Analysis: Marc Marquez’s rivals were spared an even more brutal beatdown

Marc Marquez branded it the “dream” start to the 2025 season: pole, sprint win, grand prix victory at the MotoGP Thai GP. 

Life as a factory Ducati rider really couldn’t have gotten off to a better start. All pre-season predictions and practice analysis leading up to last weekend’s racing all proved correct. And for the first time in almost 2000 days, Marquez is a championship leader again.

The end result was nothing to cause a stir, ultimately. Any thoughts that the racing could be close, as is often the case when the first round takes place at the same venue as the last test, were quickly put away when Marquez led his brother start-to-finish from pole in the sprint and the top three put on no overtakes on each other.

After six laps of racing on Sunday, Marquez was well on his way to a Thailand clean sweep as he led Alex Marquez by 1.3s, while factory team-mate Francesco Bagnaia was 2.5s adrift in a third he looked resigned to.

Read more: 2025 Thai MotoGP rider ratings

Then at Turn 3 on the seventh of 26 tours, he checked up and Alex Marquez came into the lead. His instant return to speed behind the Gresini-run GP24 of his younger brother calmed fears of a mechanical issue. But Marc Marquez admitted after the race he was three laps from “disaster” as his front tyre pressure was not in the minimum window dictated by the rules.

Failure to comply with this minimum for at least 60% of the grand prix would have resulted in a 16-second time penalty. Marquez elected to tuck into his brother’s slipstream to boost the pressure to avoid this. While the factory Ducati rider was ultimately in cruise control while doing this, he noted that it wasn’t exactly easy.

“My strategy was clear: good start, push the first two laps because I predicted that where especially Pecco would try to attack me,” he said. 

“And then just I had the speed and I pushed the first two laps, I saw Alex was second and then when I have the gap I just controlled that 1.5s more or less. When I realised the tyre pressure I was not inside for one lap, two laps, three laps, six laps, then I said ‘ok, now change strategy’.

“I was counting on the bike the laps remaining, the laps I need to stay in the pressure and I saw I was on the limit. Just I rolled the gas and I was behind him. It was super difficult to ride because the front was closing, but today I had the pace to absorb that problem.”

Ducati has denied that there was any mistake made when setting Marquez’s pressure, while the rider tried to explain that this was a consequence of changing riding style over the weekend which meant he wasn’t pushing the front as hard as he normally would. He brushed it off as being a quirk of his the team needs to learn. Ultimately, it proved no matter as Marquez took the lead again easily at the last corner on lap 23 before darting away to victory by 1.732s.

Pace analysis reveals clue as to Marc Marquez’s true dominance in Thai GP

Over the course of the full race distance, the average pace difference between the top three was actually very, very low. Marc Marquez’s average was only 0.046s quicker than Alex Marquez, and 0.058s faster than Bagnaia’s.

But, Marc Marquez was very clearly riding well within his limits between lap seven and the end of lap 23 when he retook the lead. Between laps two and six, Marquez was lapping 0.158s on average quicker than Alex Marquez and 0.372s faster than Bagnaia. Marc Marquez was the only one of that trio not to dip into the 1m31s in this period; Alex Marquez did so twice, while Bagnaia did three times.

Strung out until the end of the race, that equates to a winning margin of 3.95s over Alex Marquez and 9.3s over Bagnaia in third. The real final gaps in the end were 1.732s and 2.398s.

The pace at the end of the race is perhaps more revealing. When Marquez crossed the line at the end of lap 23, having just moved back into the lead now satisfied that his front tyre pressure was in the safe zone, he was 0.123s clear of his brother. By the end of the next tour, that gap had swollen to 1.259s.

“Tough,” he replied when asked how he would have approached a proper fight with his brother. “Difficult, especially because if something happened we would arrive at home… we lunch at the same table!

“But apart from jokes, at the end it’s competition - it’s not with your brother or with your team-mate. 

"When you overtake somebody you try to overtake in a good way and try to not make any mistakes. But sometimes we are on the limit and you cannot avoid it. Today I was lucky because I was controlling and I had more pace. And I had two clear points to overtake, which was last turn and Turn 3. And then I gave that push for 1m31s low just to open the gap, and then I said ‘he will defend Pecco, but I don’t want to be in the middle’.”

When Marc Marquez needed to open up the taps, what he had in reserve was frightening. From laps 23 to 26, his average pace was 1m31.650s. That was 0.474s faster than Alex Marquez and 0.468s quicker than Bagnaia.

Task facing Francesco Bagnaia in 2025 even greater now

As Crash wrote prior to the Thai GP, riders who win the first race of a season have a just under 40% chance statistically of going on to win the title. So far in the 2020s, only Bagnaia has successfully done this.

But Marquez’s victory in Thailand saw him match some important milestones that certainly - at least from perspective of the highly unscientific metric of superstition - set him on the right path.

He’s the first factory team Ducati rider to win on debut since Casey Stoner in 2007, the year the Australian took the Italian marque to its first world championship in the premier class. It’s just the second time in MotoGP that Marquez has won the opening round, which was over a decade ago at the 2014 Qatar GP - the year he romped to 10 consecutive wins to start the season on his way to title number two.

In his entire career, Marquez has only ever won the opening grand prix twice - the other time the 2012 Qatar GP, step one on his way to the Moto2 crown that season. For the first time since Valencia 2019, when he was last world champion, he summits the top of the riders’ standings and is a winner in Thailand for the first time since he celebrated that 2019 crown.

Understandably, Marquez was a bit teary-eyed in parc ferme after the grand prix.

But while one side of the garage was on cloud nine, the other has been smacked with an even tougher reality that it perhaps thought it would be facing at the start of the 2025 campaign.

At no point since MotoGP landed in Thailand earlier this month to finish the pre-season and begin the 2025 campaign has Bagnaia looked like being on terms with his new team-mate. A luckless Friday, in which he was caught out by phantom yellow flags and a cruising Franco Morbidelli to drop into Q1, somewhat exaggerated his plight. But even on Friday race pace analysis, he was still a step behind Marquez - though factored much more strongly in second than he ultimately ended up.

Bagnaia had to fend off the attentions of a rapid rookie in Ai Ogura from Trackhouse Aprilia in the sprint, with the Italian later complaining that the smaller fuel tank size he has to use for the shorter races changes the bike’s handling for him and saps some confidence. He also rued his choice of hard front tyre.

But even on the soft front in the main race, and on the fuel tank he prefers, from lap one Bagnaia was nowhere to be seen. A scrappy first lap left him 0.945s off the lead already, and it was at 1.579s by the end of lap two. He was brought closer to the lead fight during Marquez’s mid-race slow-down, but that was ultimately superficial.

He pushed in the last laps to snatch second from Alex Marquez, but couldn’t breach the devilish 0.666s gulf splitting them.

“I wasn’t even close to stopping them, honestly,” Bagnaia lamented. “It was like I was in a cinema. 

"On Friday we finished the job that we didn’t do in the test, so I needed to set up a bit more on Saturday morning, and I was a bit too late. So I didn’t try well the front tyres, [in the sprint] I decided to go with the hard [compound front tyre] but it wasn’t the correct choice, and today I used the soft that was working much better but I think I wasn’t on the correct set-up for trying to have an advantage.

“I think that Marc played a bit with us, also for his problem with the pressure; but as soon as he decided to go he gave to me like 2.3 seconds in three laps, so he was much faster and I have to improve, learn what he’s doing better, and close this gap because I know that the next two race weekends are very good for both of them but I need to be closer.”

The upcoming Argentina GP has never been a happy hunting ground for Bagnaia. He was 16th in the wet 2023 edition after tumbling out of the podium places, was fifth in 2022 and 14th in his 2019 rookie season. He has breached the podium once in America, in 2021, while a victory in 2023 went walking when he crashed out of the lead.

Marquez, by contrast, has three wins at the Argentina GP - his last in 2019 seeing him dance through the dirty, low-grip conditions he so loves at Rio Hondo to a victory margin of 9.816s. At COTA, he has seven wins to his credit.

The next few rounds are shaping up to be uncomfortable for Bagnaia as they play into Marquez's strengths, while the former's weaknesses in Thailand clearly aren't an issue for his team-mate. 

But Bagnaia just needs to do what he did last weekend, which was bank the maximum results on offer and keep laying the ground work for when he does get back to a better level on the Ducati.

That said, the level from which Marquez starts the 2025 season is much higher than anticipated. And all of a sudden, a hard season for Bagnaia has just gotten even more difficult…