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Miller pumped to start with new team | 01:38
For the first event of a 22-round MotoGP season featuring 22 riders all on zero world championship points, the optics didn’t look great.
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But they were explainable, and understandable.
Thursday’s media day at a sweltering hot Chang International Circuit, Thailand opening the season for the first time this weekend, had just new factory Ducati teammates Francesco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez feature in its pre-event press conference.
A tad dismissive of the other 20 riders, perhaps. But, equally, the likely reality of the narrative of the 2025 campaign.
The other rider scheduled to attend that first press conference, reigning world champion Jorge Martin, was back home in Andorra rather than Buriram, recovering from surgery on a fractured left hand after a training accident last weekend that – allied to injuries to his right hand and left foot from a violent highside in the first pre-season test in Malaysia earlier this month – left his start date for his title defence with new manufacturer Aprilia in doubt.
Bagnaia and Marquez, second and third in the 2024 title chase to Martin and armed with Ducati’s class-leading GP24 that was so good that Ducati have elected to largely run it back this season, are most expert’s selections to turn this year’s championship tussle into a two-horse race, much as the seasons since 2020 have played out.
What’s different this time, though, is that we’ve not had a head-to-head title fight between teammates that’s raged from start to finish since 2015, when Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi’s intra-team fight at Yamaha became personal – and controversial once Marquez got involved – a decade ago.
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While Marquez and Bagnaia’s body language and measured responses to probing questions on Thursday suggested 2025 won’t get as nasty as 2015 did, there’s plenty to gain at Buriram this weekend.
Marquez – a standout in testing for his new team at the same Thailand track a fortnight ago – will be keen to start his best title shot in years with victory on his first weekend with the team Bagnaia has called home since 2021.
For Bagnaia – off an 11-win 2024 season that saw him lose his chance of a hat-trick of MotoGP titles with one wasteful crash after another – drawing a line in the sand early against the force of nature that is Marquez in the same garage is paramount.
It’s all change for MotoGP in 2025 – Thailand becomes the third country to host the season-opener in as many years after Qatar last year and Portugal in 2023 – while the 22-rider grid features nine riders with different teams and six with new manufacturers from last season, Australia’s Jack Miller at Pramac Yamaha among them.
A trio of eye-catching rookies, including Thai local hero Somkiat Chantra (LCR Honda), will debut this weekend, while the opening round will give us an instant answer as to who took their pre-season fitness and conditioning programs seriously, Friday’s forecast of 36 degrees likely to be the coolest day of what’s set to be a stern opening test.
With the lights poised to go out to herald the start of 2025, here’s your Insider’s Guide to round 1 of MotoGP’s longest-ever season.
TITLE BATTLE NOT A RACE IN TWO, MARQUEZ INSISTS
With Marquez (six MotoGP titles) and Bagnaia (two) giving Ducati’s factory outfit a dream team the likes of which MotoGP hasn’t seen since the Lorenzo/Rossi Yamaha super-squad of a decade previously, Ducati’s decision to run back its all-conquering GP24 machine from last season has many experts predicting 2025 will be a whitewash for the sport’s red-hued team.
On Thursday in Buriram, Marquez urged caution despite his prodigious pre-season testing pace seeing him installed a favourite to annex his first title since 2019 with Honda.
“If you expect 1-2 every weekend, you don’t know what MotoGP is,” he said.
“We are in MotoGP, everybody is super fast. I think it will be a lot of fights between different riders [in] different conditions, rain and damp conditions.
“All Ducati riders can fight for the win because we start with a similar base [bike] but we cannot forget [KTM’s Pedro] Acosta. I would like to say [Jorge] Martin but he is not here. [Aprilia’s Marco] Bezzecchi.
“The consistency is the most important [for the title]. In a single race, many riders can be fast – many riders can win a single race.”
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Bagnaia agreed with his teammate’s sentiment that 2025 won’t be a two-horse race – “for a 1-2 each weekend, I will sign right now”, he quipped – and the Italian said he didn’t expect any immediate internal friction with Marquez, the two sharing similar comments about the direction of Ducati’s GP25 bike during the pre-season that prompted the factory to largely stick with a machine that won 16 of 20 Grands Prix a year ago.
“We are starting the season … it’s not a secret that we both want to win the championship, we are here for that and the ambition in our team is to win the championship – we will have to do the maximum,” he said.
“I think many times this season we will fight, and I don’t think already here [Marquez] will start doing some strategies because the most important thing right now is to improve, to learn from the new bike.
“We have to work together to improve and then, in the race fight, the best will win.”
Of the five previous Grands Prix held in Thailand, Marquez won for Honda in 2018 and 2019, with Bagnaia – in the rain – holding off Martin at Buriram last October.
Two-time MotoGP champion Bagnaia faces his sternest intra-team test yet with the arrival of Marquez in the same garage. (Photo by Mirco Lazzari gp/Getty Images)Source: Getty ImagesMARTIN URGED TO TAKE TIME AS INJURIES MOUNT
The absence of Martin, the winner in Thailand two years ago, was a major talking point on Thursday, Aprilia CEO Massimo Rivola revealing his team’s star signing will also miss round two of the season in Argentina (March 14-16), and is no guarantee to return when MotoGP visits Texas for the Grand Prix of the Americas a fortnight later (March 28-30).
It’s a huge blow for both factory and rider after Martin, spurned by Ducati as it elected to replace Bagnaia’s 2024 teammate Enea Bastianini with Marquez for this season, broke the bank to sign the 27-year-old Spaniard, Martin forming part of a potent all-new line-up of race winners with Italian Marco Bezzecchi.
Asked by the assembled press in Buriram about the absence of Martin, Rivola said: “Obviously, I feel s**t.”
“He won’t race in Argentina, the situation of the left hand is not good at the moment,” Rivola added.
“He will only come back when he’s really fit, we don’t want to risk his condition at all. He is a fighter, he is a gladiator, I’m sure he is thinking about racing tomorrow. But also, it is our time to tell him ‘hang on a second, we don’t want to make any kind of mistake, you will be back … take your time’. We will think about the championship in the future.”
Marquez, who revealed on Thursday that he’d contacted Martin after his second pre-season spill, also urged Martin to take his time returning, his own experience in 2020 front of mind.
That season, Marquez crashed heavily in the Jerez season opener as the defending world champion and attempted to rush back later after breaking his right arm before missing the rest of that season, four subsequent surgeries ruining the years between 2020-23 and stopping his Honda glory days in their tracks.
“I texted him this morning,” Marquez said.
“It’s true that I understand the situation a bit, especially because after being world champion your motivation is extra, your confidence is extra.
“I just said to him ‘respect your body’. I didn’t respect my body in the past, and I paid a lot.
“I told him ‘if you lose three, four, five, six races, it’s nothing’. He’s young, has a lot of talent, whole career in front of him. We wish him a good comeback, in the end he’s the number 1, he needs to defend the number 1 on the racetrack.”
Martin’s absence was obvious as Aprilia prepares to begin its 2025 season without its star riding signing. (Photo by Lillian SUWANRUMPHA / AFP)Source: AFPMILLER: YAMAHA ON THE WAY BACK, AND SOON
Jack Miller feels it’s “a matter of time” before Yamaha can re-establish itself towards the top of MotoGP after two seasons in the wilderness, the Australian keen to see what the YZR-M1 can do in race trim after a promising pre-season with his new manufacturer.
Miller is riding a Yamaha for the first time after crossing from KTM at the end of last season while reuniting with former team Pramac Racing, who he rode a Ducati for from 2018-20.
The 30-year-old said he’d been pleasantly surprised of the synergy between Pramac and Yamaha’s factory team, which will field 2021 world champion Fabio Quartararo and Alex Rins for a second straight season.
Yamaha hasn’t won a race since Quartararo battled with Bagnaia for the 2022 title, but Miller feels the time is coming for the Japanese brand to fight for bigger prizes.
“For a company that was quite closed in the past with what they did with factory riders and satellite riders, they’ve turned a new leaf completely, it’s open slather,” Miller said of Yamaha.
“Structurally we worked through the whole testing program, whether I tried a chassis and then it goes through all the days to all the [other Yamaha] riders to try and gain information from everybody to try to better the next step. They’re doing it the correct way, and it shows their full commitment in trying to improve the project and improve their position.
“They have all the pieces of the puzzle, they now just need time to slot them all together. We’re chasing tenths [of a second], not seconds. They’re so close, yet so far – the hardest ones to find are those last few tenths. It’s a matter of time until it all comes together and they get back to where they belong.”
Miller feels Yamaha are on the way back to their glory days after spending the past two seasons in the wilderness. (Photo by Mirco Lazzari gp/Getty Images)Source: Getty ImagesMiller, who finished right behind Quartararo on the pre-season testing timesheets, has a history of strong starts with new manufacturers over his 10-year career, and is keen to see how that pre-season promise translates into points this weekend.
“I’m looking forward to Saturday afternoon when the lights go out to see what this Yamaha can do up against the other bikes,” he said.
“Testing is one thing, but you never really know anything during testing, you don’t really see anybody on track, and when you do you don’t know the circumstances of what their bike is, tyres … it’ll be cool to see how she shapes up against the other boys. But looking forward to it, and really excited to get the season underway.
“I’m more optimistic after the initial shakedown of the bike [in Malaysia], and then understanding it and getting to know it. I feel more optimistic than I would have been three-four months ago.
“The whole testing plan went really well and we got through what we needed to get through. We’re still working, but it’s given us a solid foundation to build from.”
