Gresini MotoGP rider Alex Marquez has admitted he was “too relaxed” and “too confident” at the moment he crashed out of the lead in the Catalan Grand Prix sprint, insisting he had felt falling “was not a possibility.”
The Spaniard had taken his first pole since 2023 on Saturday with a new lap record and looked set for a dominant sprint win ahead of his brother Marc Marquez. But on lap nine of 12, Alex fell at Turn 10, handing victory to his elder sibling.
“Too confident. Too relaxed in that moment,” Alex explained. “I was just trying to finish that lap pushing to see the gap with Marc, then from that moment I started to manage. When you have so much confidence with the bike, you don’t think crashing is possible. But I was really fast, really close to the limit, and a small mistake cost everything.”
Despite the disappointment, the Gresini rider stressed that Sunday’s grand prix offers him a major chance to bounce back as he will start from pole again.
“We have a great opportunity tomorrow in front of us. We will try to take it,” he said.
“It still hurts” – but moving on
Alex’s crash echoes last year’s Catalan GP, when multiple riders fell while leading in the half-distance race. He pointed to the track’s notoriously low grip as a key factor that punishes even the smallest mistakes.
“It’s a low-grip track,” he said. “When you make a really small mistake, it costs you a crash. Turn 10 is tricky — you have to stop the bike a lot, and it’s easy to go a bit wide or long on the brakes. We need to stay focused tomorrow. Today was my mistake.”
Admitting the fall “still hurts,” Alex underlined the importance of moving on quickly:
“It still hurts, but there’s nothing we can change. We just learn from that mistake. If that happened on Sunday it would hurt even more. But we have a great opportunity tomorrow again, and we can’t waste time thinking about today.”
