Could 2025 be the year of MotoGP's other Marquez?

It’s hard to believe that the 2025 season will mark Alex Marquez’s sixth year in MotoGP. 

The premier class he joined in 2020 with the factory Honda squad as Jorge Lorenzo’s replacement was turned upside down by the COVID pandemic, and then shaken up some more when his team-mate - and older brother - Marc Marquez badly broke his arm at the season-opening Spanish Grand Prix.

The 2019 Moto2 and 2014 Moto3 world champion wasn't fancied to do much when he stepped up to MotoGP. His signing came just a few days after Lorenzo announced his retirement one year into a two-year Honda deal, while Marc Marquez’s blockbuster four-year contract announced in February of 2020 suggested HRC’s signing of his younger brother was a stipulation of the eight-time world champion’s.

To boot, he was taking on the bike that effectively ended three-time MotoGP world champion Lorenzo’s career and gave Dani Pedrosa his first winless campaign in his final outing in 2018. Alex Marquez’s situation was unenviable.

Then with Honda’s reference rider sidelined by injury, he was thrust into learning the ropes on his own. And to his credit, he did an admirable job. Scoring podiums at the French GP and Aragon GP, the younger Marquez brother was the only Honda rider to see the rostrum that season.

Scoring 74 points in a shortened 2020 calendar, difficult Honda machinery at LCR in the following two seasons saw him repeatedly come up short of matching that. In 2022, he made the decision to step away and take on a new challenge at the Gresini Ducati squad.

It proved an inspired move, as he scored two sprint wins and two grands prix podiums on his way to a career-best ninth in the standings on 177 points. However, the GP23 he rode last year proved difficult to adapt to and a clear step behind the GP24, Marquez only managed one podium but was eighth in the standings on 173 points.

Even still, his points-per-round average only slumped from 8.85 to 8.65 in 2024, while he only finished outside of the top 10 twice in the 16 grands prix he finished last season. His consistency is something that’s proven to be a real asset for Gresini, with the squad sixth in the teams’ standings in 2023 and third in 2024 as it enjoyed a boom with Marc Marquez at the helm.

Alex Marquez's time to shine?

While his older brother stole the headlines in a career rebuilding year for him, Alex Marquez didn’t exactly crumble under what he admits was a lot of pressure from the situation.

“It's not that Marc is going to go too far, because he'll be one garage away from us, to the left or to the right, but it will be different,” he said at Gresini’s 2025 launch event last weekend. 

“I've said it several times, having Marc in the garage has positive and negative aspects. Last year there was a lot of pressure in the garage at the beginning, because expectations were high. 

"But Marc also brought a lot of experience, and I think he was a leader from day one, he made us understand many things. What we learned from him we have to take advantage of this year , because he made us take a step forward as a team.”

While the hype around Gresini will cool off in 2025 now Marc Marquez has departed to the factory Ducati squad, the Nadia Padovani-run outfit clearly sees Alex as a suitable leader now. He’s got a contract through to the end of 2026 and will be tasked with accelerating Fermin Aldeguer’s adaptation to MotoGP as a rookie.

While one could make a sneering generalisation that Alex is now just a leftover Marquez at Gresini, he’s used the time alongside his brother constructively. And let’s not forget, Marc’s ‘rebirth’ year - as he has called it - wouldn’t have been possible without the persuasions of his younger brother.

“I've learned a lot from Marc, and I'm sure I'll learn something from Fermin as well,” he noted. “But he's a rookie, so I accept the responsibility of being the team's reference, the one who has to get results. An independent team needs them every weekend to show themselves on television and for their sponsors to be seen. It's a mission that I like, and it gives me a lot of motivation.”

Don’t think, though, that Alex Marquez is going to try and be a Marc clone in 2025 now he is back at the helm of Gresini. While he has always appreciated his brother’s support, Alex told this writer a few years ago that during his rookie campaign he had to put a stop to Marc’s advice because it became a bit much.

Gresini has lofty ambitions with the GP24 this year. It’s looking for top fives every weekend, results which Alex Marquez was able to start churning out nicely in the last rounds of a tough 2024 campaign.

A fifth in the Thai GP sprint was followed up by a brace of fourth-place finishes in Malaysia, fifth in the sprint and fourth in the grand prix at the Barcelona finale. It marked his first time breaching the top five since his German GP podium last July, in which he was third behind Marc Marquez to create MotoGP’s first brotherly podium in 27 years.

That end-of-season surge was the result of “working with no stress, just making our things and looking at our garage”. And it’s left him with the feeling that there are “a lot of chances” for his first grand prix win in MotoGP to come in 2025.

There’s no telling at this stage just how much of a step Ducati will take with its GP25. But Marquez’s first touch of the GP24 at the Barcelona test last November was immensely positive as he topped the timesheets.

He said at the time the GP24 was a bike that was “better and better and better” every time he tried to push, while the corner-entry problems that plagued the GP23 were not present.

The start of the 2025 season will be crucial for Gresini and Marquez. With a GP24 fully developed and set up, the chance to jump their factory rivals will be at its strongest in the early races of the season.

And while all eyes will be on his brother’s factory Ducati move and the impending tensions between himself and Francesco Bagnaia, Alex Marquez is poised to put in his best season yet in MotoGP…