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Innovation and improvement are relentless imperatives in MotoGP. Standing still means falling behind. So it shows just how strong Ducati is that it spent untold budget and engineering hours over the past year developing its Desmosedici GP25, only for the teams to say, "Nah, we'll just use the old one, thanks."
We already had plenty of evidence the GP24 was the strongest motorcycle on the MotoGP grid. Ducati riders won 19 of 20 full-length races, including sweeping the podium 14 times, in 2024. Plus, Ducati has reason to play it conservative. With new engine rules taking effect for 2027, whatever engine Ducati homologates for this season is what the teams will have to use next year, too, under the development freeze that's in effect for the top teams that have no concessions. So while some electronic settings developed for the GP25 will be used, the engine, chassis, and most aerodynamics will basically be carried over from the GP24.
On top of that mechanical strength and confidence, the factory Ducati Lenovo Team has the two most proven riders on the grid, with three-time world champion Pecco Bagnaia and eight-time world champion and GOAT contender Marc Márquez. And, the team's decision to stick with the GP24 means that the younger Márquez brother, Alex, on the Gresini Racing MotoGP team, will now finally be on the best motorcycle in the paddock instead of a dated Ducati or an unruly Honda. In both recent pre-season tests, Alex was very close to his more famous brother at the top of the time sheets, which suggests he could be a bigger factor than ever this year.
So it's settled then, right? Ducati will dominate again and Marc Márquez, now back on the best bike on the grid for the first time in many years and now fully past his crippling injury and botched recovery of five years ago, will reassert his inevitable dominance. Well... not so fast.
As the late, great Nicky Hayden said, 'That's why we line up on Sunday, because you never know what's going to happen." And now, with sprint races on Saturday, too, we doubly don't know what's going to happen.
For the defending champ, it's already a bad season
If the most common question being asked during the preseason was whether Márquez will win another championship, the other intriguing question we should be addressing at this point is how defending champion Jorge Martín would fare at Aprilia, where he landed after being passed over for the factory Ducati seat alongside Bagnaia. But instead of preparing to defend his title, Martín is sitting out the opening round, having already suffered enough setbacks for an entire season even before racing has begun.
For Martín and Aprilia, it has been setbacks offset by faint glimmers of hope that were snuffed by more setbacks.
Naturally, Martín went into the preseason tests wanting as much time as possible to get used to the Aprilia RS-GP25 after years on a Ducati. Instead, early in the test at Sepang in Malaysia, an unpredictable highside ended his testing after a small number of laps. Martín suffered fractures to his right hand and left foot and returned to Europe for surgery. That meant while his rivals were testing at Buriram in Thailand, the site of the opening round this weekend, Martín was sitting at home, missing the chance to get his new-to-him motorcycle dialed in for the first race. A difficult task for the defending champ got even more difficult.
This was @88jorgemartin's awful highside in his first hours with the number 1 plate 💢
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) February 5, 2025
He's at the hospital undergoing tests due to left foot and right hand pain. Updates will follow and in the meantime, we're sending our best wishes to the World Champ 💪#MotoGP pic.twitter.com/2UQtHKOq1w
Then it got worse. On Monday, Aprilia issued a four-sentence statement revealing that Martín had suffered fractures in his left hand, wrist, and heel in a "training session" and was scheduled for immediate surgery. When will he be able to return to racing? Unknown, but the injuries described were not minor. Martín already had an uphill task, going up against the Ducati riders on a new-to-him Aprilia. Now he will be forfeiting an unknown number of points, making his title defense seem nearly impossible.
Before this week's news about Martín's injury, you could squint and almost see reasons for optimism for him. At the final test in Buriram, Martín's Aprilia Racing teammate, Marco Bezzecchi, set the third-fastest lap time, suggesting the Aprilia has advanced for 2025. And the other Trackhouse rider, rookie Ai Ogura, has made steady and laudable progress, suggesting positive things about the Aprilia's nature.
"We had two productive days in which I was able to set some good time attacks and also a sprint simulation, so I'm very happy," Bezzecchi said. "We worked well and made a lot of progress. The bike is competitive, and the 2025 engine works very well everywhere."
That raised an interesting question. Could Martín have done even better than Bezzechi at the second test if he hadn't been injured in the first test? Had Aprilia made a big step forward? Now, with Martín's second injury, that cause for hope has been put on ice.
Now, back to reality. Who were the two riders ahead of Bez on the final time sheets? Two guys named Márquez on Ducatis. And while it's easy to look at the list of fastest laps, that doesn't necessarily foretell who is best positioned to win races. More telling are the sprint and race simulations, when riders do longer runs on the same tires to replicate the conditions of at least a sizable portion of a race.
In both outright lap time and race simulations, Marc Márquez made a statement in the final test. The only rider to dip into the 1:28 range at the Chang International Circuit, he was also able to reel off strings of consistent laps at race pace. Does that mean he has a lock on the 2025 title? Some are ready to declare it so. I don't think it will be that simple.
Márquez just turned 32, and while he could follow Valentino Rossi's example and still have another decade of racing ahead of him, it's also reality that he is no longer on the upward trajectory of his career, especially since he just went through years of fighting back from complicated injuries. He's also, potentially, just one innocuous tumble into the gravel trap away from a return of the vision problems that threatened to end his career number of world championships at one, far from his current eight. Or some other injury. We know MM93 is no stranger to the gravel trap. Will the aggression that served him so well as a 20-something also serve him in his 30s? Or will it cause him to miss out on second- and third-place finishes and end up with DNFs while lunging for a win? After all, in 2024, Bagnaia won far more races than Martín, but Martín won the war with consistency.
At the end of last season, Ducati had the difficult decision of who to put on the factory team beside Bagnaia. Would they choose the current champ, Martín, with more years of racing ahead of him, or the multi-time champ, Márquez? Then Márquez said he didn't see himself riding for an independent team on a year-old bike. Ducati buckled and snubbed Martín, who left for Aprilia. The ultimate irony of Ducati's decision to stick with its GP24 is that now, after all this, Márquez is going to be riding last year's bike, the same as his brother at the Gresini team. How much did Márquez really gain by switching to the factory team from Gresini? How much did Ducati lose in the years ahead by letting Martín go?
Another intriguing question is what will happen with Red Bull KTM Factory Racing's Pedro Acosta, who made such an impression last year as a rookie by finishing on the podium nine times, including sprint races. Acosta was the fastest of the four KTM riders at the final test. One of the fun aspects of 2025 will be watching to see if Acosta can get his KTM past the Ducatis and Aprilias for his first premier-class race win.
Meanwhile, Honda and Yamaha appear to have made progress, but they're still lagging behind the European entries. A few of the Honda riders were able to go faster in the test than Honda's best time in race conditions last year. Monster Energy Yamaha rider Fabio Quartararo was near the top of the time sheets in Malaysia but then said he was hampered with front-end problems that kept him further down the order in the Thailand test.
The racing starts this weekend and we begin getting some answers, instead of just annoying questions from guys like me.
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