Davide Tardozzi on Marc Marquez: “To be a great rider, you have to be a great person”

As Marc Marquez heads from Gresini Racing to the Ducati Lenovo Team in 2025, he returns to factory status after one year in a satellite squad, but more importantly achieves technical parity with Francesco Bagnaia, who has won more than any other rider since 2021.

Bagnaia’s rise to becoming a two-time MotoGP World Champion began in the 2020 Andalucia Grand Prix, where he was nailed on for a podium before his Pramac Ducati encountered a terminal failure on lap 20. It was in that race that Bagnaia first emerged as a candidate to become a factory Ducati rider in 2021.

One week before, Marquez broke his right humerus in the Spanish Grand Prix. It almost ended his career, but ultimately led him to Ducati, as he returned from injury to find his Honda RC213V uncompetitive, and increasingly so.

Finally, after battling against the factory Ducati team in 2017, 2018, and 2019, Marquez will join it in 2025, the team having established itself as the strongest in MotoGP.

“I think Marquez is a great rider because he is also a great person and, for me, he has the intelligence to listen, reason and know what you are going to say to him and prepare the next answer,” siad Ducati Lenovo Team manager Davide Tardozzi said in an interview with the Spanish publication AS.

“It has an overview that gives you the possibility to have everything ready. The person is in perfect communion with the rider.

“To be a great rider, you also have to be a great person. If not, there is weakness.

“He is not Einstein, he is not the president of the government, but he is one step ahead.”

Bringing Marquez, the most successful MotoGP rider of the 2010s, into the factory Ducati team alongside Francesco Bagnaia, the most successful MotoGP rider of the 2020s so far, means that the Ducati Lenovo Team has assembled arguably one of the greatest two-rider teams in motorcycle racing history.

For Tardozzi, there is only one other partnership of the past few years that is worthy of comparison to Bagnaia-Marquez.

“A team like the one we have, with [Francesco] Bagnaia and Marquez, I think can only withstand the comparison with that of Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo,” he said.

“I don't think there is another team in recent history that is at this level.”