Marc Marquez proved Ducati’s vision of a bright future in Australia

Ducati continued to tick off new milestones in its era of utter domination in MotoGP at the Australian Grand Prix.

As its riders - Jorge Martin and Marc Marquez - shared the spoils in both races, it also saw to it for the first time in the modern era that a single manufacturer occupied the top six spots of a grand prix.

Not since Honda in 1997 during the stranglehold years of the NSR500 has a manufacturer achieved this feat, and it is a testament to the job Ducati is doing. A GP23 led two GP24s, a GP23 and two more GP24s.

The first non-Ducati in Australia was the KTM of Brad Binder, who was 15.450s away from winning the grand prix.

In 2025, there will be more opportunities for others to break up this chokehold Ducati has at the sharp end of results sheets. It loses two of its bikes from the grid as Pramac joins forces with Yamaha, while only three of its stable will be on GP25s.

That’s not to say Ducati still won’t be able to have top six lockouts, but they will be harder to come by.

Glimpse into Ducati's bright future

What’s unlikely to change, though, is Ducati’s annexation of the podium. It was 1-2-3 in both races at Phillip Island, with its podium runners a clear step above the rest.

And at one stage in the 27-lap grand prix, we got a glimpse of a future Ducati hoped it would have in 2025 when it came time to decide who should be Francesco Bagnaia’s team-mate at the factory squad on the run up to the Italian GP.

In an ideal world, Ducati hoped to have its cake and eat it. It had already re-signed double world champion Bagnaia through to the end of 2026, and was set to make Martin his team-mate.

Marquez, then, would slot nicely onto a factory GP25 at Pramac.

On lap 12 of the grand prix, the vision Ducati had of that future was put on show.

Martin led Marquez and Bagnaia, while the rest of the field was 3.872s adrift as they started that lap. Martin ran wide into Turn 1 and opened the door for Bagnaia to make an overtake at Turn 3, before the Pramac rider retaliated at Turn 4. This then opened the door for Marquez to come into second.

For a brief, glorious moment, three of the best riders on the current grid - all on Ducati machinery - battled it out for the lead of a race. It was a postcard moment for Ducati that perfectly displayed the brilliant job it has done to take control of the competitive landscape in MotoGP; three different riders, three different teams and two of its best ever bikes.

But it was also a bittersweet reminder of what could have been.

A 2025 season with all three of those riders on GP25s battling for supremacy was a mouthwatering prospect when it was first floated.

But it’s a future that will never come to pass after the powerplay Marquez pulled on the run up to the Italian GP, where he said it was either the factory team for him or a works bike at Gresini (an option Ducati had already rejected out of hand), or he’ll take up a plan C option elsewhere.

We all know how the story goes, but Phillip Island also glimpsed the future Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali rightly feared it would miss out on if it didn’t meet Marquez’s demands.

Marquez's brilliant fightback

The bizarre visor tear-off moment at the start nearly derailed Marquez’s entire grand prix, as the wheelspin it created dumped him to 13th at the first corner from second on the grid. Alex Marquez has taken a bit of credit for nerfing Jack Miller out the way to part the Red Sea for his brother, but Marc’s charge back up to sixth by Turn 6 was nevertheless impressive.

He lost 1.269s to Martin on that opening lap, but by lap six he was back into the podium places and was 0.737s behind Bagnaia in second. He would jump Bagnaia on lap 12 in that three-way battle that involved Martin, while his first raid on the Pramac rider came on the 24th tour when Martin was a bit wide exiting Turn 4.

Martin’s fightback showed how gritty he is despite the need to be wary of his championship position, and the compliance he had in Marquez’s aggressive Turn 4 overtake that would win him the race on lap 25 deserves just as much credit as the pass itself.

“This one was old style,” Marquez beamed after the race. “These kind of circuits, when you have a lot of stop-and-go with the aerodynamics we have now, you cannot do this kind of race.

“But here in Phillip Island, where you don’t have hard brake points, you can follow the others in a good way and this is one of my strong points in the riding style.

“In fact, when I was behind Martin I was super comfortable, riding in an easy way… not easy, but I was smooth and managing always the distance, and waiting until those last laps.”

Marquez beat Martin to the chequered flag by 0.997s to register his first season with three grands prix wins since 2021. Prior to the weekend, Martin talked about wanting to go back to the era of 2014, 2015 in MotoGP to truly assess his speed as a rider. Phillip Island, then, gave him his answer.

Marquez's lap time analysis

Arguably, the 2024 Australian GP could be considered as Marquez’s best win in MotoGP. The recovery from the poor start was one thing, but a look deeper into his pace shows just how good Marquez was in that race.

Marquez was 0.117s quicker per lap on average than Martin throughout that grand prix, with Martin leading for much of it while the Gresini rider had to make several overtakes.

On seven occasions (including the new race lap record he set of 1m27.765s) Marquez circulated in the 1m27s bracket, versus four for Martin.

Impressively, Marquez’s pace was such that he did three laps faster than his Q2 time that put him second on the grid, while six of his race efforts would have been still good enough to qualify him on the front row.

All but four of his race laps were times good enough for the second row. While Q2 conditions weren’t optimal, his race laps were still being done on a higher fuel load and on soft rubber that had to do 27 laps.

His final two laps were both 1m28.0s, while Martin’s were a 1m28.464s and a 1m28.576s. To further contextualise this form, he did it on a year-old bike. While the official word from Ducati and its riders is that the GP24 and GP23 don’t have many differences.

At Phillip Island, the difference between the leading GP23 (Marquez in first) and the next one (Fabio Di Giannantonio in fourth) was 12.997s at the chequered flag. Across the 17 rounds run in 2024 so far, Marquez has outscored the next-best GP23 (Di Giannantonio again) by 195 points.

Marquez is currently sat at 20.29 points per round after 17 events, while Di Giannantonio is at 8.82 - that’s a whopping difference of 11.4 points per round.

And all of that is on a GP23 that in recent rounds seems to have taken a step further back from the GP24s. After his engine failure at the Indonesian GP, several reports emerged that Ducati had reverted to an older flywheel set-up on the GP23’s engine as a modification made in this area was deemed the cause of the problem.

All in, the 2024 Australian GP raises the question: just what can Marquez do on a factory Ducati?

This is the question that has been on Ducati management’s mind since the early rounds of 2024 and the podium form Marquez showed almost out of the gate on his Gresini-run GP23. It’s the question that ultimately led Ducati to its 2025 rider line-up U-turn, which cost it Martin, Pramac and - indirectly - Marco Bezzecchi too.

Phillip Island has reiterated the question again, but it is one that now also has the glimpse of an answer if the Australian venue is one where, as Marquez points out, the rider can still make the difference in the modern bike era…