MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

With the 2025 MotoGP season slowly starting to heave into view, it's time to make a few predictions of what may lie ahead. There are a few things that seem almost set in stone for this year, but racing and reality have a way of surprising us. So below are my hostages to fortune for 2025. The first part appears today, with the rest to come tomorrow.

Meet your 2025 MotoGP champion: Marc Márquez

It is pretty much a given that Ducati will make it four rider championships in a row. And it is indisputable that the pairing of Marc Márquez and Pecco Bagnaia at the factory Ducati squad is the best team on the MotoGP grid in 2025. So the chances that one of the two will take the 2025 crown are pretty close to 100%.

So why pick Marc Márquez, a rider who hasn't won a title in five seasons, over Pecco Bagnaia, who won two of the last three titles and has spent all of his MotoGP career on a Ducati? The flippant (if correct) answer is because he's Marc Márquez. But the statistics bear this out.

There are more financial problems building for KTM's parent company Pierer Mobility AG. According to the excellent and comprehensive reporting of Gerald Dirnbeck at Motorsport-Total.com, several things have happened.

• The administrator appointed to oversee the bankruptcy proceedings has forced PM AG to sell its holding in MV Agusta
• Pierer Mobility Group has called in the assistance of Citibank to help with an "ownership restructuring" and find financing
• Austria's Financial Market Supervision authority has opened an investigation into whether the Pierer Mobility Group informed investors in a timely fashion about its financial problems
• 50 more jobs at risk at KTM

Sale of MV Agusta

KTM's financial difficulties continue to cause headlines, with the group owner Pierer Mobility Group filing for bankruptcy protection on Friday. There have been a number of developments since then, including reports of a development pause over the winter for the MotoGP project. So here is a summary of where things stand as of today. Before reading this, it would be helpful to read the previous story I wrote on KTM's financial issues.

What's going on?

On Friday, Pierer Mobility Group, the parent company of KTM, filed bankruptcy protection procedures (under Austrian law, judicial restructuring proceedings with self-administration) for three of its subsidiaries:

• KTM AG, the motorcycle division comprising the brands KTM, GASGAS, Husqvarna, and MV Agusta
• KTM F&E GmbH, a separate company which houses KTM's R&D department
• KTM Components GmbH, another separate company which produces a range of parts for KTM.

Why did KTM do this?

Motorcycle racing is relatively simple to understand as a sport. The rider that crosses the line first wins the race. Riders score points for their finishing positions, and the rider with the most points at the end of the season is crowned champion. Sure, there's plenty of detail crammed in the spaces between those statements, but at the end, it's pretty straightforward.

So the reason Jorge Martin won the 2024 championship ahead of Pecco Bagnaia is also very simple to understand. Martin did a better job over the course of 20 race weekends, scored more points, and earned the right to call himself champion. Jorge Martin is absolutely a deserving MotoGP champion.

But as much as Martin won the championship, Pecco Bagnaia lost it. Because of the curious and deficient way Dorna maintain their statistics (you can't ignore the existence of sprint races forever), the official season statistics PDF makes it look like Bagnaia should have won the championship. Bagnaia had 11 GP wins, and 5 more podiums. By comparison, Martin has 3 GP wins and 13 podiums.

What are we to make of the Barcelona MotoGP test? For a start, there was a lot going on. With 6 riders changing manufacturers (Jorge Martin and Marco Bezzecchi from Ducati to Aprilia, Maverick Viñales from Aprilia to KTM, Enea Bastianini from Ducati to KTM, Miguel Oliveira from Aprilia to Yamaha and Jack Miller from KTM to Yamaha), 3 riders changing teams (Marc Márquez from Gresini to Ducati Lenovo, Franco Morbidelli from Pramac to VR46, and Pedro Acosta from Tech3 to Red Bull KTM Factory), and 3 rookies (Somkiat Chantra to LCR Honda, Ai Ogura to Trackhouse Aprilia, and Fermin Aldeguer to Gresini Ducati). Plus Aleix Espargaro becoming a Honda test rider after spending the last 8 years in Aprilia.

There was also quite a lot of new parts being tested, and the basic prototypes of the 2025 bikes for Aprilia and Ducati. There was a lot of aero, a couple of engines, an exhaust or two, and frames as far as the eye could see.

There are years that the post-race test at the last round of the year - normally post Valencia, but Barcelona this year - is more of a formality than a source of excitement. The 2024 post-Barcelona test is not one of those occasions, however. A lot of riders are swapping teams and bikes, as are a lot of crew chiefs, so there is a lot to get used to.

The final test of the year is not usually a place to see new bikes or a lot of new parts introduced. Riders are tired after a long and emotionally draining season, the adrenaline of racing which has sustained them is gone, and nobody is as sharp as they should be and capable of providing the kind of precise and detailed feedback that the factories require.

In terms of bikes and parts, the focus will mostly be on general, big picture stuff. Some first impressions, and some acclimatization. The bikes at Barcelona may be very preliminary verions of what we see next year, but Sepang is where we will see the first real prototypes for the 2025 season take to the track.

With so many changes taking place, I have added a list of who is going where in 2025 at the bottom of this post. That includes riders, bikes, and crew chiefs. But first, what to expect from the various factories.

Ducati - an embarrassment of riches

Saturday saw a fitting penultimate chapter to the 2024 MotoGP season. Pecco Bagnaia knew he had to win both the sprint race and the Sunday GP, and he also knew that he was comfortably the fastest at Barcelona. So he deployed a brilliant qualifying strategy, in an attempt to elicit some help. Normally, when he leaves the pits during Q2, he is irritated when he finds he has a retinue in tow. On Saturday, he was pretty much offering his rear wheel to anyone who wanted it.

Marc Márquez knew that Bagnaia had to be fast, and was looking for the Ducati Lenovo rider's tail. On his second run, he latched onto Bagnaia, with Franco Morbidelli slotting in behind him, and the three of them took the provisional front row of the grid.

But Bagnaia also ran into the limits which will almost certainly see him come up short in the title fight on Sunday. Marc Márquez' time was good enough for the front row, but he was demoted to third by Aleix Espargaro. And Jorge Martin slipped ahead of Morbidelli to qualify fourth for the sprint race.

With one more race to decide the MotoGP championship, and just 25 points left on the table, who needs to finish were to take the championship?

Normally on Friday I like to examine the pace the riders have set during the day and try to draw some conclusions (erroneous or not) about who might be in contention for the podium on Saturday and Sunday. That seems like a fool's errand at Barcelona, however.

Jorge Martin was asked if he was worried that there seemed to be quite a lot of riders with similar pace to Pecco Bagnaia and him, unlike at the last race in Sepang. "I think there were so many tires to try, and we didn't see any riders with a lot of laps on the tires, so we will see in the race," the Pramac Ducati rider pointed out.

Pace is difficult to figure out when riders are constantly swapping tires, trying to figure out what will be the best choice for the race. Of the ten riders that made it through to Q2 on Friday afternoon, only half of them put 12 laps (sprint race distance or half GP distance) on a rear tire, where normally it would be all ten. Marco Bezzecchi, Aleix Espargaro, Johann Zarco, Maverick Viñales and Alex Márquez stuck with the same tire to do sprint race distance, the rest didn't.

One more day of practice, and then the final points of the season are up for grabs. On Saturday, Jorge Martin has a chance to snatch the MotoGP crown from Pecco Bagnaia, while Bagnaia needs to clean up on Saturday and Sunday to be in with a chance.

Martin stands a chance of becoming the first rider in the MotoGP era to win a title while riding for an independent team. There are some caveats on that claim - Martin has a contract directly with Ducati Corse, rides the same spec Ducati GP24 as Pecco Bagnaia (the few differences are solely down to personal preference, not availability), and the Pramac squad has full factory backing.

But it is still an incredible achievement - the factory Ducati Lenovo team has priority when it comes to processing the data from all of the teams, and the apparatus of Ducati Corse is built with the objective of ensuring the factory team wins the MotoGP title.

So it speaks volumes of the fairness of Ducati that they have proven themselves willing to treat both factory rider Bagnaia and Pramac satellite rider Martin so scrupulously fairly. Ducati have made a very public point of not interfering in the title battle.

Equal opportunities?