How it unfolded
Marquez broke his humerus at Jerez in 2020, underwent four surgeries, and spent 2021 through 2023 in a stretch where vision problems and repeated injuries made wins themselves rare. He left Honda in 2024 for the satellite Gresini Ducati team, then joined the Ducati factory squad in 2025. That season was one-sided. He won 14 of the first 15 Sprints and kept piling up Grand Prix wins as well, arriving at Motegi, the seventeenth of 22 rounds, already in position to clinch the title outright. On the Sunday he finished second, sealing the championship with five rounds still to run, 2,184 days after his previous title in 2019. His final tally for the season was 11 Grand Prix wins and 14 Sprint wins for 545 points combined, a single-season record, set despite missing the final four rounds through injury.
Why it still matters
This is the clearest illustration of how the points structure has changed since Sprints were introduced. The 545-point total cannot be compared directly with the 420 points he scored in 2019, and that gap reopened the whole debate over how to compare records across eras. At the same time, returning to the summit after four years of injury and a manufacturer switch reopened the question of how much the rider versus the equipment actually decides in modern MotoGP.