What would the 2025 MotoGP season have looked like without Marc Marquez?

It says a lot about just how good Marc Marquez was in 2025 that he still finished the season 78 points clear of the field despite missing the final four rounds. And it says a lot about how the final rounds may have played out had he not been injured in a collision with Marco Bezzecchi at the Indonesian Grand Prix.

After a hellish journey back from a serious arm injury in 2020, Marquez achieved his ultimate aim of winning again. But he didn’t just win: he returned to his pre-injury best, and even exceeded it on the factory Ducati.

Eleven grand prix victories, 14 sprint wins, and a consecutive run of seven 37-point weekends from Aragon to Hungary. No rider in the sprint era has enjoyed such dominance or consistency: Pecco Bagnaia won 11 grands prix in 2024, for example, and still came up 10 points short of a third world title.

Marquez’s domination was magnified by the woes of Bagnaia in the garage next door and the inconsistent form of Fabio Di Giannantonio on the third GP25.

This has raised questions about where Ducati actually sits now in the pecking order. Marquez rode around any problems that arose on the GP25, the others largely couldn’t. It has sparked fears of a repeat of the Honda years, when Marquez could extract the most from a bike that the rest of the stable seemed to struggle on.

Those questions won’t be answered until after the first few rounds of the 2026 season. But with Marquez back fit and healthy, it’s hard to see Ducati being knocked off its perch easily.

By every metric, Marc Marquez would have won the world championship in 2025. He amassed a total of 545 points from 18 rounds. In grands prix alone, he outscored Alex Marquez 355 to 309 points. In the sprints, he bested Alex Marquez 190 to 158 points.

For the last few years, MotoGP has enjoyed title battles that have gone to the wire. In all three of those occasions, Marc Marquez wasn’t a combatant. That’s a bitter pill to swallow for the rest of the grid as it tries to plot the best course of action to topple him in 2026.

But what would the 2025 season have looked like if Marquez wasn’t there? In this hypothetical scenario, we’ve thrown Marquez out of the results entirely and promoted riders accordingly to create a new championship picture.

Ducati could have won 2025 MotoGP title even without Marc Marquez

In this scenario, where Marquez has been ejected from the results of the 2025 season, Ducati still comes out a dominant victor.

Alex Marquez early-season consistency quickly strengthened his claims to finishing at least runner-up in the championship. Without his older brother hogging the limelight, much of the glory of the 2025 campaign falls on the Gresini rider.

On the GP24, Alex Marquez wins eight grands prix instead of the three he actually achieved this season and brings his Sunday total up from 309 to 344. That’s still 11 shy of the 355 Marc Marquez scored in grands prix alone in 2025.

It’s the sprints where Alex Marquez really stretches his legs, with 13 wins going his way to help boost his Saturday tally from 158 to 191. Combined, he ends 2025 with 535 points to be crowned world champion.

And by quite some distance, too, as Marco Bezzecchi moves into second in the standings for Aprilia. A slow start to the year in both grands prix and sprints ultimately kicks off from the British Grand Prix, as he raises his tally of wins from three to six, while scoring four sprint wins too.

However, that’s only good enough for 401 points, putting him 134 behind. In real life, that gap was slightly smaller at 114.

KTM’s Pedro Acosta inherits third in this scenario with 351 points. Crucially, Marc Marquez’s absence from the 2025 results would have seen Pedro Acosta score his first wins. He’d have taken sprint honours at Brno, before registering a first grand prix win in Hungary.

Marc Marquez’s absence doesn’t make life much better for his struggling team-mate Pecco Bagnaia, who still finishes the campaign outside of the top three in the standings. He adds another grand prix win to his credit, but remains on two sprint successes to end the year on 336 points.

Other results to note would have been a sprint win for Fabio Di Giannantonio in Hungary and one for Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo at Barcelona. Fermin Aldeguer’s first win would have come in Austria instead of Indonesia.

The most intriguing thing about this scenario is the fact Ducati’s older bike would have beaten its new one comfortably, with the GP24 combining for 10 wins versus just three for the GP25. How Ducati would have reacted to that raises an interesting thought: would it be forced to dig even deeper to improve the GP26, or bank all of its chips on the GP24?