Ducati rivals should fear what’s next for Marc Marquez after engine drama

After just two weeks, pre-season testing for the 2025 MotoGP campaign is over and in just 14 days’ time bikes will be back on track at Buriram for practice ahead of the Thai Grand Prix. 

And Ducati will be doing so running factory bikes featuring year-old engines, albeit with a few tweaks the marque is refusing to talk about.

For all of the five days of testing we’ve had this February, the overarching storyline has been whether or not Ducati will ditch its GP25 engine for the GP24 motor that won 16 of 20 grands prix last season.

That decision looked clearer after day one at Buriram, and was confirmed on Thursday. A two-year engine freeze and not enough tangible gains with the 2025 engine forced Ducati into a cautious decision to continue with the GP24 unit.

As factory riders do, both Marc Marquez and Francesco Bagnaia kept details about the 2025 engine to a minimal. Bagnaia said on Wednesday that Ducati had been unable to find a good braking balance with the new engine, while Marquez noted it had “very weak points”. 

Bagnaia later admitted he’d been lying to the media and knew from the off the GP24 was likely going to be the race engine for this year.

Ducati has enough recent examples of pre-season engine dramas to have helped influence its decision. A fairly problematic 2022 testing phase with the full GP22 engine led the factory team to switch to a hybrid version for the season, while the GP23 engine had a clear weakness under braking that was eradicated with the GP24.

The GP24 is easily the best bike Ducati has ever built, and is arguably the best MotoGP bike ever. What many have viewed as a headache this winter has actually been a luxury for the world champion manufacturer.

Ducati also confirmed that it was “a real possibility” that its factory riders start the year with a 2024 engine as well as 2024 aero and chassis. Bagnaia was a little more diplomatic, calling his current bike the “GP24.9”. But this has led many to sound alarm bells, claiming Ducati is standing still and this will be music to the ears of its rivals.

Well, not quite. The average winning margin of the GP24 across the 2024 campaign compared to the nearest non-GP24 was around 3.5s. Ducati’s rivals have taken a step over this winter, but nobody finds that amount of time from one year to the next.

2025 Buriram test fastest laps per manufacturer

Ducati - 1m28.855s (Marc Marquez)

Aprilia - 1m29.060s (Marco Bezzecchi)

KTM - 1m29.133s (Pedro Acosta)

Honda - 1m29.133s (Joan Mir)

Yamaha - 1m29.586s (Fabio Quartararo)

The Marquez brothers annexed the top of the timesheets across both days of testing at Buriram, with Ducati completing a clean sweep over the winter after Alex Marquez was fastest in Barcelona and Sepang on his Gresini-run GP24. Marc Marquez, on the hybrid GP25, set the pace at the end of the Buriram test, albeit missing out on the lap record by 0.155s. Getting his time attack in late on the final day almost certainly played a part in this.

But, outright times aside, it was in the race running where Marc Marquez really caught the eye and further quashed any notion that Ducati’s caution will backfire.

2025 Buriram test long run averages

(Above 20 laps)

Marc Marquez - Ducati - 1m30.378s (23 laps)

Alex Marquez - Ducati - 1m31.071s (23 laps)

Pedro Acosta - KTM - 1m31.016s (22 laps)

Brad Binder - KTM - 1m31.016s (22 laps)

Johann Zarco - Honda - 1m31.559s (23 laps)

(Below 20 laps)

Marco Bezzecchi - Aprilia - 1m30.093s (13 laps)

Joan Mir - Honda - 1m30.338s (13 laps)

Fabio Quartararo - Yamaha - 1m30.361s (12 laps)

Franco Morbidelli - Ducati - 1m31.019s (18 laps)

Marquez average run pace across the 23 laps was 0.518s quicker than the best race lap ever at the Thai GP, which was set by Marco Bezzecchi on a GP22-spec Ducati in 2023. At no point in his run did Marquez drop into the 1m31s, either.

He moved to brush this off somewhat, noting that Alex Marquez would have been closer to him had it not been for electronics issues during the Gresini rider’s run. Either way, Ducati comes out of it looking stronger than the rest still.

There is a noticeable absentee from the above race simulation data. Bagnaia endured a difficult opening day of the Buriram test where nothing really worked for him on his bike. That led to him “starting from zero” on the final day, though his team was able to turn things around and get him feeling confident again.

Fifth overall on the timesheets, he didn’t complete any meaningful race run programme - though was happy with how his pace was on used tyres.

Ducati parking its 2025 chassis may come as something of a surprise, given Bagnaia wanted it introduced last year after testing it. That may well have not been the best move, based on this pre-season. 

That chassis was tested at Misano last September, a track Bagnaia knows like the back of his hand, where the Ducati has always worked well, and was covered in rubber from the previous race weekend. The same was true of when it was trialled at Barcelona last November.

Unsurprisingly, in different grip conditions at Buriram, the chassis didn’t quite perform as expected. Shelving it, as well as the 2025 aero, is no bad thing. The first four races are at tracks that never really paint a true reflection of how the season will unfold, with Buriram, Rio Honda, COTA and Lusail all throwing up unique challenges.

These items will be rolled out again for the post-Spanish Grand Prix test at Jerez at the end of April. In 2022 and 2023, breakthroughs at that Jerez test proved pivotal in Bagnaia’s title charges in those seasons.

As clearly proven this winter, jumping onto what is more or less the 2024 package will still ensure the factory Ducati team is competitive in the early rounds. And Bagnaia did offer up a worrying discovery for Ducati’s rivals.

“I was quite convinced from the start that the ’24 was better,” he said. 

“Then we worked, we tried to improve but for the first day in Malaysia me and Marc were of the same opinion that the GP24 was still a bit better. We tried to improve a lot on the braking, but we didn’t succeed. So, we worked a lot here with the ’24 and we understood that we still have some margin on it. So, this is great.”

To still “have margin” on a bike that was already at such a high level should be high praise Gigi Dall’Igna takes to heart while he wrestles with the disappointment of his other 2025 developments not quite working as hoped…