Honda MotoGP boss says Ducati ‘lucky to have Marc Marquez winning so much’

Honda MotoGP team boss Alberto Puig says Ducati are “lucky” to have had Marc Marquez be as dominant on its bike in 2025 as he has been.

Winning 11 grands prix and 14 sprints, the 32-year-old Spaniard dominated the 2025 standings to claim his seventh MotoGP world title with five rounds to spare at the Japanese Grand Prix.

It represented Marc Marquez’s first championship in six years, while making him Ducati’s fourth in its history.

Though Marquez has dominated, Ducati’s factory bike has not been as big a step forward compared to previous seasons, with Pecco Bagnaia struggling for much of the campaign to adapt to the GP25.

Alberto Puig, who worked closely with Marquez during his tenure with Honda that saw him win six MotoGP titles, says nobody deserves a championship more than the No.93 for everything he has been through with his injury problems since 2020.

He also acknowledges that Marquez’s decision to quit Honda in 2023 to pursue a satellite Ducati ride for 2024 “was correct”, while suggesting this was also a fortunate turn of events for the Italian manufacturer.

“Marc deserved the title more than anyone,” he told the official MotoGP website.

“After all that he has been through; all that suffering, all that pain, all of that feeling when you are in that situation.

“And he took his way and he has proven that his way was correct.

“You can say that way with Ducati. They were also lucky to have him winning so many races.”

Marquez’s 2025 campaign has been compared to his sixth title-winning year in 2019, when he took an unfancied Honda to 12 wins and podiums in all but one of the 19 rounds.

For Puig, “the result was massive in 2019. The combination of that bike and that rider was a real weapon, and that’s why he won so many races.”

Marquez will be absent for at least the next two rounds of the 2025 season in Australia and Malaysia, after suffering a shoulder injury in a crash at the Indonesian Grand Prix.

While initially leaving the injury to heal on its own following a medical check last week, his doctors made a U-turn this week on surgery.

The operation was successful, though a timeline for the recovery has not been given yet by Ducati.