Analysis: Lewis Hamilton/Marc Marquez fever will be huge for motorsport in 2025

As I write this, it is Wednesday 22 January 2025. And for the first time in a long time, this off-season has felt especially frustrating. Ask anyone who works in motorsport and most will tell you that the winter is never long enough.

And this is still true. The MotoGP season ended properly on 19 November following the Barcelona test. F1 carried on into the second week of December. The MotoGP campaign gets underway in just over a month’s time in Thailand, while F1’s campaign does so a few weeks later in March. Between world motorsport’s two biggest series, they are scheduled to race 46 times in 2025.

Read more: Why fallout is inevitable at Ducati's MotoGP superteam

But, there is a sense of excitement coming into 2025 that we’ve not had for a while.

Let’s face it, since the madness of the 2021 season F1 hasn’t really had a genuinely enthralling battle for the drivers’ championship as Red Bull and Max Verstappen have romped to four on the bounce. Yes, they were challenged in the second half of last year, but the dominance of winning seven of the first 10 races ensured a predictable outcome.

MotoGP has seen the last three of its title battles go down to the wire. But, again, the hype around them felt flat. Francesco Bagnaia and Fabio Quartararo’s 2022 tussle was anything but, really, with the former able to capitalise on a gradual decline in performance from the Yamaha. And the last two editions of Bagnaia versus Jorge Martin won’t go too high up on anyone’s list of greatest title battles.

Taking nothing away from anyone’s achievements, star power is a vital part of any championship narrative. Valentino Rossi’s first five premier class titles so him triumph at a canter, but he was the main attraction. Everything about him, from his personality, to his on-track rivalries, to his celebrations captivated audiences.

But three of his first five MotoGP titles were won by over 100 points. The rest, he was still comfortably clear. Despite that, those years were littered with memorable on- and off-track moments that have become the focal point. The fact he went from Honda to an unfancied Yamaha in 2004 and did the same thing only strengthened his superstar power.

The 2008 title win was dominant too, but the riders he was having to beat were getting tougher and the tensions created great drama. That much was true of his 2009 championship win against Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo. He may well have won a seventh crown but the guarantees were diminishing and how he would respond to this kept you coming back for more.

F1 at the same time in the late 2000s and early 2010s had better title battles, arguably, with 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2012 all memorable tilts.

But for so many people, the total domination of Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes through the rest of the 2010s between 2014 and 2020 is just as important a point in F1 history for them because - much like Rossi - the more he won, the more it boosted his star power and the further afield it garnered attention. The same is true of the Michael Schumacher years of domination in the decade prior.

With all the will in the world, he’s a popular racer, but Max Verstappen just doesn’t command that same Rossi-like or Schumacher-like aura.

Lewis Hamilton drives for Ferrari

This week has very much been proof that, as much as fans want good racing, they hunger even more for superstars doing big things. Marc Marquez’s first official event as a factory Ducati rider has whipped everyone into a frenzy, while Lewis Hamilton driving Ferrari F1 machinery at Maranello on Wednesday for the first time has blown up social media: F1’s official Twitter post about it has already hits 1.7 million impressions in just a few hours while his first picture from Maranello is F1's most liked on Instagram ever. To boot, he already drew a big crowd to Maranello to watch his first laps.

Make no bones about it: this is a genuinely exciting time for motorsport, especially because these are both moments that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.

In many ways, there is a lot of overlap in the racing careers of Marquez and Hamilton. The latter was already a phenom when he stepped into F1 in 2007, just a year before Marquez made his grand prix debut in the 125cc World Championship. Much like Hamilton’s, Marquez’s rise up the ladder was rapid and enthralling.

Marquez made his MotoGP debut in 2013, the same year Hamilton made his high-profile - and criticised at the time - move from McLaren, with whom he was world champion in 2008, to Mercedes, who’d only won a single grand prix since taking over the former Brawn GP outfit in 2010. But that year really marked a hand-in-hand starting point of dominance for both.

Marquez, of course, was world champion in his rookie season. In 2014, alongside F1’s hybrid engine switch, Hamilton won title number two while Marquez conquered all for his second crown. Hamilton added title number three in 2015, while Marquez did so in 2016. From 2017 to 2019, Hamilton and Marquez ruled the world. The same likely would have happened in 2020 had Marquez not badly broken his arm in the season-opening race.

As both have enjoyed success at roughly the same pace, their career slumps also coincided. F1’s ground effect rules shift for 2022 caught Mercedes on the back foot and Hamilton would go winless for two seasons. Marquez returned to racing in 2021 and managed three wins, but would miss a good chunk of 2022 to have a fourth operation on his arm to rotate the bone back to its normal position.

Fully fit for 2023, Honda delivered him a dud bike on which he managed just one podium. With little hope of Honda turning things around for 2024, he cut his factory deal a year early to join Gresini Ducati for 2024. At the start of last year, Hamilton also elected to end his multi-year contract with Mercedes before that campaign had even started to sign a deal with Ferrari for 2025.

As Marquez got back to winning races for the first time since 2021 on a year-old Ducati in 2024, Hamilton also broke his drought dating back to the same point.

Now, for 2025, both suit up in red - Hamilton at Ferrari, Marquez at the factory Ducati squad - to try to add to their legacies having regained their form last year.

Though Liberty Media’s acquisition of MotoGP is on hold pending an EU probe, success for Marquez and Hamilton in red this year will only serve to please the company no end as it looks to take advantage of having motorsport’s biggest properties under its umbrella.

Success for either, of course, is not guaranteed. Hamilton is eight years older than Marquez and is much closer to the end of his F1 career than Marquez is to the finish of his MotoGP tenure. And the competition both face will be stiff, both internally - in the form of Charles Leclerc for Hamilton and Francesco Bagnaia for Marquez - and from their rivals.

But the progress of both will be talking points week-to-week this season and will almost certainly prompt casual observers to tune in more regularly. Should both end up winning their respective titles, they will be hailed as major comeback stories - albeit for very different reasons - and 2025 will instantly become frozen in time as one of motorsport’s best years.