Alex Marquez says he is his “main rival” in battle for second in MotoGP standings

Gresini Ducati MotoGP rider Alex Marquez says it will be “a nice experience” to battle with an in-form Pecco Bagnaia, but stresses his main rival for second in the standings is himself.

The 29-year-old struggled for pace last weekend in Japan, with a sixth in the grand prix allowing older brother Marc Marquez to lift himself out of reach in the 2025 championship battle.

Alex Marquez’s woes also coincided with Ducati’s Pecco Bagnaia having his best weekend of the season, which narrowed his advantage in second in the standings to 66 points with five rounds to go.

With Bagnaia looking very much like he is back on top form, Alex Marquez’s fight to keep runner-up spot in the standings will get harder.

“Still we have a good advantage, 66 points are quite a lot,” he said on Thursday ahead of the Indonesian Grand Prix.

“But we have in front of us a Pecco in good form, also a really good team in the official Ducati.

“So, it will be a nice experience to fight against Pecco and that package for the second position.

“Just we need to focus on ourself. We have an advantage. So, like in Japan, if some weekends we struggle a little bit more we just need to save the weekend and go to the next one.

“But my mentality is to keep attacking, to extract the potential from the bike every weekend, which in Japan we didn’t do. And just focus on our performance.”

He added: “Marc has a lot of options to win the five races until the end, because he will not have pressure.

“So, he will risk. In many other situations when someone wins the championship, sometimes it’s the opposite - they relax a little bit. But Marc is the opposite.

“He’s like ‘now I want to win the five races to go’. So, it will be tough but it’s not our fight.

“We need to focus on ourself and the main rival for us is us. If we do everything in the correct direction, second will be ours.”

Lack of “intensity” blamed for Alex Marquez’s Japan struggles

The Gresini rider struggled all weekend with a lack of front-end confidence during the Japanese Grand Prix.

Reflecting on this on Thursday at Mandalika, he says he didn’t have “the intensity” necessary to wrestle a MotoGP bike, while also admitting his feedback on the bike wasn’t precise in practice.

“I was not with the intensity that you need to fight on a MotoGP bike with, first of all,” he explained.

“Later on, we went to a direction of set-up that was not the correct one because my comments were not really precise.

“So, they were in the opposite side and coming back. So, it was difficult.

“We lost all of that Friday, also with a crash, with Q1 and all that. If you are not in the top 10 in practice, Q2 directly, all the weekend is complicated.

“I didn’t feel very good, so I didn’t put the intensity that I needed to put.”