Since the motorcycle world championship first touched down at Phillip Island in 1989, it really has been one hell of a ride.
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Ahead of the 30th and final instalment of the Australian Grand Prix at Phillip Island – a run only interrupted by a six-year sidestep at Eastern Creek in Sydney in the 90s and a two-year pandemic pause in 2020-21 – there’s been no shortage of races, champions, and moments that range from brilliant to baffling and everywhere in between.
The only guarantee is that, on this final weekend, nostalgia won’t be in short supply.
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What were the signature moments over the past 37 years? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you mention a rider’s name and Australia? Which wins by the locals – and there’s been 11 of them so far across all three championship classes – stand out most?
Coming up with a list of inclusions was easy, because there were so many, and hard … because there were too many.
The best moments? That’s for you to decide. Here at Fox Sports, we’ve divided them into three distinct categories.
THE AUSSIES
They share eight premier-class world titles between them, and their names flow together like a perfect start to a lap of the Island – (Wayne) Gardner Straight into (Mick) Doohan Corner at turn one, and eventually to (Casey) Stoner Corner at turn three.
But if we’re re-ranking the three Aussie giants of the sport’s Island age – the championship debuted at the Island after (and largely because of) Gardner’s 1987 title, while Doohan (five titles) and Stoner (two) topped the world once the Australian GP became a calendar staple – it’s Stoner who has to sit atop the list.
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When you win your home Grand Prix six years in a row as Stoner did from 2007-12 – and lead 160 of 162 laps – finding magical moments for King Casey isn’t tough. His 2007 win, the race after he’d won that year’s title in Japan, was more coronation than contest, while arguably his day of days came in 2011, when he won the race for the fifth time running and secured the title on his 26th birthday.
A final win in 2012, in his penultimate Grand Prix before retiring, was the icing on a very large cake.
Doohan, for all his success elsewhere, won at the Island just once in 1998, two of his three AGP wins coming at Eastern Creek, while his 1997 final-round Island DNF was his only result outside the top two – think about that – all season.
Gardner, of course, was pivotal to Australia even having a world championship round in the first place, and didn’t disappoint when the race came to the resurrected Island circuit.
His 1989 win on the Island’s debut – and the image of wife Donna, in heels, running up the start-finish straight to greet him – was the Australian GP’s first signature moment, while his victory a year later, racing with a broken wrist and a damaged bike after he nearly high-sided early on, is the one of his 18 premier-class wins he believes was his best.
There’s been a pair of wins 11 years apart for two riders passing one another in the MotoGP revolving door, too.
Jack Miller’s 2014 Moto3 win was nearly as wild and chaotic as the post-race celebrations it sparked, while Senna Agius’ 2025 Moto2 masterclass – where he left the rest of the field for dead – was less dramatic but just as impressive, and prompted the beginnings of the discussions that he could be Miller’s Aussie successor before long, which he will be in 2027.
THE LEGENDS
Legendary rides from legendary riders who don’t have Aussie passports? There’s been several, but the two most successful riders of MotoGP’s era that included the Island stand out, both separately and – inevitably, given their history – together.
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No rider has won more times at the Island than Valentino Rossi, who stood atop the rostrum eight times, six times in the premier class.
Two wins 11 years apart are memorable. In 2003, ‘The Doctor’ was given a 10-second time penalty for passing under yellow flags after an early-race crash elsewhere in the field; the Italian great simply went fast enough for it not to matter, crossing the line 15.212secs ahead of compatriot Loris Capirossi, which equated to a comfortable five-second win once his penalty was applied.
“I closed my eyes for the last 10 laps, I never made a race at 100 per cent before all the time,” he quipped.
If 2003 was a power-flex – it was the middle of a sequence of five straight Rossi wins in Australia – his final Island victory in 2014 was one out of the box. With Marquez winning his second MotoGP title the round before in Japan, the Spaniard let loose and was leading by four seconds when he crashed at turn 10 on lap 18, Rossi gleefully sweeping up the crumbs to extend an Island win total that may never be broken.
As for Marquez? That 2014 gaffe came after he’d been disqualified from the 2013 event for not taking a pit stop in a prescribed window, the abrasive new track surface shredding tyres and enforcing a mid-race bike change on either lap 9 or 10; Marquez mistakenly came in after 11 laps and was forced to the sidelines.
Of Marquez’s four premier-class Island wins, there’s only one candidate for the most significant.
In 2015, the one year he didn’t win the title in his first seven MotoGP seasons, Marquez came out victorious in a race considered by many to be the best ever at any track.
The front four (Marquez, Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo and Andrea Iannone) made 52 overtakes between themselves alone before Marquez went from third to first on the final lap, with Rossi later accusing the Spaniard of helping compatriot (and Rossi’s teammate) Lorenzo in his bid to win the world title, with Marquez mathematically out of contention.
The next race? Malaysia, and the Rossi/Marquez feud that erupted at Sepang, one that caused untold controversy and continues to simmer to this day.
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THE UNEXPECTED
Marquez falls into this category, too – and in a post-covid period where every Australian Grand Prix seems to throw up something strange.
In 2024, in his first year with Gresini Ducati after turning his back on Honda following six titles, Marquez somehow managed to throw one of his own helmet visor tear-offs beneath his rear wheel before the start of the race, tossing it aside as the riders lined up, but instantly horrified when he realised the sliver of plastic had lodged itself under his rear tyre.
Taking off in a cloud of smoke after spinning his wheel on the plastic strip, Marquez plummeted to 13th at the first turn, threw any thoughts of tyre preservation and race strategy aside as he rode like a demon to get back in the fight, then passed that year’s eventual champion Jorge Martin with three laps left to win. “Something always happens here,” he grinned.
Since MotoGP resumed at the Island in 2022, Marquez’s unusual win was probably the most predictable.
In 2022, Alex Rins won in Suzuki’s third-last race before it withdrew from the sport, the Spaniard becoming the only rider to win in all three world championship categories at the Island after his 2013 Moto3 and 2015 Moto2 successes when he crossed the line at the head of a 330km/h freight train; Martin’s Ducati was 0.884secs from victory, but was seventh across the line after 27 breathtaking laps.
The next year, and with the Island’s famously fickle weather making racing close to impossible on Sunday, organisers moved the race forward by 24 hours to Saturday afternoon to uncork a classic, Frenchman Johann Zarco finally winning after 19 previous MotoGP podiums when he hunted down and passed Ducati teammate Martin with eight corners left on the last lap.
Victory in his 120th start represented the longest wait for a maiden win in history, and Zarco reprised his signature celebratory backflip off a trackside fence – somewhat cautiously, given he’d no reason to do one since his final Moto2 win seven years earlier – to cap a crazy day as the skies darkened by the minute.
Last year, Spaniard Raul Fernandez took his own first win – on his 76th start – having never finished on a premier-class podium before in four seasons, Aprilia becoming the seventh different manufacturer to win the main race at the Island.
Unexpected Island winners are a relatively recent phenomenon; moments outside of race wins have featured prominently in MotoGP lore, too.
At the Island in 2006, the first-ever flag-to-flag race in the sport’s history for inclement weather arguably saw the best-ever pre-victory celebration when Italian Marco Melandri, comfortably ahead of first-time podium finisher and now Fox Sports analyst Chris Vermeulen, smoked the rear tyre of his Honda while taking his left hand off the handlebars to flash the ‘V’ sign as he came out of the last corner on full gas.
It was the fifth of Melandri’s five MotoGP wins, and the one he still gets asked about most to this day.
Seven years later, Jorge Lorenzo ruffled feathers when he decimated the Island’s lap record by taking pole for Yamaha, his first qualifying attempt all the more meritorious given he’d collected a seagull – which wedged itself into the front fairing of his bike – on his out-lap.
“I could make a second attempt without a passenger,” he said afterwards, and after he’d set a circuit record that stood for a decade.
Lorenzo’s unnamed and unwanted pillion was relegated to second in the Island’s unofficial rankings of famously deceased seagulls two years later in the aforementioned 2015 Marquez-won brawl.
Leading the pack over the top of Lukey Heights on lap one, Andrea Iannone found himself on a collision course with a seagull determined to stand its ground against a grid of MotoGP missiles, the Italian ducking his head as the seagull tried to fly away … and didn’t quite make it.
“The seagull waited for the kiss,” the ever-laconic Iannone said afterwards, as the late seagull was christened ‘Gavin’ on social media after the Ducati rider’s headbutt. Iannone then showed up at the Malaysia pre-season test the following season with a ‘Gavin’ tribute helmet.
“Dedicated to my friend,” the rider known as ‘The Maniac’ wrote on social media.
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