How Marc Marquez is cementing 2025 as his greatest year in MotoGP

Perhaps it is premature to make such a claim, but at the halfway stage of the 22-round 2025 MotoGP season this has fast become arguably Marc Marquez’s greatest campaign in the premier class.

There was little doubting that Marquez wouldn’t go to the Sachsenring and come away with a big points haul. He’s won at the circuit every year he has raced there in MotoGP barring 2024, where he came from 13th on the grid after breaking a finger in a practice crash to finish second on a Gresini-run Ducati.

The predominantly left-handed circuit has always suited his riding style: “I was able to ride in that way because I was just flowing on the race track,” he said on Sunday after crushing the opposition with a lights to flag victory in the German Grand Prix.

But this wasn’t a straightforward weekend. Rain all of Saturday threatened to turn things on their head, with Marquez needing to weigh up the risks to his sizeable championship lead in the sprint. A mistake at Turn 1 from pole forced him into a recovery from fifth, with Marquez snatching victory on the last lap - but pushing “too much” to do so. He came away from it with another 12 points but with a lesson learned: luck won’t always be on your side.

The rain on Saturday had cleaned the race track of rubber for the 30-lap grand prix. And this led to a demolition derby. Of the already depleted starting list of 18 riders, just 10 actually made it to the chequered flag.

“That Turn 1 was quit critical,” he explained in the post-race press conference. “The fact that yesterday [Saturday] it rained, there was no rubber, no Michelin rubber on the race track and from the beginning I saw it was more slippery than usual. On that Turn 1, also it was a bit of a tailwind and it pushed the bikes a bit out and it was more difficult to stop. So, I was taking care of all these things and especially when I saw a lot of yellow flags, a lot of marks on the race track [from crashes] this gave me extra concentration.”

Taking the lessons from his crashes at COTA and Jerez earlier in the season, Marquez navigated his way around the chaos behind him - which caught out podium runners Fabio Di Giannantonio and Marco Bezzecchi within a matter of laps of each other.

The result was his fourth successive sprint/grand prix double, a 69th career premier class victory to go second all-time on the winners’ list and an 83-point advantage in the championship that could see him miss the next two rounds without losing his lead in the standings.

Over the last four rounds, Marquez has faced numerous different conditions, track layouts, circumstances and has come through all of them with a perfect score. As such, his success in Germany feels very much like a turning point in this championship, where we’ll likely not see him again feeling like he needs to push at his maximum in races because he has such control now.

Canny Friday work yields major boost for Marquez in Germany

The only session that Marquez didn’t top during the German Grand Prix weekend was Practice on Friday afternoon. Fabio Di Giannantonio blasted the field away with a new all-time lap record at the Sachsenring, while Marquez was only third.

But he had elected against a final soft tyre time attack. He reckoned, reasonably, that he’d done enough to secure a direct Q2 place and was more concerned with the impending changes threatened by the weather forecast.

“I prefer to prepare for the race because the forecast said that maybe the next time I will ride the bike in dry will be directly in the race,” he explained. “So, I was riding with that medium rear tyre to prepare especially the electronics, the [engine] maps, because they are crucial in this race track.”

The medium rear was the race option for everyone in the grand prix. And Marquez had it switched on pretty rapidly. At the end of lap two, he was already 0.737s clear of the chasing Fabio Di Giannantonio. And by the start of lap six of 30, he was over a second ahead for the first time. Before Di Giannantonio crashed at Turn 1 on lap 18, Marquez’s lead had extended to 3.298s.

“I mean, of course when you arrive in a circuit where you feel good and for my riding style is perfect… even it was perfect conditions because it was a bit slippery and I like this,” he said. “But I was in a perfect line in the correct way in every corner because I was not on my limit. So, my limit was 1m20.4s, 1m20.3s as I showed on the practice.”

At no point did Marquez get into those sorts of lap time. The closest he got was on lap five, when he set his - and the race’s - best with a 1m20.704s. Such was the control he had of his pace, he dipped into the 1m22s just once - on lap 28 - and sat steady in the 1m21s as he managed a surefire victory. His slowest lap was the last one, with him backing off across the line seeing him register a 1m23.836s.

Even if you include that, his average pace still worked out at 1m21.414 relative to 1m21.6s for fellow podium finishers Alex Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia - who benefitted greatly from the falls of Di Giannantonio and Bezzecchi.

Though an incomplete sample, Di Giannantonio deserves a lot of credit for his ride prior to his crash. His average pace to the point when he fell was 1m21.211s, while Marc Marquez’s worked out at 1m21.351s if you remove his safe final lap. That is, of course, caveated by the fact that Marquez was playing with the field and had pace enough in reserve if he ever needed it. That said, Marquez was at pains to stress he wasn’t cruising.

“I have respect to all the riders and I’m pushing,” he said. “And I’m trying to be super concentrated and it’s not like I’m riding with one hand. It’s not like this. I’m pushing and we’re in MotoGP here in Sachsenring. In other race tracks, as I said in Assen, I was not the fastest one. I won the race but I was not the fastest one. So, today it’s true that I felt super good from the beginning, from FP1. And the way to ride the Ducati is a big difference compared to the Honda. But also the fact I had the injury in my arm and all these things, I changed my riding style to be a bit smooth and less physical.”

Even still, the 6.380s lead he had at the chequered flag definitely felt conservative to what he was actually capable of in the grand prix.

How Marc Marquez keeps getting better

With an 83-point advantage in the championship over Alex Marquez and 147 over third-placed Pecco Bagnaia, this is now firmly Marc Marquez’s championship to lose. Injury is the omnipresent threat in MotoGP, but there has been no point this year where either of his title rivals have looked genuinely faster than him.

With 11 rounds, including this weekend’s Czech Grand Prix at Brno, still to run there is plenty of time for Marquez to make more history. But even now, 2025 is proving to be a new peak in his glittering career.

So far, he’s managed seven perfect 37-point weekends from the opening 11. By contrast in the sprint era, 2024 world champion Jorge Martin had just one in the entirety of last year, while Bagnaia had. In 2023 when he won his second title, Bagnaia had three 37-point weekends.

Marquez has already bettered the record for sprints wins in a season, having won 10 of the 11 held so far. Jorge Martin had the previous record of nine. Marquez has seven grand prix wins at this stage relative to two for Martin in 2024 after 11 rounds and five for Bagnaia in 2023. Marquez is already just four away from the haul of 11 Bagnaia achieved last season.

After 11 rounds, Marquez’s points-per-round average is a staggering 31.3. Martin’s was 25.4 for the entirety of last year, while Bagnaia was at 24.35 for 2023. If grand prix wins alone counted towards the championship, Marquez would be 49 points clear right now and 34 ahead if only sprints are taken into consideration.

Holding 344 points after 11 rounds, this is 69 more than Bagnaia had as the championship leader at the same stage of the 2024 campaign and 84 more than the Italian had in 2023.

Marquez’s best championship season was 2019, where he finished all but one grand prix inside the top two, won 13 grands prix and was 151 points clear in the championship. Comparing 2025 to that, he already has one win more after 11 rounds of this season than he did in 2019. With grand prix points, he’s just 15 shy of where he was at the same stage of 2019.

At present, then, he’s on course to better all of his 2019 statistics and set a new benchmark for success in the sprint era. But what is most impressive about that - and why his 2025 should right now be considered greater - is the fact that he is 32 years old and still at the height of his powers despite fundamentally not being the same rider he was in 2019 as a result of the major arm injury he suffered in 2020.

By no means is 32 an old age. But consider this: Valentino Rossi’s last championship came when he was two years younger than Marquez is now in 2009. The nine-time world champion would win just 10 grands prix beyond his 32nd birthday. Take another multi world champion in Jorge Lorenzo: at 32 years old, he retired from MotoGP.

Success of this measure, then, is something of a rarity in a championship of such youth. Marquez, even in 2019, was still considered a young gun: fully healthy and fully dialled into a Honda he’d ridden all his career, his results were impressive. But to do what he is doing now, having competed in his 200th premier class grand prix, just over a year and a half into his time on a Ducati that requires a totally different riding approach is truly special.

“Of course it’s super important to keep enjoying on the bike,” he said. “And if you are winning it means you are enjoying and this season I’m enjoying a lot. To achieve my 200th GP with a victory means still we are in a very good level. So, I will try to keep going and especially keep with the same passion. This will be the key point…”