Is Marc Marquez’s Ducati GP25 actually the best bike in MotoGP 2025?

MotoGP’s 2025 experiment is very simple: what happens when you put the best rider in the field on the best bike in the field? The answer, after two rounds, has been Ducati-powered Marc Marquez domination.

Since Marquez first rode the Desmosedici GP25 in its final homologated form in first practice at the Thai Grand Prix at the end of February, he has been completely dominant. 

Not only has he won both Sprints and both Grands Prix, but he’s also took both pole positions, and topped every session so far (with the exception of Q1 at both of the opening two rounds courtesy of him topping Practice on both occasions and therefore exempting himself from the first qualifying session).

But Marquez has dominated before on motorcycles that weren’t the best. So, could the year-old GP24 – of which the GP25 is only a reportedly minor evolution – actually be the superior package at the moment?

Is 2024 Ducati better than 2025 spec?

It’s an assumption based on a few presumptions: that two-time premier class champion Francesco Bagnaia is a better rider than winless (in top class Grands Prix) Alex Marquez; that Fabio Di Giannantonio is not dramatically worse than Franco Morbidelli; and that winning races does not indicate that one bike is better than another when the rider aboard the victorious machine is Marc Marquez.

Over the course of their respective careers, it’s hard to argue that Alex Marquez is a better rider than Francesco Bagnaia. Marquez is a World Champion in his own right, but Bagnaia has done it in the premier class twice, and is the most victorious rider on the current grid bar the current championship leader.

Gresini Racing’s #73, though, is doubtless in the best form of his career, at least in MotoGP. If being beaten to race wins by arguably the greatest ever is a defence of Bagnaia, it certainly is for satellite rider Marquez who could quite reasonably argue that, if his brother had simply ridden out his financially lucrative Honda contract, he’d currently be leading the 2025 Riders’ Championship.

But, that is the point trying to be made. If removing Marc Marquez from the series makes Alex Marquez the championship leader over Bagnaia (riders such as Fabio Quartararo and Jorge Martin would also be in this group, but we have to consider their respective current limitations), what does that tell us about relative performance of the motorcycles?

Strictly speaking, it tells us nothing at all. But we can infer from it that either Alex Marquez has, over the winter, become a substantially better rider than Bagnaia; or that – while Marquez has made improvements, and this is irrefutable – he also currently has a minor technical advantage over the GP25 riders.

The latter point there is supported by the second point made earlier about Di Giannantonio and Morbidelli.

It’s a little murky between the two because of Di Giannantonio’s injury-affected winter, but the results from the opening two races show that the GP24-riding Morbidelli is currently out-performing the GP25-mounted Di Giannantonio: Morbidelli was fourth in the Thai Grand Prix to Di Giannantonio’s 10th, with 16 seconds between them; and while Di Giannantonio was much better – and much fitter – in Argentina, he was still two places and almost 2.5 seconds behind third-placed Morbidelli at the second round.

On the other hand, Di Giannantonio (fifth) beat Morbidelli (seventh) in the Argentina Sprint, so this is not an open-and-shut case between the VR46 Racing Team riders.

But perhaps the combination of Morbidelli’s slightly inconsistent performance versus Di Giannantonio over the first two rounds is reinforcement of the level of Alex Marquez, who has been second in both qualifying sessions, both Sprints, and both Grands Prix this season, and who was the only rider with even remotely comparable pace to Marc Marquez in the latter stages of the Argentinian Grand Prix.

If last year it was Marc Marquez making the difference on the year-old Desmosedici GP23, at a disadvantage to the better-turning GP24, perhaps this year it is Alex Marquez making the difference on the year-old GP24 – certainly, he so far has been much better than all the other GP24 riders in 2025, which is the metric by which his brother’s difference-making ability was determined last year.

Is Alex Marquez the key indicator?

But if there is evidence in the results that the GP24 is a better bike at the moment than the GP25, it is in the proximity of the Marquez brothers to each other.

Last year, in the Grands Prix that both riders finished, neither crashed, and neither received a time penalty – that’s 11 of the 20 races* – Marc Marquez beat Alex Marquez on each occasion.

The biggest margin between them in terms of time was 24.591 seconds at the Australian Grand Prix, and the smallest was 0.530 seconds at the German Grand Prix. The average time difference between them across those 11 races was 9.922 seconds.

In percentage terms, Alex Marquez was on average 0.402 per cent behind his brother last year, when both were on Desmosedici GP23s.

In comparison, at this year’s two Grands Prix, the biggest margin Alex Marquez has had to his brother is 1.732 seconds in Thailand, while at Termas de Rio Hondo he was 1.362 seconds behind his former teammate.

Both of those differences are far smaller than the average delta between the Spanish pair last year, and this is reflected in percentage terms, too: Alex was 0.055 per cent away from Marc in Argentina, and 0.073 per cent away in Thailand – the only race he was less than 0.1 per cent away last year was Germany (0.022 per cent).

These are clear indications that Alex Marquez is closer to Marc Marquez this year – with a difference in bike specification – than he was last year, when they were both on the same bike.

Although the indications are clear, they do not point to the cause. Perhaps Alex really has got that much better. Perhaps he is just that much better suited to the GP24 than he was to the GP23. Or perhaps the GP25 is that far away from being dialled in for the factory riders.

Or, of course, Marc Marquez hasn’t showed his full potential yet, and is so comfortable riding within half-a-second either side of Alex Marquez that he has allowed the margin between himself and his brother to close so substantially because it means he can increase the margin between himself and the limit – a luxury he has been so rarely afforded in his career to now.

We know that he has enjoyed such a luxury so far this year by his performance at the Thai Grand Prix, where he rode in the hot and turbulent wake of his brother to increase his front tyre pressure before bolting off in the final laps.

The side effect of the Ducati Lenovo Team rider’s apparent ability to win while riding at a relatively comfortable pace is that it’s hard to say with certainty what is the difference between Marc Marquez and Alex Marquez, because we don’t know (and can’t know) how much race time the eight-time World Champion is leaving on the table. Therefore, what is the difference between the performance of their bikes cannot be deduced from those numbers alone without doubt.

But the supporting evidence of Bagnaia’s struggles and Morbidelli’s apparent superiority compared to Di Giannantonio at present suggests that the bias leans towards the GP24 – at least for now; Ducati has been able to make use of the post-race Jerez test in previous years to make progress with the latest edition of the Desmosedici, and the 2025 edition of that test is coming up at the end of April.

Whatever the case, though, it is the Marquez brothers who are making the difference on their respective machinery at the moment, and the evidence of Argentina comes with the inference that the rest of the field has a significant margin to close.

*Omitted races were the Portuguese Grand Prix, where both riders DNF’d; the Grand Prix of the Americas, where Marc Marquez DNF’d; the Dutch TT, where Marc Marquez was penalised 16 seconds for a front tyre pressure infringement; the Aragon Grand Prix, where Alex Marquez DNF’d; the San Marino Grand Prix, which was a flag-to-flag race; the Indonesian Grand Prix, where both riders DNF’d; the Japanese Grand Prix, where Alex Marquez DNF’d; the Thai Grand Prix which was run in wet conditions; and the Malaysian Grand Prix, where Marc Marquez crashed from third and remounted to finish 12th.