Praise heaped on Marc Marquez by Ducati boss after MotoGP season of firsts

Ducati Corse General Manager Gigi Dall’lgna has heaped praise on Marc Marquez following the Spaniard’s triumph in the 2025 MotoGP World Championship.

It’s been almost two months since Marc Marquez clinched his ninth world title, seventh in MotoGP, at the Japanese Grand Prix, but only a couple of weeks since the end of a yet another season which saw Ducati on the podium in every grand prix – a streak which now stands at 88 races, even despite the absence of Marquez in the final five rounds.

Marquez’s title triumph was one of the most dominant in the history of the championship, winning 11 grands prix and 14 Sprints from the 17 of each he started, and ending the season with a 78-point margin over the field despite missing those last five races.

For a Ducati rider, it was also a season of firsts, something Dall’Igna was keen to point out in a post-season statement in which he praised Marquez for his combination of youthful hunger for success and “experience of a veteran”.

“[Marquez] is the first Ducati rider to put together 15 consecutive victories between Sprint and GP, the first to get on the podium for 11 races in a row and the first to end the season with over 10 victories in both the Sprint and the GP,” said Dall’Igna.

“But what is equally important, even more, is that his return, his getting back into the game initially in a satellite team, his stubbornness and his enthusiasm are the figure of an ambition that is not economic, but that of a Champion who wanted to rediscover the sensations lost in the odyssey of recent years: the light in his eyes is the sign of a human adventure before being a sporting one, lived with the humility of a rider who always has to learn. 

“The desire of a rookie and the experience of a veteran: it is an example for everyone and an honor for the factory team to have him with them.”

A season of contrast

If the main storyline of 2025 was the return to glory of Marquez, it came in contrast to the experience of the year from the other side of the Ducati Lenovo Team box, as Francesco Bagnaia suffered arguably his worst season in MotoGP – certainly his worst since his podium-less rookie year.

Bagnaia won two races and a Sprint in 2025, but finished only fifth in the standings after not finishing any of the last five Sunday races; that coming after a tough summer period where he scored no points in Misano, was only ninth in both Hungary, seventh in Barcelona, and eighth in Austria.

Bagnaia was “very unlucky,” Dall’igna said, “especially in the final part of the championship: it did not collect as much as it could have even in less than optimal situations.

“Certainly things should have gone differently but if you also add bad luck everything becomes more difficult, for team and rider.”

But Dall’Igna backed Bagnaia to return to the kind of form that saw him become the most successful rider in MotoGP between 2020 and 2024.

“If we want to draw valuable lessons,” he said, “I am convinced that these situations must be assimilated as if they were antibodies and draw even more determination from them to move forward and return to being what we were. 

“A lesson to be learned, after all in 2026 there will inevitably still be important unknowns to face, we might as well treasure what happened.”