One race after the final Grand Prix victory of an 11-win season in 2024, Francesco Bagnaia was already in damage limitation mode.
To pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. It was time for a public admission that was chastening, but appropriate.
Every MotoGP qualifying, practice and race LIVE and ad-break free from lights out to the chequered flag. New to Kayo? Start Your Free Trial Today >
On his first weekend as Marc Marquez’s teammate at Ducati’s factory team – the same Ducati factory team where he’d won two MotoGP titles, finished runner-up twice and won 29 Grands Prix over the past four seasons – Bagnaia had been made to look second-rate in Thailand.
Marquez beat him to pole position in qualifying. Beat him in the sprint race. Beat him in the Grand Prix. And beat everyone so comprehensively that it was hard not to look back at 2019, the last time Marquez had led the world championship before Thailand, and 2014, when Marquez last won the first race of a season.
“Marc was playing with us … he was much faster,” Bagnaia said bluntly on Sunday in Buriram.
“I’m here to win and not to finish third. I know that for the next few races, I need to take the maximum that I can like this weekend and then try to close the gap … Qatar and Jerez are good tracks for me.”
The Italian is right about Qatar and Jerez – but they’re rounds four and five of MotoGP’s longest-ever 22-round calendar in 2025, after Argentina for round two (March 14-16), or the Circuit of the Americas in Texas a fortnight later (March 28-30).
Was Bagnaia conceding the next two rounds before he – and the rest of Marquez’s opponents – even got on the plane to travel to the Americas? Was he right to see his glass as more half-empty than full in the short-term? And is the narrative of the 2025 season already written?
Almost, yes and no … maybe. But the striking resemblance to Marquez’s 2014 and 2019 masterclasses was hard to miss.
HISTORY PAINTS IMPOSING PICTURE
Eleven years ago, Marquez had come into the season off winning the 2013 world title as a 20-year-old rookie for Honda, the youngest champion in MotoGP history prevailing over Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo in a nervy Valencia finale.
Despite Marquez breaking his right leg in a pre-season dirt-track training accident and missing testing in Malaysia and Australia, the Spaniard won the opening round of 2014 in Qatar before reeling off 10 wins in a row to begin the season, a run of victories matched only by Mick Doohan and Giacomo Agostini in the premier class.
Back-to-back titles was a case of when, not if; Marquez’s defence of his crown was confirmed on Honda’s home ground at Motegi with three rounds left of a season where he won 13 of 18 Grands Prix and took 13 poles, both single-season records.
Good as that was, 2019 was even better. In 19 Grands Prix, Marquez won 12; he finished second in six of the other seven races, the one blot on his copybook coming when he crashed – from the lead – in Texas in round three.
His advantage over closest challenger Andrea Dovizioso by season’s end was 151 points, a margin of more than six race wins.
MORE MOTOGP NEWS
GOLDEN AI Inside the remarkable debut of MotoGP’s rookie sensation
TALKING POINTS Rivals’ worst fears coming true as epic redemption brews
While there’s just one round of 2025 in the books for Marquez, Thailand was imposing for its dominance and reminiscent of his glory days. After setting a scorching pace in pre-season testing at the same Buriram track, Marquez spent every on-track session inside the top two, took pole, and was never led in the sprint race.
Seven laps into Sunday’s Grand Prix and in a comfortable lead, Marquez had to change course. Realising his front tyre pressures were too low from running at the front in clear air – a bike’s tyres have to be above a mandated minimum pressure for 60 per cent of the distance of a Grand Prix for safety reasons – Marquez sat up out of the third corner of the Chang International Circuit layout, allowed fellow Ducati rider and younger brother Alex Marquez to pass him for the lead, and toured behind his sibling for 15 laps, sucking up the heat generated from a bike in front of him and elevating his front tyre pressure to ensure he didn’t fall foul of the rules.
The ease at which Marquez sat behind his brother – and was under no threat from Bagnaia behind him – indicated the margin he had in reserve, and Marquez proved it when he scythed past his sibling at the final corner to begin the third-last lap and simply disappeared, pulling a 1.3-second gap in a single lap before dropping his pace to win by 1.7secs.
It was a brutal demonstration of Marquez’s margin, and his ability to improvise.
“The first two laps I felt smooth and fast, and then I saw the tyre pressure was not in the correct range,” he explained.
“It was too low so I started to brake harder for two laps to see if I was able to recover a bit, but I was not able [riding] alone. I waited for Alex and I stayed behind him until three laps to go and I decided to attack, because today I had the speed. In this race track I was able to ride two or three different ways with the same lap time.”
As Bagnaia commented, Marquez was playing a game, one where there was only one outcome. Which begged the question: how long will it last?
HOW FAR CAN MARQUEZ PUSH HIS STREAK?
Proof that 2014 really was an outlier, for Marquez and MotoGP in general? Marquez’s banner 2019 season featured one five-race winning streak, the second-longest of his career. Bagnaia’s 11-win 2024 season had one run of four victories in succession, a feat he first managed in his 2022 title-winning campaign.
Good as Marquez was in Thailand, expecting him to reel off 10 Grands Prix wins in a row – especially given the introduction of the Saturday half-distance sprint race format two years ago – is worth contemplating, but unlikely. But Bagnaia’s gloomy prediction for the next two rounds makes statistical sense.
Marquez hasn’t raced in Argentina since 2019; the event didn’t feature on the covid-compromised 2020 and ’21 calendars, and Marquez missed 2022 and ’23 with injury before the 2024 event was cancelled at the last minute by the local government. But his record at the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit is stellar; three wins from six starts and five pole positions at a low-grip, dusty track that is barely used for the other 51 weekends a year, one right in Marquez’s wheelhouse.
MORE MOTOGP NEWS
‘COOKING OUT THERE’ Miller burnt by bike after bizarre mishap
THAILAND RACE REPORT Spanish star doubles up in Thailand
And then there’s the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, where Marquez has been close to unbeatable when he manages to stay on the bike.
His first MotoGP win – on his second-ever start – came in Texas in 2013, kick-starting a run of six consecutive victories, all from pole position. His crash from the lead in 2019 broke the streak, and after COTA wasn’t on the abbreviated 2020 calendar, he won again in 2021 in a season where he missed races or was recovering from multiple arm surgeries for the majority of it.
Last year, his third race on a Ducati after leaving Honda, Marquez worked his way to the lead before falling at half-distance; other than the Sachsenring in Germany (where he won seven consecutive times from 2013-19), COTA is where he’s been more dominant than usual.
Qatar, round four, is where Bagnaia and the rest will have their first and best chance to get back on terms; Marquez has won there just once (2014), his time at Honda punctuated by last-gasp defeats to Ducati’s Dovizioso in 2018 and again the following season.
WHO ELSE CAN SPOIL MARQUEZ’S PARTY?
If you’re a rider not on a Ducati? Forget it.
Marquez’s win in Thailand last Sunday – and the all-Ducati podium of the Marquez brothers and Bagnaia – was the Italian brand’s 18th Grand Prix win in a row, the last non-Ducati victory coming when Maverick Vinales, then with Aprilia, won the Grand Prix of the Americas last April.
Ducati elected to largely run back last year’s GP24 – for the beginning of this season at least – after Marquez and Bagnaia both reported in pre-season testing that the updated GP25 engine earmarked for this year was inferior in engine braking despite delivering more power, Ducati deciding to shelve it.
While this year’s bike – dubbed by Bagnaia as a “GP24.9” in pre-season testing – features a new swingarm and gearbox, updated chassis and aerodynamic parts won’t come on-stream until round five in Spain at the earliest.
After winning 16 of 20 Grands Prix a year ago, the GP24 still comfortably has the measure of its rivals; in Thailand, the bike locked out the front row of the grid and the first four positions in Sunday’s main race.
Italian rider Fabio Di Giannantonio – who, like Marquez, used Ducati’s GP23 machine last year which was a model introduced for the start of the 2023 season, finished only 10th in Buriram as he recovers from a broken left shoulder from pre-season testing, but was in no doubt of the performance advantage the GP24 offers.
“Way better … way better,” Di Giannantonio said in his post-race media debrief.
“It’s like another world completely. Much, much faster. The power is insane, the traction is unbelievable, the turning of the bike … I think it’s not one second difference [per lap, over a qualifying lap] but on a race distance, it could be.”
Yamaha, KTM and Honda showed top-10 potential in Thailand, but that appears the ceiling for three of the other four manufacturers, for now.
Aprilia, with Japanese rookie Ai Ogura stunning on debut with fourth (sprint) and fifth (Grand Prix) results, gave MotoGP’s ‘other’ Italian factory some optimism for when world champion Jorge Martin, who missed Thailand as he recovers from surgery on a fractured left wrist and hand after a training accident, returns.
With Martin out for the next round and possibly longer, and requiring time to adapt when belatedly starts his season after coming across from Ducati, Bagnaia is still Marquez’s main – perhaps only – threat for the title.
Bagnaia had a compromised pre-season, struggled for rear grip in Thailand, chased his tail all weekend after being baulked in Friday practice and not making the top 10 for an automatic Q2 berth, and did what he could. Future weekends will undoubtedly be smoother, and more profitable.
But after Thailand, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to Marquez’s two most dominant seasons when best rider on the grid had the best bike, something he hasn’t enjoyed this decade.
It’s a scary prospect for his rivals, one where Bagnaia – on that same bike, remember – left Thailand sounding like a man desperately trying to convince himself.
“I’m not happy, but satisfied … not fully because it can be worse,” he said.
“We did a very good through the weekend to solve some problems we had in the test, and we finished the job too late because I just started to be focused on the race on Saturday morning, so it was a bit too late.
“I was struggling, so finishing in third place in both races is not so bad. I want to find back my feeling from last season. The bike is similar, so I need to find back this feeling. I will try to improve myself to be better.”
The early evidence suggests the competitive picture of MotoGP in 2025 might depend on just that.
Discussion about this post