Why is Marc Márquez ahead of the curve?

Marc Márquez has all the skills required to be an all-time great motorcycle racer, like armies have arsenals of different weapons to unleash in battle.

There are a few particular riding skills that separate Marc from the rest: his killer speed in left-handers and his mastery of the front tyre, which allow him to find speed where others can’t.

He developed important elements of these skills doing dirt track, because dirt ovals offer so little grip that you can skid the front tyre as easily as you can slide the rear, and because the ovals run anticlockwise.

Dirt track originated in the US, which is why most asphalt race tracks in the States – Circuit of the Americas, Laguna Seca, Indianapolis, Daytona and so on – also run anticlockwise. Which is why Marc has always dominated in the US. Of course, he’s also pretty good at turning right, although his speed in right-handers has suffered since he broke his right arm in 2020. Even now, after multiple operations, the arm is far from perfect, so he no longer has the strength to fully attack right-handers.

“Marc told me he’s good in lefts but he can’t do what he used to be able to do in rights because of his right arm,” says Mike Watt, his Öhlins engineer in 2024. “He doesn’t have the strength in that arm to ride like he used to and save slides in right-handers, so he’s had to adapt himself to work around that.”

Márquez is still glorious to watch whether he’s turning left or right: front tyre squirming into the corner and sometimes painting the asphalt black, elbows digging into the road, then up, up and away, hard on the throttle, an explosion of exhaust noise, a shudder of wheelspin and he’s gone. No one else can consistently override a MotoGP bike like he does, specifically the front tyre’s traction limit. And that’s why he won the MotoGP world championship at his first attempt.

It’s no coincidence that the only riders to have won MotoGP championships in their rookie seasons did so by introducing skills no one else had. In 1978 it was ‘King’ Kenny Roberts. In 2013 it was Márquez.

“Dirt track isn’t merely a great way to learn, it’s also the best way to experiment with techniques”

Roberts transformed riding technique by using the skills he had learned in American dirt track to spin and slide the rear tyre to magic faster lap times. He won the 500cc MotoGP title in 1978 and again in 1979 and 1980, so there was no doubt that anyone who wanted to catch up had to learn from him. And that’s why all but two winners of the MotoGP championship between 1978 and 1998 grew up racing dirt track.

“The natural stuff comes out much quicker in dirt track because it’s not so fast, it’s more physical and the motorcycle’s much more controllable,” says Roberts, now 73. “Whereas when you’re riding a road race bike you commit and you’re committed. On the dirt tracker you can make adjustments – weight distribution means a lot, how you set it into the turn and what the suspension does and all that stuff. Dirt track is still useful to a road racer. The more you know about what a motorcycle does, especially when it’s out of control, the better off you’re going to be, traction control or not.”

Casey Stoner, whose retirement at the end of 2012 gave Marc his place at Repsol Honda, won the MotoGP championship in 2007 and 2011. He achieved that first success riding a Ducati which no one else could ride. How did he do that? Growing up racing dirt track in Australia certainly helped.

“When I was racing in MotoGP, a lot of people didn’t realise that dirt track was so important,” he says. “Dirt track is why I was able to control the power. Dirt track and road racing are both about the fine details: looking for grip, then trying to find it again when the grip starts going away, because you can’t leave it to the electronics.

“In dirt track I’d be looking for that point, right on the end of a slick line, trying to find some little bit of dirt that would give me the grip to outride my opponents in some unorthodox way. That’s basically what I did on the Ducati.”

Márquez knows all of this. Indeed it’s his dirt-track background that triggered the current craze for dirt-track training among top racers, because dirt track isn’t merely a great way to learn, it’s also the best way to experiment with tricks and techniques.

“Learning to slide in dirt track is important but more important than sliding is understanding what you need to do in every situation,” he says. “In road racing you ride most laps in the same way – the same movements, the same slides, the same way to turn the bike.

“Márquez’s ability to play with the front tyre helps open up a whole new area of performance”

“But in flat track, dirt track, even motocross, every lap is different and you can experiment more easily. For example, when I go training on my Panigale [a Ducati sports bike he uses for circuit training] I never experiment because a small mistake can be big damage, but in dirt track and flat track you can experiment and push the limits.”

This means chasing grip via body position, throttle opening and the “gyroscope up your ass” (King Kenny’s words), while honing dexterity, depth of feel, speed of reactions and your thought processes to analyse, understand and react accordingly.

Nowadays, there’s not a rider in MotoGP that can’t ride sideways out of corners, using the sliding, spinning rear tyre to help turn the motorcycle.

A front slide is altogether different, because the front tyre guides the motorcycle, while the rear merely follows. Therefore rear-tyre slides are relatively easy to control. Front slides aren’t at all easy to control, which is why they usually end with rider and motorcycle tumbling into the gravel trap.

Sliding the front tyre feels weird – the rubber smears across the asphalt as you sweep into a corner, the tyre crabs, the handlebars turn a few degrees to the inside, usually the prelude to a crash. The feeling is more intimate than a rear slide. It’s like you can feel the shape of every grain of asphalt in the track’s surface.

The problem with front slides is that they are usually self-amplifying. They mostly happen because too much load is being forced into the tyre – usually via braking power or turning force – as you attack a corner. When the slide begins, the front end’s downward momentum throws even more weight onto the tyre, which means you’ll need a miracle to save the slide.

This is where Márquez makes the difference, by placing his head in the lion’s mouth and using his skills to get out of there alive. His ability to play with the front tyre helps his lap times in various ways because it opens up a whole new area of performance.

While most riders understand that pushing too deep into the tyre’s danger zone will have them on the ground, Marc is perfectly happy surpassing its grip limit. He then uses that area, where others fear to tread, to make the motorcycle do things others can’t do.

When Marc’s front-tyre rubber loses a little grip and starts smearing and skating across the asphalt, he’s carrying extra speed into the corner, gaining a few hundredths of a second. And sometimes he gains much more than that, using his extra speed to make a pass that no one else could make.

Sliding the front into corners to carry more corner speed also gets him through the apex quicker than his rivals, which allows him to get on the throttle earlier and, because he’s already going faster, he doesn’t need to accelerate so aggressively, so his rear tyre won’t spin so much.

“Before Marc arrives at the apex of a corner he releases the front brake and when he leans and puts his body in that low position the amount of corner speed he carries is unbelievable,” says MotoGP race winner Aleix Espargaró. “When you can do that you can prepare for acceleration much better. He’s carrying a lot of corner speed, so he has better traction when he touches the throttle.”

So Márquez possesses weapons no one else has; and that’s how you win a war.

“It’s about how he rotates the bike into the corner and how quickly he does that,” says twice MotoGP champion Freddie Spencer, the American whose otherworldly riding in the mid-1980s made him a kind of prototype Márquez.

“It’s like he’s over-turning and going beyond the grip level of the front tyre, so he’s using speed and tyre movement to get the bike to pivot around the front tyre. And that helps him get the bike in a better position to accelerate.

“Marc is able to feel the edge of the limit, even where there’s a lot of movement from the bike, and he can control that. He has incredible feel and is able to anticipate what’s going to happen next. He is extremely intuitive. He is able to feel things when he’s on the edge of control and that allows him to be more aggressive and still be in control. That gives him a real advantage.”

“Marc is able to feel the edge of the limit, even where there’s a lot of movement from the bike”

Anticipation and prediction are massive things in motorcycle racing. To ride really, really fast you need to ride with your subconscious mind, because your conscious mind has to wait for something to happen before it responds, so you’ll be too late, or too slow. If you’re not ahead of the motorcycle, you’re nowhere. Thus riders need to know their motorcycle so well that they can predict what it’s going to do next, so they can adjust throttle opening, body position, brake pressure and so on to fix a problem before it even appears.

Marc’s hypersensitivity allows him to go further. Both Honda and Ducati engineers tell me that Marc can maintain the front tyre and brake at lower temperatures than his rivals, despite hammering into corners faster than anyone. This obviously helps in the heat of a race, when riders can struggle with overheating tyres and brakes, which hurt their lap times.

“How he handles the Michelin front tyre is still a mystery – I really don’t know how he was managing it,” says Takeo Yokoyama, Honda’s MotoGP technical director from 2013 to 2022. “He gained so much time in braking, but often his front tyre temperature and brake temperature were the lowest [among Honda’s riders]. It was very strange.”

His ability to keep his front tyre cooler than most has been particularly beneficial during MotoGP’s Michelin spec-tyre era [2016 to 2026], because the French company’s front slick isn’t so grippy when it gets too hot. Marc keeps the tyre cool by working with his engineers to understand which parts of each race track stress the tyre the most, then he decides where he can ask less of the tyre without affecting his lap times too much. Basically, he saves in some areas to spend in others.

Piero Taramasso, Michelin’s MotoGP chief, tells a story about the lengths Márquez is willing to go to in his search for the limit. “During 2018 pre-season testing in Qatar he went out in the night [under the Losail circuit’s floodlights] with a hard front, because he needed the harder tyre to support his riding style. No one else would go out with the hard front in the night-time, when track temperature is lower, but he told us, ‘I want to try it.’

“He will always dance on the edge of the precipice. It’s his favourite place in the world”

“So he went out and soon after that Jack [Miller, Ducati rider] came back into his box. He told us that Marc had been in front of him and losing the front on purpose, trying to look for the limit. He said it was crazy because Marc was going to full lock.

“After the session, Jack went into Marc’s garage and said, ‘What were you doing in Turn 6? You were leaning 20 degrees in the corner and turning the handlebars onto full lock!’ Marc said, ‘Oh, I was looking for the limit, because I want to know where’s the limit and I want to feel the reaction.’ No one else can do that.”

Márquez has become famous for spectacular front-end saves, which continue to boggle the minds of not only fans but also rivals. He can fully lose the front into a corner, with the handlebars close to full lock, and regain control. These saves are a joy and a thrill to watch – because you know he will always dance on the edge of this precipice, because that’s his favourite place in the world.

There is an entire process in saving front slides, starting with the sensation that the front tyre is about to surpass its grip limit. That warning lasts milliseconds and it may only be whispered, so you need very special antennae to understand that whisper. Then you need lightning reactions, the coolness not to panic when the tyre talks, the know-how to predict what’s going to happen next, the talent to react and the strength to prevent the motorcycle falling.

No surprise that Marc still remembers his first front save, during his 125cc world championship-winning season. “I exactly remember the first one – it was 2010 at Barcelona’s Turn 3. I said, ‘Ah, maybe I’m able to save crashes like this.’ Then I started using my elbows a little bit in 125s, starting with the right elbow.”

Marc’s use of elbows as outriggers was another landmark in motorcycle racing. Back in the 1960s people got excited about riders dragging their toes on the ground, sometimes wearing through their boots until their toes bled.

In the 1970s, Kenny Roberts (yes, him again) became the first rider to use his knees as outriggers, which didn’t amuse some of his rivals. “One guy told me, ‘You’re going to kill yourself – you’re the craziest sonofabitch I ever seen in my life and you’re gonna die!’” Roberts recalls.

Some people thought the same about Marc’s elbows, but just as Roberts normalised scraping your knees on the road, so Marc normalised scraping your elbows. Now all MotoGP riders have metal inserts in the elbows of their leathers, just like they’d had knee sliders on their knees for several decades.

“When I lose the front I push down with my [inside] elbow,” says Marc. “Then it depends on the situation: sometimes I open the gas, sometimes I close the gas and I wait. But it’s so difficult to understand! Also, it depends on which tyre I am using. If I lose the front with a very hard tyre then I crash. But if I lose the front with a softer tyre then I can save the crash. When you lose the front with the hard tyre, everything happens much quicker!”

His 2025 factory Ducati team-mate is Pecco Bagnaia, who won the 2022 and 2023 MotoGP titles by using his own brand of super-fast corner entry. But the Italian struggled because Ducati’s Desmosedici GP25 bike doesn’t give him the feel to attack corners the way he used to, even though Márquez feels happy enough on the bike.

“Marc is very good at riding everything – I cannot do it,” said Bagnaia during the 2025 Spanish GP. “I need to have a good feeling with the front. It’s clear from the data that he has a very great feeling with the bike and can push a lot in different places.”

That weekend Bagnaia had crashed heavily at Jerez’s high-speed Turn 7 left-hander, the kind of corner where Márquez makes the difference. “You’ve made a deal with someone on left-handers,” he laughed, speaking to Marc and suggesting some kind of demonic intervention. “This morning I said, ‘I’ll do Turn 7 just like Marc,’ and boom, I crashed!”

The fact is that no one knows how Márquez can do what he does; not his engineers, nor his rivals, which puts him beyond human understanding, and makes him almost supernatural.

Marc Márquez by Mat Oxley (£25, plus post) is out now. matoxley.bigcartel.com