM's Mr. Reliable come up so short here, on "definitely the most difficult MotoGP weekend I’ve had in my career". He was limited by vibration, limited by a lack of rear grip, limited by a Friday crash - just limited.
A truly alarming few days at a track that has historically yielded so much more for him on this bike.
Qualified: 14th Sprint: 16th Grand Prix: DNF
It's a really cruel and mean sport sometimes, and trying to critically assess Martin's weekend in some way feels like it would only add to the cruelty and meanness.
Get well soon.
Qualified: 17th Sprint: 17th Grand Prix: 17th
Fernandez's demeanour changed from day to day. As you can see, the results did not - there was only one session in which he placed higher than 17th, and that was Q1, with 12 bikes taking part.
The Spaniard says he cannot turn his RS-GP like he wants and cannot extract the high-speed corner performance the Aprilia used to rely on.
At the end of the weekend, it got borderline existential, with Fernandez insisting himself, Trackhouse and Aprilia had more potential than this.
"If not, what am I doing here? To do laps? I am not here to do laps on the bike. I don’t like it. If I am thinking like this, I would not come here, because I would be wasting my time and the team’s time."
Qualified: 16th Sprint: 19th Grand Prix: DNF
A drama in three acts, all disappointing, that equates to the worst weekend of Miller's otherwise impressive Yamaha tenure so far.
He crashed twice on Friday, the second taking him out of the Q2 fight, then wasn't fast enough to make it out of Q1 due to struggling through the triple-right section of Turns 12-13-14, which he admits is "my old Achilles' heel".
He then made that bewildering choice of the soft rear for the sprint - lots of riders did but, with no disrespect meant to Miller, he particularly shouldn't have. "A piss-poor decision", as he put it, that effectively wrote off his race.
Finally, a crash in the grand prix due to vibrations on the left side - which, the way he described it, sounds like a technical issue more than anything he did wrong. But even without that, the weekend was already more or less unsalvageable.
Qualified: 22nd Sprint: 20th Grand Prix: 18th
Some hints of gentle in-weekend progress - Chantra's fastest lap in the sprint was slower than his fastest lap in the grand prix, which normally isn't how that works.
But he's now spent a couple of weekends marooned on a pace island all by himself after starting the campaign generally competitive - so just cannot rank any higher than this.
