How Marc Marquez took a step closer to MotoGP title glory in Japan practice

The comeback may be loading, but really this weekend is one of six more opportunities with increasingly narrower margins for error for Alex Marquez where Marc Marquez can win his first MotoGP world title in six years.

But, as it is the first opportunity, and with a very favourable set of permutations, there is a lot of weight being put behind this year’s Japanese Grand Prix as being the most significant round of the 2025 season.

And yet, nothing really went Marc Marquez’s way on Friday at Motegi. On face value he was third in both sessions, with the factory Ducati rider the marque’s leading light at the end of Practice with a 1m43.360s effort set in a frantic conclusion to the hour-long afternoon outing.

But for much of the afternoon session, he really didn’t look very comfortable. All day he was slow through the second sector of the lap, which comprises the heavy braking for the Turn 5 right-handed hairpin, then the fast, long Turn 6 right: five years on from his serious right arm injury, this is little surprise.

But often did his GP25 look unstable around Motegi’s many hard braking zones. Well outside of the top 10 in the latter stages of Practice, a switch to soft rubber saw him vault up the order to safety and direct passage into Q2.

Meanwhile, Alex Marquez - the only rider mathematically able to stop him from winning the title this year - struggled even more on his GP24. The Gresini rider fell out of the Q2 places for the first time this season in what he dubbed a “disaster” day where he generally lacked speed.

To win the title on Sunday, Marc Marquez simply has to have outscored Alex Marquez by three points to seal the deal. And right now, even with a lot of wolves snarling at Ducati’s door in Motegi, that job is looking easier than ever.

In something of a rarity for this season, the GP25 looked to be the better Ducati, with no GP24 making it into the direct Q2 qualifying places at the end of Friday. Maybe that isn’t surprising when they faced rapid Aprilia, KTM and Honda machinery in what is shaping up to be one of the closest weekends of the year.

Coming into the weekend, Marc Marquez insisted he would treat it as a normal round. Ultimately, for him, that is the best way to approach races lest he burdens himself unnecessarily with the weight of expectation.

As such, the closed up order will come as a welcome distraction, as his goal now is to simply improve the package he has against a host of foes with little desire to freely relinquish an opportunity for glory for the sake of a championship battle they have no part in.

Too many changes impact Marc Marquez’s Friday at Motegi

“Strange” was the word Marc Marquez used to describe Friday at the Japanese Grand Prix. And it was, particularly in the closing stages of Practice, as the order chopped and changed, riders threw their machines at the gravel and the normal order was discarded.

But it’s not the first time there has been a Friday with Ducati - and particularly Marquez - on the back foot, only for both to rally when it matters from Saturday onwards.

KTM’s Pedro Acosta - second on Friday despite wrecking his RC16 in a Turn 1 crash - has repeatedly said that Ducati “wakes up” from Saturday. That, as crash.net found out at Misano, is in large part down to the brand’s Remote Garage set-up, where engineers on-site and back at base work in tandem to analyse video and data to determine the correct course for improvement.

Such in-depth work, however, may not be necessary on Friday evening in Japan. Marquez was pretty clear in what he felt was contributing to his problems on the GP25.

“The feeling changed quite a lot with the bike and the track, and then everything became more difficult,” he said, before adding: “our problem was that we started to try different set-ups too early. And it’s better sometimes to concentrate on my riding style.”

Adaptability has been arguably the key pillar of Marquez’s success in 2025. And with that in mind heading into Saturday, he should face an easier time improving what he needs to.

The long run data definitely shows there is pace to be found for the factory Ducati rider. But in the context of what those around him were doing, he’s very much in the ball park. He did his work on the medium Michelin rear, putting 15 total laps on it and averaging 1m45.139s across a five-lap representative sample.

Nobody put this kind of longevity onto a tyre in Practice other than Joan Mir, who was impressive at 1m45.110s on a soft rear that he put 17 laps on. If he can qualify well, the 2020 world champion will certainly be one to watch in the sprint at least.

There were other medium runners faster than Marquez, though across shorter stints. The one that stands out again as arguably being his big rival is Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi. Polesitter at Misano and pushing Marquez all the way for victory at the San Marino Grand Prix, Bezzecchi brushed off two crashes on Friday morning - which meant his team couldn’t eat lunch - to top the day at Motegi in Practice.

The stop-and-go nature of Motegi suits Bezzecchi’s style, but has been a track characteristic that has also suited the RS-GP since the Austrian Grand Prix. Based on recent form, it’s hard to look past the Italian’s pace as anything but legitimate.

KTM’s Acosta was only fractionally faster than Marquez was on the medium rear (which was last year’s grand prix option) and on much fresher rubber. The speed has been there for the 21-year-old, who scored a maiden pole at Motegi last year, in recent events. But converting that into victory challenges has been hard.

And again on Friday in Japan, Acosta complained about the braking of the RC16 not being as strong as it was 12 months ago. There’s rapid one-lap pace in Acosta, but long-term podium pace in the grand prix remains a question mark.

Going back to Marquez, even on a bad day he is in the thick of it and does have a clear direction to follow on Saturday. As has been the case recently, pole may not come his way. But wins in the sprint and grand prix are still very much on the cards.

Alex Marquez picks wrong moment to have worst Friday of the year

And if you compare the position Marc Marquez is in heading into the rest of the Motegi weekend relative to that of Alex Marquez, there is little to suggest at this stage that the championship won’t be wrapped up on Sunday.

Coming to Japan, the Marquez brothers were the only pair with a 100% direct Q2 record. But that run came to an end on Friday afternoon for Alex Marquez, who could do no more than 15th - albeit 0.050s from a top 10 spot.

And to Alex Marquez’s credit, he set an identical time of 1m43.784s to Ai Ogura and Jorge Martin ahead of him in an end to Practice where he was heavily disrupted by yellow flags. A mistake at Turn 3 on his final flying effort was the final nail in the coffin of his Q2 hopes.

Front-end confidence had completely escaped Alex Marquez all day and Gresini’s attempts to fix the issue didn’t really go anywhere. His improved speed in the time attack phase was attributed by the 29-year-old to the step in grip the soft rear offers at Motegi.

Still, he felt there were “positives” to take into Saturday and looks at 15 extra minutes of running in Q1 as something that will be useful for him.

Any attempts to stop his older brother from winning the championship at this point are just delaying the inevitable. But, regardless, pushing to the last possible opportunity remains important for Alex Marquez with a view to the future, especially when he jumps on a factory Ducati next year.

But to make the leap necessary to do this in Japan, he needs to improve on an average race pace of 1m45.444s from Practice.

Pecco Bagnaia has another good Friday - but this one was different

There’s no point sugarcoating it: the last month or so has been a complete crisis for double world champion Pecco Bagnaia. In what has already been a tough season on the GP25, it hit a new nadir from Austria through to the San Marino Grand Prix.

But his Misano rock bottom may have actually delivered him with some tangible solutions. The test day on the Monday after the race was a rare opportunity for him to really dig into toy box and try a number of things.

While after the test he said he didn’t change too much on the bike, in Japan he spoke of “unconventional” ideas that hadn’t been considered before Misano. What exactly those are he’s been cagey about, but it seems like he has gone back to GP24 forks and a swingarm in a bid to recover his lost front-end feeling under braking.

However, some eagle-eyed shots of the practice start session on Friday afternoon at Motegi suggests Bagnaia could have also gone back to the GP24’s ride height device. His bike certainly appeared slightly higher during the practice start than team-mate Marc Marquez’s did on the GP25.

There have, in fact, been some suggestions in the paddock that a big cause of Bagnaia’s issues has been the newer version of the ride height device.

What was evident for Bagnaia was that he could “brake very hard” for the first time, which was then allowing him to experiment more with his riding style. That, he reckons, is why he went from leading FP1 to finishing seventh in Practice.

But pace-wise, Bagnaia looks competitive. Though only across a three-lap representative run with a medium that had 11 laps on it when he discarded it, his average pace worked out at 1m44.950s, which was slightly faster on paper than Marc Marquez’s - though the latter’s run was longer.

Wary to get ahead of himself given what has happened before, and with the dreaded sprint to navigate next, there is still a long way to go before Bagnaia can be considered back despite Ducati’s insistence. And even if things go well for the rest of the Motegi round, there is the caveat that the bigger 355mm brake discs he has felt comfortable on before this season are mandated for this event.

But given how so much of Bagnaia's 2025 woes have been the result of a lack of confidence, simply finding that again will take him a long way.