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Quiz Val on his Assen MotoGP rider rankings
🕑 Added 2025-06-30 04:45:06 +0000 UTCHere's Val's judgement on how the 22 MotoGP riders performed at Assen - let him know your thoughts and your questions on it in the comments and he'll tackle them in his Rankings Debrief video later this week.
The Dutch TT at Assen may have proven pivotal to the outcome of the MotoGP 2025 title race - though, truthfully, that title race was already on life support coming into the weekend and simply remains that way.
But the two races themselves were close, and the 'race' to be top of these rankings was closer still, decided by the narrowest of margins.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 3rd GP: 2nd
Though he didn't win, Marco Bezzecchi's weekend was potent enough to snatch away the title of the grid's pre-eminent Assen specialist from his good friend Pecco Bagnaia.
A fifth-place qualifying, given the 2025 form book, marked him out as a win contender in both races. It didn't quite happen but, given the Aprilia's relative strengths and weaknesses to the Ducati, Bezzecchi executed both races extremely well.
He was "desperate" to give Aprilia a win here - given the Jorge Martin stuff going on in the background it would have been well-timed like Silverstone - but found it "almost impossible to even try" overtaking Marc Marquez given how strong the latter was on the run to the Geert Timmer chicane.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 1st GP: 1st
A case of 1a/1b for first place this week, or maybe even 1aa/1ab. It ultimately comes down to qualifying and the fact Marquez wasn't the only Ducati rider in the mix - while Bezzecchi was alone flying the flag for Aprilia.
Which is not to say Marquez was somehow below par.
At around 80% of the weekends this year Marquez has the pace to dominate, but here was one of the other 20% of them, so he had to outfox the others - and did so with ruthless efficiency.
There will be no joy in his newly-found 68-point lead due to the circumstances, but he's good value for it.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 9th GP: 4th
A good response after Mugello, on what was surely the third-best bike in MotoGP this weekend.
Pedro Acosta cost himself a little with track limits violations on Saturday, but countered with what may have actually been the best ride of anyone in the grand prix.
Not every round and every race needs to be a referendum on a rider, but Assen underlined that the case for 2025 being a sophomore slump for Acosta just isn't very strong.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 6th GP: 5th
Practice, but more so his past record at the track, suggested Maverick Vinales may have had marginally more potential than Acosta among KTM's two leading riders here - but Acosta was slightly better in his execution.
A lot of that came down to Vinales still "missing something" in qualifying, which he believes is just a matter of experience rather than the RC16 being weak over one lap.
"We just need to make it easier on ourselves," was his judgement regarding grid position. He looked solid in battle at Assen - though maybe took marginally too long to pass Fabio Quartararo in the sprint - but improving qualifying seems an easier route to the front than magically becoming a more aggressive rider.
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 5th GP: 3rd
Even after his usual bad sprint, this Dutch TT felt like a Pecco Bagnaia win in the making - but instead he just proved again that something is fundamentally wrong this season beyond having an all-time great as a team-mate.
He said he had "maybe the best pace, but I wasn't able to show it", struggling to run in rivals' slipstreams and set up moves.
"The weekend was better," Bagnaia insisted. This feels correct, but for now the result stays the same.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 11th GP: 12th
Johann Zarco apologised for his "sad" comments at the end of his debrief - but the sadness was really tempered, given he did find it in himself to point out that last year he'd been 43 seconds back at the finish of the Dutch TT, compared to 25s here.
Small positives were all that was available to Honda here, because the RC213V was really nothing to write home about for the third event in a row - and Zarco at least got the most out of it, despite a subpar qualifying.
He rode a respectable sprint for no points, then was able to least salvage something from the grand prix and finally get himself over the 100-point mark after five non-scores. But he fears he may have reached the limit of the current Honda package.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 4th GP: 6th
This was a very similar - if slightly less fruitful - weekend to Fabio Di Giannantonio's Mugello outing, with a similar qualifying underperformance conditioning the rest.
He clearly has supreme late-stint pace of late - and would've been a threat in the sprint had he started just slightly further ahead.
His grand prix was disappointing relative to that, but Di Giannantonio put the blame squarely on a rear tyre that was "like ice" and only seemed to work at "between 45-50 degrees of angle", with his race coming alive once he'd figured that out.
Asked whether that specific medium rear felt off compared to those he'd used previously in the weekend, Di Giannantonio - squirming a bit as he tried to figure out a way not to call out tyre supplier Michelin and risk a fine - gave the following answer with the help of his press officer: "The Sachsenring [next on the calendar] is a great circuit, I like it a lot."
Qualifying: 11th Sprint: DNF GP: 8th
Less impressive than at Mugello - where he was closer to Bezzecchi but Aprilia was weaker overall - yet impressive still.
Raul Fernandez did well to work his way into Q2 after missing out on automatic passage by just 0.001s on Friday, then was a total passenger in his sprint race unravelling twice - first because he had to go to the gravel as a result of Franco Morbidelli going wide up ahead, and then because the gearbox failed anyway.
No such trouble on Sunday and a good result at the end of it, though the 19s gap to top Aprilia Bezzecchi means the excitement has to be tempered.
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: DNF GP: 10th
As potent as Quartararo's Yamaha looked again in qualifying trim, en route to a brilliant fourth pole position, it was totally hopeless in the early laps of both races.
“The first laps are a complete disaster for us," he lamented. "We have zero grip." It does seem worse for him than the other Yamahas, but it's hard to judge because they're almost never starting in the same part of the pack.
The actual race results were paltry again. There are no complaints about his Sunday - he recovered impressively after having to take to the grass to avoid Fermin Aldeguer, though he felt he had the pure pace to do much more - but the Saturday crash from fourth felt needless and a little familiar.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 2nd GP: DNF
Alex Marquez looked the strongest in the sprint but could find no opportunity for a clean move on his brother, so settled for the nine points.
Unfortunately, those nine points may now prove useful in the battle for second in the championship, following an injury in battle with Acosta just as Alex started to recover from a so-so run in the early laps.
It was hard to attribute blame in the incident, though in hindsight trying to keep the fight going exiting Strubben may have been a mistake in risk assessment.
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: 8th GP: 7th
Just not really at the races on the best bike on the grid, and frustrating on Sunday in particular in both the ill-judged duel with Di Giannantonio and that familiar late-race collapse.
A decent qualifying had papered over the crack, and after Sunday's race Morbidelli admitted this was "the most difficult track of the year for me", at which he actually "didn't struggle as much as we thought".
But this really wasn't enough for a rider on the GP24, and getting respectable finishes in both races - which on this bike seems a default for an experienced and accomplished MotoGP rider such as Morbidelli - can only take you so far.
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 13th GP: 9th
Enea Bastianini has picked up a bit of a nasty habit of racking up penalties this season, this time incurring a three-place grid drop for impeding Alex Rins that irked him but looked pretty sensible from the TV evidence.
He was also slow in qualifying again, and felt he shipped all the laptime to his fellow KTMs in the fast corners - where his RC16 was compliant in tow but felt "50kg heavier" when in clean air.
His sprint was nothing special but Sunday's performance was actually fairly convincing - featuring a straight-fight defeat of Brad Binder and then a successful defence against the recovering Quartararo.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: 11th GP: 10th
Binder's exact position in the KTM rider hierarchy this year has proven hard to pin down, given his particular strengths and weaknesses as a rider. But there was nothing too difficult about gauging his Assen weekend.
"I just really, really had no pace all weekend. No one-lap pace, and I could do the same laptime almost every lap - but it was just way too slow."
Instability on the front was the big limitation, but even when he kept it in check he "wasn't fast enough". He'd hoped the temperatures picking up and allowing him to use the hard front would change his weekend, but that didn't prove a panacea.
Given he'd been quite potent at Assen in previous years, this whole event was one big worrying sign.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 12th GP: DNF
Miguel Oliveira had a much better weekend than the results showed. He felt he should've at least doubled his points tally for the season here, and with good reason.
His Saturday was quite strong, despite a hold-up from an aggressive lunge by Morbidelli, and his Sunday never got a chance, with a 'traffic jam' at Strubben meaning he - through what seemed like little fault of his own - clipped the back of his Pramac team-mate Jack Miller, which sent him into Ai Ogura.
He rode around at the back, pitting for a change of windscreen, but ultimately felt he couldn't continue given how bent the handlebars were.
Qualifying remains the issue. As Oliveira himself put it: "It is not acceptable that I'm doing 1m32.2s [laps] in the [sprint] race and 1m31.9s in qualifying. Something is really not adding up."
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: DNF GP: DNF
Joan Mir had Q2 potential at various points of the weekend - stymied by a rear brake failure on Friday and missing out by 0.004s on Saturday - and getting the right break could've transformed his Dutch TT.
He caught the wrong one, instead, powerless to avoid clattering into Aldeguer's crashed Ducati on Sunday, in a big shunt that left him beaten up but thankfully without major injury.
Obviously, a crash like that shouldn't influence his ranking. What does is the sprint crash, caused by Mir getting Turn 3 all wrong at the start and followed by a media session in which he again emphasised the shortcomings of the bike rather than his own arguably more pertinent struggles to get it to the finish line.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 15th GP: 13th
I write it every week, but Rins's single-lap pace still remains way too reliant on having a faster rider to follow - and in Q1 this was exposed, even if being impeded by Bastianini wasn't very helpful to the cause.
He wasn't great in the sprint - hindered by having to run a used soft front to preserve one just-in-case for Sunday, though Yamaha team-mate Quartararo seemed to cope much better with the same limitation - but actually rode a pretty nice grand prix, in the context of being three seconds off the back of the pack on lap one after getting caught up in the Turn 5 Miller/Oliveira/Ogura incident.
Qualifying: 14th Sprint: 14th GP: 14th
The highs of the start of the season, where Miller appeared the clear second-fastest Yamaha and was even giving Quartararo some occasional trouble, are in the rearview mirror.
Though he still has a bit more than Pramac team-mate Oliveira in qualifying, there's a half-hint that it's going the other way in race trim.
Both of his races were anonymous - though the sprint was hindered by the wind popping his airbag - and like many Yamaha riders before him he's finding the bike just isn't very effective in battle.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 17th GP: DNF
Lorenzo Savadori was tracking to be ranked pretty high here even through the big Friday crash and the Saturday tyre pressures penalty (which only demoted him behind Ogura) - though ultimately Sunday's puzzling losing-the-rear off-throttle crash means the weekend wasn't too positive on his side of the Aprilia garage.
But he was clearly pretty quick for a test rider, both in qualifying and race trim, and he also deserves credit for signing off on a fresh rear aero upgrade mid-weekend that was then introduced to Bezzecchi's bike for his run to second place on Sunday.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 7th GP: DNF
As rookies tend to do, Aldeguer is leaving absolute heaps of points on the table this year - Assen proving no exception.
Given his ongoing struggles on new tyres, he was impressive in sneaking through Q1 and then having enough in the tank to put the bike on row three in Q2 - and the sprint was solid despite the track limits penalty.
But he high-sided out of contention on Sunday, and now that the pace is there his paymasters at Ducati would be wise to tell him to prioritise points and finishes in the upcoming rounds.
Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 18th GP: 16th
If there's any comparison to be had between Honda testers/stand-ins Aleix Espargaro and Takaaki Nakagami in their race appearances this year - and yes, I know, that is not their main job - then it's a 'battle' Nakagami is winning.
Espargaro just wasn't very fast at any point of the weekend. For much of it he was hamstrung by the need to use a soft front due to temperatures, having always favoured the harder tyre on the Aprilia.
But once Sunday brought the hard into play, Espargaro spent it battling a race-breaking vibration - made worse, he believes, by the fact the soft rear tyre (a wrong strategic choice) was overheating.
Qualifying: 22nd Sprint: 19th GP: 15th
Somkiat Chantra finally has a point on the board, which does owe a lot to Espargaro - who suggested post-race he more or less chose not to fight the rookie when he realised it would be for 15th place and Chantra's first point.
Chantra needs to be quicker still to be viable for Honda, but - on a weekend he admitted the aggression of the sheer power of a MotoGP bike is currently proving too much - he at least clearly took a tentative step forward.
And he attributed this to Espargaro, saying he understood a lot of things - things he wouldn't have known otherwise - about how to approach corners on the RC213V after following the veteran for several laps.
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 16th GP: DNF
Ogura will hope this is the worst weekend of his 2025 season - and maybe of his whole MotoGP career.
A puzzling high-side that wrote off one RS-GP in a fireball on Friday was a foreboding sign, and a glimmer of hope in Q1 - a good first lap - was immediately extinguished with another crash that doomed his Dutch TT for good.
He could only chuckle self-deprecatingly about his sprint - "it's not a good one. I finished behind the test rider" - then had his weekend put out of its misery on the opening lap on Sunday, when the Miller/Oliveira contact on the inside spilled over to the outside of the corner and sent Ogura away to crash in the gravel.
Comments
Alan
Fabio Quartararo feels quite low in my opinuon
Motorsport Mike
Did you not mark down Acosta for the clash with Alex?
