MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

After the sprint race on Saturday in Argentina, I wrote about how Marc Márquez' victories are the natural consequence of putting the best rider on the best bike. On Sunday, he rather proved my point, even though brother Alex made it considerably tougher for him than he had in Thailand. Tougher or not, the outcome was the same: Marc Márquez took another win with a comfortable margin, making it a clean sweep of the first two races. At both Buriram and Termas de Rio Hondo, the Ducati Lenovo rider took pole, sprint win, GP win, and a new lap record.

Once again, Márquez dropped behind his brother Alex after a few laps, before passing him again at the end. But this time, it wasn't because of tire pressure or a sign of control. At the start of lap 4, Marc made a mistake and outbraked himself going into Turn 1, running wide and allowing Alex through. And then the elder Márquez brother found himself stuck behind the younger, incapable of getting past again. Until 5 laps to the end.

There is an entirely unsubstantiated rumor, which I have personally decided to believe regardless of the evidence, that Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta worked hard to prevent Ducati from signing Marc Márquez to the factory team. After two sprints and a GP, you have to concede that he would have been right to try to interfere. So far, Márquez has looked pretty much unstoppable. Exactly as you would expect when you put the best rider on the best bike.

At the end of every Friday practice, the riders like to remind us that it is only Friday, and we shouldn't read too much into the times. Fat chance, of course, but they have a point. But "it's only Friday" takes on extra potency at the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit, given the changing nature of the track. Especially after it rained heavily overnight, and the track started the day wet and took a long time to dry out. High humidity and low temperatures add another layer of complexity, just to liven things up.

The track started off cleaner than expected. "Yesterday when I made the track walk, I thought that the track was more dirty," Marco Bezzecchi said at the end of the first day. "But when I rode the bike this morning, to be honest it was much much better compared to the past times we came here."

The track may have started from a better base, but the grip levels were still changing on pretty much every exit as more and more rubber got laid down. That makes working out where riders stand relatively complicated, though we can take a stab at it by looking at the timesheets.

MotoGP is back at Termas de Rio Hondo in Argentina, so what better way to start than with news about Austin, Texas? The reigning world champion isn't in Argentina, and wasn't scheduled to be in the pre-event press conference, but he called in anyway, phoning in from his car. His recovery from the scaphoid injury he suffered in a training crash wasn't proceeding as quickly as he hoped, he said, and he wouldn't be able to ride at the Grand Prix Of The Americas in Austin, Texas. And probably not in Qatar either.

"I'm really suffering," Martin said. "It's not my moment, I'm struggling to recover as fast as I would like." He would skip Austin and maybe also Qatar, and would really like to test himself before he returned to racing. "I would like to make some kind of test before coming back to racing, because I'm not feeling really good. And I know Massimo [Rivola, Aprilia Racing CEO] is also working on that, let's see if we can make it possible."

A test is going to be hard. Martin is able to ride a production bike, but Aprilia is in category C as far as concessions are concerned. That means no testing for contracted riders (i.e. riders on the official MotoGP entry list for 2025) outside of official IRTA tests. The first IRTA test is at Jerez. And if Martin is going to ride at the test in Jerez, he might as well try to ride at the weekend.

Patience is a virtue

A couple of decades ago, when Valentino Rossi was at the height of his powers, Rossi's crew chief Jeremy Burgess was interviewed. Burgess explained that if he was shown a photo of Rossi riding, he could identify what lap Rossi was on.

Is this some kind of weird superpower? Not really. Burgess was looking at Rossi's position on the bike, and dozens of tiny telltale signs of how he was adapting his riding to the bike and tires as they changed during race, as the fuel tank emptied and the tires wore and degraded.

If you have the kind of intimate knowledge of a rider's talent and habits that a crew chief does, you can spot those subtle changes. Or if you are an ex-rider and have been watching a particular rider for a long time, you can pick up on those signs too.

We are off and running. The first points in the 2025 MotoGP season have been handed out, and we have a championship. So far, it is running pretty much as it did last year: three Ducatis on the podium and a race that was spaced out and predictable pretty much from the start. But that didn't stop the Saturday Sprint race at Buriram from being interesting, if not exciting to watch.

The atmosphere more than made up for the lack of on track action. The grandstands were once again packed with enthusiastic and loud MotoGP fans, vindicating Dorna's decision to start the season in Buriram instead of Qatar. That may not suit European broadcasters - a 9am CET start time is less attractive to TV audiences than either 3pm for a race in Europe or 6pm for Qatar.

(And yes, I am aware that the 3pm Buriram time is much more convenient for viewers in Australia, and to an extent on the West Coast of the US. The trouble is, TV audience sizes in those countries are nowhere near what they are in Spain, Italy, France, and the UK.)

It's Only Friday, as the riders like to say to hype-hungry journalists after the first day of practice. That is of course true, but this It's Only Friday has brought a whole ream of fascinating stories to follow. It is far too early to be drawing conclusions for the rest of the season, but so far, 2025 looks a lot less like 2024 than we feared.

Yes, Ducati is still clearly the strongest manufacturer. The Márquez brothers topped the timesheets on Friday, Gresini's Alex beating Lenovo's Marc by half a tenth of a second. And in terms of pace, Ducatis are looking strongest as well: Marc Márquez was running 1'29.9s on old tires, teammate Pecco Bagnaia 1'30.0s.

But there are signs the other factories are catching up. There are as many Aprilias in the top 10 and directly through to Q2 as there are Ducatis (three). All five manufacturers are straight through to Q2. There are two Hondas in the top ten, Joan Mir an impressive sixth fastest. And Pedro Acosta is both quick over a single lap and running just a tenth or two off Pecco Bagnaia's pace on used tires. It has been very interesting day indeed.

Normally here I would be writing about the characteristics of the track, what to watch out for, where the passing opportunities are, and what the challenges are. But the opening round of MotoGP is at Buriram, where we had a test two weeks ago, and a race at the end of October last year. So I would refer you to those, as the track hasn't changed since then.

One thing that has changed is the heat. At the test, the temperature was in the low 30s °C. Hot, but bearable. This weekend, the temperature is expected to hit 38°C. Those will be some of the hottest temperatures MotoGP riders have faced perhaps since they stopped running Qatar during the daytime.

The heat will be brutal, though the fact that humidity will be low - forecast to be around 20% - means that wet bulb temperatures (used to measure the ability of humans to prevent overheating and suffer serious health consequences) will be within a safe range. Temperatures will be punishing, but survivable.

In many ways, the 2025 MotoGP championship promises to be one of the more interesting in recent years. Perhaps not the most closely contested - the general consensus among fans and pundits alike is that you can take your pick of whether it will be Pecco Bagnaia or Marc Márquez who ends up lifting the 2025 MotoGP crown - but behind the title fight, there are some fascinating developments to watch out for.

We may as well start with that title battle. The dominance of Ducati was so great last year that it is hard to imagine anyone other than Marc Márquez or Pecco Bagnaia walking off with the title. Despite the fact that they are sticking with their GP24 engine - a little more on that later - both Bagnaia and Márquez showed pace during the test, Márquez' race simulation at Buriram almost fast enough to win a sprint race.

The final preseason test is a strange creature. Most of the work has already been done at the first test at Sepang. Parts have been tried, and either accepted for use or sent back for scrap. (The parts may be scrapped, but the ideas will be laid aside and the results used to make something better next time.) So there really is a lot less for the teams and factories to test.

Looking at pictures from Buriram, you would be hard pressed to see any new parts compared to the bikes used at Sepang. Or indeed new parts compared to the Barcelona test. As I wrote after Sepang, we are at the stage of MotoGP bike development where designs are converging on the most efficient aerodynamic shape. And we probably won't see any major changes until the new technical rules arrive in 2027.