Conspiracy theories and Marc Márquez

It’s been more than a decade since a rider has dominated the first half of a MotoGP championship like Marc Márquez ruled 2025. In fact you need to go back to 2014, when Márquez, then riding a Honda, not a Ducati, went unbeaten at the first 10 grands prix.

Once again the six-times MotoGP king is making everyone else look second rate, with 11 sprint victories and eight grand prix wins from Buriram to Brno. Most of the MotoGP pitlane knew this would happen, because only they really know his skills, both on the racetrack and in the garage.

Few fans doubt Márquez’s skills as a rider, but many have fallen for the fiction that he doesn’t know how to set-up or develop a MotoGP bike. This untruth spread in the years following his falling out with Valentino Rossi, when millions of Rossi fans took against the young Spaniard.

Their theory – conspiracy theory, more like – went like this: only Márquez could win with Honda’s RC213V, which must mean he led engineers down a development path that created a machine only he could master. In fact the RC213V and its predecessor, the RC212V, were hard to tame. That’s why during the six years that preceded Márquez’s title-winning 2013 rookie season, the bikes only won a single world championship.

The fiction has continued into 2025 because Márquez is hugely outperforming factory team-mate Pecco Bagnaia, although both ride same spec Ducati Desmosedicis. This time, the conspiracy theory goes like this: again Márquez has taken the engineers down a development path that suits only him.

Again, this is nonsense, because this year’s Desmosedicis were configured in 2024, when Márquez wasn’t a factory rider, so he had no development input.

Of course, the only people who really know his skills in the garage are the technicians who have worked with him, so what do they think?

“People who say Marc doesn’t understand things have zero idea,” says Santi Hernández, Márquez’s crew chief from 2011 to 2023. “His comments are always very precise and clear, so they tell the engineers what they need to do.”

When Márquez switched from Honda to Ducati last season, he rode for the independent Gresini team, working with an entirely new engineering group. Among his staff was Öhlins suspension technician Mike Watt, a pitlane veteran who started out with three-times MotoGP champion Wayne Rainey in the 1990s.

“Sometimes Marc came in, thought about what was going on, then drew a graph on a piece of paper, maybe showing throttle trace, brake point and front suspension stroke,” recalls Watts. “We laid the paper over the data on the screen and they were the same! It was unbelievable! The first time he did it, me and Frankie [Carchedi, Márquez’s crew chief in 2024] were like, ‘What the!?’ Just incredible.”

“In all my years in racing I’ve not known any rider to have his level of knowledge about the bike and about set-up,” says Carchedi, who won the 2020 MotoGP crown with Joan Mir when they were at Suzuki. “It’s not just about how he rides. It’s about how he likes the bike to be set-up so he can do what he wants to do.”

“Marc has the ability to feel the front tyre’s limit like no one else”

Márquez has long been king of corner entry, thanks to his ability to feel the front tyre’s limit like no one else, but this skill also comes from hard work in the garage.

“I don’t want to give away too much because that wouldn’t be fair on him,” adds Carchedi. “Feel is one thing he’s got, but it’s also how he wants the bike set-up for that, so the bike is very much set-up in a way to give him that front feel.”

Öhlins’ chief engineer Mats Larsson has worked with Marc for the past 13 seasons; he knows the 32-year-old better than most.

“Sometimes we give new parts to our riders and most of the time the other guys are, like, ‘No, it feels the same, it feels the same,’” says Larsson. “Then we give that same part to Marc and he tells us that when he’s on the razor’s edge it’s worse or it’s better. He can feel things when he’s on the limit and his reactions are special. And he can detect the difference between tyre movement and suspension movement.”

That’s almost supernatural, the ability to feel the difference between the front suspension compressing a few millimetres and the front tyre squishing a few millimetres when you’re charging into a corner, on that razor’s edge, at 150mph.

Let’s leave the final word to Márquez’s current crew chief Marco Rigamonti.

“It’s not true that Marc can ride fast but doesn’t understand anything,” he says. “He understands very well what’s happening, what are the positive points and what are the negative points of the parts we’re testing. It’s also true that when we say, ‘This is how the bike will be for the race,’ that he’s able to take out the maximum from it.”