The five worst MotoGP title defences

The 2025 MotoGP season has clearly not started in the best way for the series’ reigning champion, Jorge Martin, who will go to the first race in Thailand having ridden his new Aprilia RS-GP for less than 20 laps this year thanks to a crash in the opening laps of the first test of the year in Sepang.

Martin left Malaysia with a broken right hand and left foot, and was then ruled out of taking part in this week’s Buriram test after having surgery in Barcelona.

Looking at the situation pessimistically, it sets Martin up for what could be an especially lacklustre defence of his title as he races – rather than tests – his way to understanding his new motorcycle, with that shiny #1 stuck to the front of it as a reminder of where he probably should be.

That’s not to say, of course, that the Martin-Aprilia partnership is now destined for interminable failure or that they’ll never win a title together.

But, by almost any metric, Martin’s defence of his 2024 MotoGP World Championship – even though there hasn’t been a single free practice session run yet in 2025 – could hardly have gotten off to a worse start than it has.

With that in mind, we thought we’d take a look back at some of MotoGP’s (and, yes, that means strictly the four-stroke era) past failed title defences to see how it’s gone wrong before for some of the series’ previous champions.

Fabio Quartararo, 2022

In a way, it’s quite harsh to put Fabio Quartararo’s 2022 title defence on this list since already in November 2021 it was clear that holding onto his crown would be extremely difficult.

This was in part because of Yamaha’s declining competitiveness but mostly because of the rise to the top that Ducati experienced with Francesco Bagnaia, who won four of the last six races in Quartararo’s title year.

Bagnaia was also confident at the end of 2021 that Ducati’s Desmosedici GP22 was already a step up on the GP21 with over three months still remaining until the start of the 2022 season.

But the start of the season didn’t go the way it was expected to. Bagnaia crashed in Qatar, was 15th in Indonesia, then fifth in Argentina and Texas, and a crash in qualifying at Portimao saw him start last and finish eighth.

Quartararo wasn’t much better, with a ninth in Qatar, eighth in Argentina, and seventh in Texas. But there was a podium in Indonesia and a victory in Portimao.

Jerez was the first time the two went head-to-head, and Bagnaia came out on top as Quartararo tried to avoid overheating his front tyre in Bagnaia’s dirty air for 40 minutes.

But then things went back in Quartararo’s favour: 4-2-1-1 in France, Italy, Catalunya, and Germany. With three DNFs for Bagnaia in that period, Quartararo was over 90 points clear of the Italian entering the Dutch TT.

That should’ve been an insurmountable distance for Bagnaia, even with the performance difference between the Ducati and the Yamaha.

But he ultimately won the title by 17 points, and while this was a triumph of Bagnaia and Ducati, it was also a failure of Quartararo (who crashed at Assen and Phillip Island) and Yamaha to let it slip away so drastically.

Valentino Rossi, 2006

Valentino Rossi won nine titles during his career, and failed to defend on two occasions: 2006, and 2010.

The reason it’s 2006 that makes this list and not 2010 is because defending the title he won in 2009 was made more difficult for Rossi by a shoulder injury sustained before the season and a leg break sustained in practice for the Italian Grand Prix.

In comparison, the 2006 title was lost by Rossi as a result of his own mistakes, some of which were made on track, and some off it.

For example, Rossi tested a Ferrari F1 car during 2006 in such a capacity as to make a switch to the premier four-wheeled championship in the future a viability.

It was a distraction that ultimately proved pointless since Rossi never raced in F1, and the consequence was a compromised development of the 2006 YZR-M1 which proved capable of winning on occasion, but Rossi only managed that on five occasions in 2006 compared to the 11 victories he amassed the previous year.

There were also multiple occasions – such as in Turkey and Germany – where the Italian was coming through from poor qualifying positions to recover something in the race (indeed, at the Sachsenring, it was a 14th-place qualifying performance that resulted in one of Rossi’s finest ever rides to come through and win), or the scenario of the Dutch TT where Rossi crashed in practice and limped to eighth in the race.

Despite all of the difficulties faced in 2006 by Rossi and Yamaha, the Italian still carried the points lead into the final race over Nicky Hayden (at least in part thanks to Hayden’s misfortune in Estoril where he was taken out by Repsol Honda teammate Dani Pedrosa).

But one final mistake ultimately – and famously – cost the Italian what would have been, at the time, an eighth world title and a complete set of 990cc crowns as he folded the front and slid out of the season-ending Valencian Grand Prix at turn two.

As we will find with most of the title defences on this list, 2006 was not a bad season for Rossi in the grand scheme of things, but, by the standards he had set for himself since 2001, it failed to achieve the ultimate target.

Marc Marquez, 2015

As was the case with Rossi, Marc Marquez has (so far) failed to defend a title on two occasions. In his case, the unsuccessful defences came in 2015 and 2020, and, again like Rossi, the latter was down to injury while the former was about Marquez’s own continued mistakes, and that’s why it’s 2015 that makes this list.

It’s inescapably true that, when thinking about the 2015 MotoGP season, we automatically think about how it finished. But, it was, really, an excellent season of racing which, at the start, seemed destined to be boring.

After all, Marquez came into the year – his third in the premier class – after winning consecutive titles in his first two years as a MotoGP rider, the second of which came after a record run of 10 successive wins to start the season and a final total of 13 Grand Prix wins from 18 starts.

Thinking that Marquez wouldn’t eventually go on to dominate 2015 – even if the start of the year in testing hadn’t gone perfectly – seemed nonsensical.

And, yet, there was no Marquez domination– apart from in Texas and Germany, but on the whole the Spaniard was unable to make the same impression he had in the previous two seasons.

Much of this was down to the bike, as the Honda riders that year, Marquez included, struggled with an aggressive engine character.

But it was also down to Marquez’s own desire to win at every opportunity. Throwing away points in races he should’ve won – like in Argentina and Britain – meant that by the time he’d stopped crashing at the start of the Asian triple header the title was already gone.

Infamously, the #93’s inability to win the title himself that year was not the end of his influence on the championship, even if it wasn’t Marquez who generated that influence. But, fundamentally, Marc Marquez didn’t go racing in 2015 to win Jorge Lorenzo a title.

After all, Lorenzo was perfectly capable of winning the title all by himself; and both Marquez and Valentino Rossi were perfectly capable of losing it.

Joan Mir, 2021

If Fabio Quartararo’s 2022 season was a drastic decline, Joan Mir’s 2021 defence was simply a disaster.

Suzuki had won the 2020 title with the Spaniard thanks to the adaptability of its GSX-RR and Mir’s own exceptional consistency in a season that was otherwise entirely chaotic.

2021 saw the overall chaos of MotoGP drop, and the consistency of Suzuki and Mir decline.

Not only did the Spaniard not win a race in 2021, he only scored six podiums in 2021’s 14 races compared to the seven he managed in the 14-race 2020 season.

In general, Mir struggled for performance in 2021 that saw him rarely able to stand out compared to the likes of Quartararo and Bagnaia that year; and on the one occasion he affirmatively was better than both of them, he was beaten in Styria by rookie Jorge Martin.

Still, Mir was third in the 2021 standings, so it was not a disastrous year for the Spaniard, but the reason he makes the list is that there was not one point during 2021 where he looked to be the most likely rider to be crowned champion that year.

Nicky Hayden, 2007

In general, we’ve tried to keep away from seasons where there have been major changes to rules or technical regulations, and that’s why Jorge Lorenzo’s 2016 season isn’t on this list and Fabio Quartararo’s 2021 season is.

However, the final point about Mir is probably also true of Nicky Hayden in 2007, as well, but to a much greater extend, and that’s why the defence of his 2006 title is on our list.

Lorenzo, for example, looked as though he would defend his 2015 title after the opening race in Qatar 2016, which he commanded effortlessly after showing formidable speed in preseason on the new Michelin tyres and with the unified electronics.

Hayden, on the other hand, started the 2007 season – the first of the 800cc era – by going 8-7-7 in the first three races, and ended the year with an average finishing position (from the 15 races he finished) of eighth place.

The American scored only three podiums while defending his title, and finished the year eighth in the standings, 115 points behind his second-year teammate Dani Pedrosa.

Hayden may not have entered the 2007 season as the outright favourite to win the title, but finishing eighth in the year after he was crowned champion, behind both factory Suzuki riders (John Hopkins and Chris Vermeulen) and the satellite Honda of Marco Melandri, was at the very least a significant underperformance.