It’s laborious to consider that the 2025 season will mark Alex Marquez’s sixth 12 months in MotoGP.
The premier class he joined in 2020 with the manufacturing facility Honda squad as Jorge Lorenzo’s alternative was turned the other way up by the COVID pandemic, after which shaken up some extra when his team-mate – and older brother – Marc Marquez badly broke his arm on the season-opening Spanish Grand Prix.
The 2019 Moto2 and 2014 Moto3 world champion wasn’t fancied to do a lot when he stepped as much as MotoGP. His signing got here just some days after Lorenzo introduced his retirement one 12 months right into a two-year Honda deal, whereas Marc Marquez’s blockbuster four-year contract introduced in February of 2020 instructed HRC’s signing of his youthful brother was a stipulation of the eight-time world champion’s.
Besides, he was taking up the bike that successfully ended three-time MotoGP world champion Lorenzo’s profession and gave Dani Pedrosa his first winless marketing campaign in his closing outing in 2018. Alex Marquez’s scenario was unenviable.
Then with Honda’s reference rider sidelined by damage, he was thrust into studying the ropes on his personal. And to his credit score, he did an admirable job. Scoring podiums on the French GP and Aragon GP, the youthful Marquez brother was the one Honda rider to see the podium that season.
Scoring 74 factors in a shortened 2020 calendar, tough Honda equipment at LCR within the following two seasons noticed him repeatedly come up wanting matching that. In 2022, he made the choice to step away and tackle a brand new problem on the Gresini Ducati squad.
It proved an impressed transfer, as he scored two dash wins and two grands prix podiums on his strategy to a career-best ninth within the standings on 177 factors. Nevertheless, the GP23 he rode final 12 months proved tough to adapt to and a transparent step behind the GP24, Marquez solely managed one podium however was eighth within the standings on 173 factors.
Even nonetheless, his points-per-round common solely slumped from 8.85 to eight.65 in 2024, whereas he solely completed outdoors of the highest 10 twice within the 16 grands prix he completed final season. His consistency is one thing that’s confirmed to be an actual asset for Gresini, with the squad sixth within the groups’ standings in 2023 and third in 2024 because it loved a growth with Marc Marquez on the helm.
Alex Marquez’s time to shine?
Whereas his older brother stole the headlines in a profession rebuilding 12 months for him, Alex Marquez didn’t precisely crumble below what he admits was a number of stress from the scenario.
“It isn’t that Marc goes to go too far, as a result of he’ll be one storage away from us, to the left or to the proper, however will probably be completely different,” he stated at Gresini’s 2025 launch occasion final weekend.
“I’ve stated it a number of occasions, having Marc within the storage has optimistic and destructive points. Final 12 months there was a number of stress within the storage at first, as a result of expectations had been excessive.
“However Marc additionally introduced a number of expertise, and I believe he was a frontrunner from day one, he made us perceive many issues. What we discovered from him we’ve got to reap the benefits of this 12 months , as a result of he made us take a step ahead as a workforce.”
Whereas the hype round Gresini will cool off in 2025 now Marc Marquez has departed to the manufacturing facility Ducati squad, the Nadia Padovani-run outfit clearly sees Alex as an acceptable chief now. He’s received a contract via to the tip of 2026 and might be tasked with accelerating Fermin Aldeguer’s adaptation to MotoGP as a rookie.
Whereas one might make a sneering generalisation that Alex is now only a leftover Marquez at Gresini, he’s used the time alongside his brother constructively. And let’s not overlook, Marc’s ‘rebirth’ 12 months – as he has referred to as it – wouldn’t have been potential with out the persuasions of his youthful brother.
“I’ve discovered so much from Marc, and I am positive I am going to be taught one thing from Fermin as properly,” he famous. “However he is a rookie, so I settle for the accountability of being the workforce’s reference, the one who has to get outcomes. An impartial workforce wants them each weekend to indicate themselves on tv and for his or her sponsors to be seen. It is a mission that I like, and it offers me a number of motivation.”
Don’t assume, although, that Alex Marquez goes to attempt to be a Marc clone in 2025 now he’s again on the helm of Gresini. Whereas he has all the time appreciated his brother’s help, Alex instructed this author a number of years in the past that in his rookie marketing campaign he needed to put a cease to Marc’s recommendation as a result of it turned a bit a lot.
Gresini has lofty ambitions with the GP24 this 12 months. It’s on the lookout for high fives each weekend, outcomes which Alex Marquez was in a position to begin churning out properly within the final rounds of a tricky 2024 marketing campaign.
A fifth within the Thai GP dash was adopted up by a brace of fourth-place finishes in Malaysia, fifth within the dash and fourth within the grand prix on the Barcelona finale. It marked his first time breaching the highest 5 since his German GP podium final July, during which he was third behind Marc Marquez to create MotoGP’s first brotherly podium in 27 years.
That end-of-season surge was the results of “working with no stress, simply making our issues and taking a look at our storage”. And it’s left him with the sensation that there are “a number of probabilities” for his first grand prix win in MotoGP to come back in 2025.
There’s no telling at this stage simply how a lot of a step Ducati will take with its GP25. However Marquez’s first contact of the GP24 on the Barcelona check final November was immensely optimistic as he topped the timesheets.
He stated on the time the GP24 was a motorcycle that was “higher and higher and higher” each time he tried to push, whereas the corner-entry issues that plagued the GP23 weren’t current.
The beginning of the 2025 season might be essential for Gresini and Marquez. With a GP24 totally developed and arrange, the possibility to leap their manufacturing facility rivals might be at its strongest within the early races of the season.
And whereas all eyes might be on his brother’s manufacturing facility Ducati transfer and the upcoming tensions between himself and Francesco Bagnaia, Alex Marquez is poised to place in his greatest season but in MotoGP…
