Alex Marquez on leading MotoGP standings: ‘Pressure is on the others to catch me’

New MotoGP championship leader Alex Marquez says he “can be more relaxed” coming into the Qatar Grand Prix because the pressure is on everyone else now to catch him.

A 100% record of runner-up finishes in 2025 so far, coupled with the crash for Marc Marquez at the Americas Grand Prix, has seen Alex Marquez take a one-point lead in the standings ahead of this weekend’s fourth round of the season.

The Gresini rider has never led the championship in MotoGP before and comes to a good venue for his team, who have celebrated maiden wins with Enea Bastianini and Fabio Di Giannantonio is recent years at Lusail.

Speaking on Thursday in Qatar about whether or not leading the championship changes anything for him, Alex Marquez said: “I mean, yeah, it’s another weekend, a normal weekend, but you can be more relaxed - it’s the others who have to recover points.

“I mean, you have that inside. But for us, for all the team, it’s like a present after all the hard work we did during last year and that we are doing this year, during the pre-season and all that.

“I think we did a really great job. Leading now, like I said, is like a present.

“So, we need to keep going like this. We are in really good form. It’s true that in Austin we struggled a little bit more than normal, especially in Sunday’s race because I was not feeling super good with the medium rear tyre.

“But we need to be there. We need to be realistic in our performance, in our things, trying not to make mistakes and trying to finish all the races. We are doing a really great job.

“[This] is just a normal weekend, try to extract the 100% as always and be as fast as we can.”

The Qatar GP has been a solid event for Alex Marquez in recent times, with the 28-year-old scoring top six finishes in the 2024 and 2023 races.

But he is reticent to use his past form and his current run of results as proof that this weekend will automatically go in his favour.

“It’s a good track for me, but I mean I have experience from the past that many tracks you arrive to that you love and you are struggling more than at ones where you struggle a lot at in the past,” he explained.

“So, like I said, it’s like a normal weekend for us, we need to extract the 100% potential from the FP1 and try to be really consistent and try to arrive on Sunday in a really good form.

“So, as I said, it’s a normal weekend, try to be focused until Sunday night and we’ll take our maximum and give our maximum as always to score the maximum points that we can.”