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.

And then there were two. With both Marc Márquez and Enea Bastianini finishing outside the top ten Sunday's Grand Prix of Thailand at Buriram, and Pecco Bagnaia storming to a superb win ahead of Jorge Martin, the 2024 MotoGP championship became a mathematical impossibility for Márquez and Bastianini. The title will be decided between Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia.

Sunday's race was a textbook example of exactly why Martin and Bagnaia are left. In extraordinarily difficult conditions, Pecco Bagnaia rode a near-perfect race to take victory, while Jorge Martin got his excess of enthusiasm under control after a couple of tricky moments and did exactly what he needed to if he is to win this championship: finish second behind Pecco Bagnaia.

Intellectually, we all understand that championships are won over an entire season. But nobody watches MotoGP, or any form of sports intellectually. The passion for sports is a deep-seated emotion that goes back to the dawn of human history. So when we get to the end of a championship, fans tend to look back and try to pinpoint a single event that decided the championship. Usually, that's the most recent and shocking or surprising event that fans can remember.

Take 2006. Ask a long-time MotoGP fan what cost Valentino Rossi the title and they will tell you it was the 5 points Rossi lost to Toni Elias when Elias beat him at Estoril at the penultimate round. But this glosses over the fact that Elias had knocked Rossi into the gravel at the opening round in Jerez, that Rossi had suffered massive tire problems in China, had mechanicals at Le Mans and Laguna Seca, and struggled with chatter in the first half of the season after being distracted by the possibility of a switch to F1. And there was the crash at Valencia. Nicky Hayden won the 2006 MotoGP title simply by being more consistent than Rossi over the full 17 rounds.

At the height of his domination of the 500 grand prix era, when the only question in everyone's minds was who would finish second behind him, Mick Doohan was asked by a journalist if he was worried his stranglehold on the sport was making motorcycle racing boring. "What do you want me to do, slow down?" Doohan retorted.

Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix at Motegi would have been immeasurably improved if Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin had slowed down. Apart from the first seven or eight minutes, as the grid assumed its natural order, the race was utterly processional. Watching Bagnaia, Martin, Marc Márquez behind them, was like watching Doohan at his peak.

These are riders controlling a MotoGP machine at the highest level imaginable, putting a 300+ horsepower motorcycle in almost exactly the same place for lap after lap. Of the 24 laps of Motegi which Pecco Bagnaia completed, 10 were within one tenth of a second of the lap before, and another 7 were between one and two tenths difference to the previous lap. That is astonishing, metronomic consistency, and a sign of a truly great rider operating almost as close to perfection as is humanly possible.

The forecast was for rain at Motegi on Saturday, and rain certainly fell. Fortunately, most of it fell overnight, leaving MotoGP qualifying and the sprint race dry. Well, almost. The constant threat of rain hung in the air, spots of rain hitting visors in enough numbers to plant the seeds of doubt into the minds of the riders. And sometimes, hard enough to actually suck some of the grip away from the track.

If you are going to end up in those fickle conditions, where the track might be a little damp or it might not, then Motegi is the place to be. It has superb grip in the wet, riders managing 1'55s in absolutely torrential rain here in the 2023 race that was eventually red-flagged. But that doesn't make it any easier for riders to wrap their heads around, when drops start to spatter on their visors.

Those spots of rain ended up having a profound effect on qualifying. And they even had an impact on the race, perhaps denying Pedro Acosta his first sprint victory, though Acosta took all of the blame on his own shoulders.

It has been hot and humid at Motegi. Humid enough to rain in the morning, chasing everyone back into the garage for 20 minutes in FP1. That disrupted everyone's practice plans, forcing a rethink of the afternoon session and leaving a lot of questions unanswered.

Questions such as, will the soft rear go the distance on Sunday, or should we use the medium? A lot of riders used the medium during the limited running in the morning, but the tire just didn't want to work for most people in the afternoon. "If you see everyone that put a medium tire in PR, they make 3 laps and come in and put a soft," Pedro Acosta said. "This is not easy to understand. And even the soft is going to be difficult to finish the race with."

That puts a lot of pressure on Saturday morning, to work out whether the medium rear is a better tire for the race. "Last season with this tire they made the whole race and they were fast, and it was not an issue," Acosta said. "But I don't know why, but this soft tire will not finish the race. But the medium, I don't know how is the level of grip, you know?"