Gresini Racing's rollercoaster of MotoGP triumph and tragedy

The story of Gresini Racing is unique in MotoGP, a rollercoaster ride between triumph and tragedy. During the team’s three decades in the paddock, it has won three world championships, with Daijiro Kato, Toni Elias and Jorge Martín, and lost three world champions, Kato, Marco Simoncelli and Fausto Gresini.

Gresini’s death in 2021, from Covid-19, put the team in real jeopardy. Finally, Gresini’s widow Nadia Padovani, a nurse by profession, decided to keep going. Since then, Gresini Racing has enjoyed its first MotoGP victories since Sete Gibernau and Marco Melandri in the early 2000s, taking its total number of premier-class wins to 26, with Gibernau, Melandri, Elias, Enea Bastianini, Fabio Di Giannantonio, Marc and Alex Márquez and Fermin Aldeguer.

Throughout most of this time the team has survived thanks largely to the efforts of commercial manager Carlo Merlini, whose ability to find and keep sponsors is renowned in the paddock.

Oxley: Carlo, your face is well known in MotoGP, so how and when did you arrive in the paddock?

Merlini: I was working for a sports marketing agency in Bologna. We were external support for teams searching for sponsors in Formula 1, MotoGP and superbikes. After three years there, Fausto Gresini became a client, so I started organising meetings for him with prospective sponsors, signing deals and so on. I attended my first races at Assen and Sachsenring in 2000, and at some point Fausto asked me to join Gresini Racing full-time, to manage the commercial department. That’s how things started and after 25 seasons I’m still here! I still run the commercial department, doing all the acquisition and servicing for the sponsors.

How have things changed during that time?

CM: It’s always been difficult to find money but probably sponsorship itself has changed. I remember when I first joined Gresini Racing there was a spasmodic search for sponsors, the larger the better. At that time, sponsors just wanted to see their logos on the bike and on the riders’ suits, as big as possible. Things have evolved since then. Of course, branding is still important, but there’s also a lot in terms of delivering experiences to sponsors and their guests.

So, sponsors invite guests to races to help their businesses…

CM: Yes, sponsors have a number of paddock passes in their contracts with teams, which they use for strategic purposes.

How many guests do Gresini have per weekend?

CM: It depends on the race. The Italian rounds are obviously very popular, but also the Asian rounds, because we have a large number of Asian sponsors. Sepang is usually crazy, Indonesia also. We have around 200 guests in Malaysia and around 300 at Misano. We use our full allocation of passes because we now have 24 sponsors.

Formula 1 has also gone through this change – in the old days one big sponsor would buy the whole car. Now, even in F1, there are many, many different brands on one car.

CM: Yes, you probably remember our old liveries: Telefonica Movistar, Fortuna, San Carlo and Castrol. I think in terms of risk management it’s safer having the budget spread over a larger number of sponsors. This was my drive after Fausto’s passing and during the transition between Fausto and Nadia, because it’s safer.

Gresini has many Asian sponsors, how did that happen?

CM: After Lehman Brothers went bankrupt [which heralded the start of the 2008 global financial crisis], Europe went into a deep hole, so the sponsorship market got stuck. At some point I had to look around and find new places where I could chase sponsors. I had a clue that Southeast Asia was a good place, especially Indonesia, so I started looking there. Federal Oil was our first sponsor from that region and then others came, because they saw what Federal Oil was doing, how they were activating their sponsorship, so other sponsors came on board by word of mouth. Now we do quite a lot of business in Asia, especially Indonesia.

I think the West is still struggling with the hangover from 2008…

CM: You’re probably right – that’s why we keep working in Asia.

And just before the 2008 crisis, MotoGP also lost all the tobacco money because of the tobacco sponsorship ban…

CM: Yes, that’s why we had CRT [MotoGP’s budget-priced grid-fillers, used in 2012 and 2013] and all the other ways to save the championship.

Sometimes Gresini runs teams in many championships, sometimes only one or two – is that according to how much money you’ve got?

CM: The proper way to approach new projects is like this – first you make a business plan, so you see how much the project will cost and how much money we can get. With Fausto it was the other way around: Okay, now there’s Moto2, so we will do Moto2, so at the moment the decision was made there was no budget, so then there was someone going around knocking on doors.

You used to run a team in CIV (the Italian championship), because that’s surely the best way – to sign young riders and bank them for the future…

CM: That’s the ideal way but it’s incredibly risky. Ideally the plan was to offer a rider the full path, from CIV, then into the world championship in Moto3, then Moto2 and finally MotoGP, but it’s very difficult to take a rider all the way along that path. But Moto2 is quite strategic for us. We can offer riders the chance to move to MotoGP, so that’s why we wanted to stay in Moto2.

What’s the minimum cost to run an independent MotoGP team?

CM: It’s expensive! I read an article somewhere that said the minimum budget for a MotoGP team is 15 million Euros. That’s not the figure we put together, but that’s the minimum.

Dorna have given financial support to independent teams for a long time – it’s probably one of the best things they’ve done…

CM: Yes, we get a contribution from Dorna because they know they need the independent teams and now we can see independent teams playing a key role in terms of results, like Gresini has done in 2024 and 2025.

Gresini already had some great times around 20 years ago – you were second in the championship with Sete Gibernau and Marco Melandri, because the Honda RC211Vs you had at that time were nearly as good as the factory bikes, but between then and now it became impossible to compete at the front…

CM: With Sete in 2003 and 2004 and with Marco in 2005 we finished second overall and top Honda, but then times got tougher because the factories wanted to build a gap [between the factory bikes and independent bikes]. Then we had seven years with Aprilia [in 2015 Aprilia used Gresini’s grid slots to return to MotoGP after a nine-year absence], which was a completely different project, then in 2022 we started our project with Ducati and once again we have proved that an independent team can have good results.

It’s interesting that most indie teams [Gresini, LCR and Tech3] were founded by ex-racers, which tells us you need to have a passion to be here, because you don’t get rich like in F1…

CM: The way Fausto managed the team was absolutely rooted in passion. Before Fausto had his team, he was a rider and before that he worked as a mechanic, so bikes were his life forever. Having said that, this is a company, so you can make money and you can lose money. Next year will be 30 years of Gresini Racing, so I think Fausto then and Nadia now have proved that we have long-term stability, because not many teams last so long.

When Marc Márquez arrived in 2024 it must have been like a dream, because the performance was huge but also the story of the brothers racing together was huge, so what was that like?

CM: I still remember the first time Marc’s manager [Jaime Martinez] called us – it was early June [2023]. Of course, in a normal situation it would have be different, but Marc was struggling with Honda and he was coming out of a very tough time with injuries. I think Alex played a key role in promoting Gresini to Marc. Not only from a technical perspective but also in terms of our cosy and mellow environment, where he could rebuild his confidence and prove to himself and to the entire world that he could still win races. And he did win races, so at the end of the season it was mission accomplished.

Marc came from a factory team and I remember some people wondering if Gresini could give him the right kind of technical support, so did you change anything when he arrived?

CM: No, we had a normal operation. Also, from a sponsor perspective we didn’t want to change anything because we already knew that most likely Marc was only going to be with us for one year, so we didn’t want to welcome sponsors that would probably only stay for one season and then leave, so we kept a quite stable environment.

How did Marc manage switching from a factory team to an independent team?

CM: He probably enjoyed the reduced pressure. Think of the pressure there had been in the HRC garage – results not coming and lots of engineers looking for solutions. I think Marc enjoyed our garage – less stress, less pressure, fewer things to test, just focusing on proving himself.

Marc always makes sure the team around him is like a gang – always joking around when they’re having dinner together and so on, so he must’ve fitted in well at Gresini?

CM: Absolutely. That’s Marc, so I think Gresini was the perfect place for him, with our friendly environment.

Were you in charge of the financial negotiations?

CM: There was Nadia, Michele [team manager Michele Masini] and myself, because we run the operation together. The financial negotiations were quite easy, because Marc knew we couldn’t afford the level of salary he had been getting. But that wasn’t his target anyway, his goal was different.

Gresini has achieved amazing things, but you’ve had some really bad times, like losing Daijiro Kato [who died following an accident during the 2003 Japanese GP] and Marco Simoncelli [killed at the 2011 Malaysian GP], so how do you come back from that?

CM: I’ve been here 25 seasons and it’s been a rollercoaster of different emotions. We lost Daijiro, Marco and then Fausto.

Fausto was there to tow the team along and push things forward. And sometimes magic things happened. I well recall Welkom 2003. I’m not saying Sete was just any rider but at that time he wasn’t proven to be a title contender, but at the race after Suzuka, a week after Daijiro’s funeral, he got pole position on the Saturday and on Sunday he won the race. I remember being there, crying.

Then at the next race after Marco at Sepang, we had Michele Pirro win the Moto2 race. And then after Fausto, Enea Bastianini won our first race in our new colours and with Ducati in 2022. What a way to start the new project with Nadia!

In English we’d say that was spooky…

CM: You start believing there’s someone up there!

After Fausto died, who kept things going?

CM: It was Nadia. She had all options on the table, including giving everything away. Instead she said very stubbornly, “Okay, we go on!” It was probably a moral effort not to close the thing that Fausto created but instead push it forward. Of course, at that moment there were plenty of doubts. In 2021 we were ending the Aprilia project and from a budget perspective all the commercial assets belonged to Aprilia, so we had to rebuild a MotoGP budget from scratch.

From a sponsor point of view, we didn’t have a single sticker to put on the bikes, so we started from zero and put the money together. That was challenging – like a K2 mountain to climb.

You must be good at dealing with stress…

CM: I’ve been tested, yes. There were some sleepless nights, for sure, but not only for me, for Nadia and others too.

What’s your best memory?

CM: From a sport perspective we’ve won world titles in 250cc, Moto2, Moto3 and MotoE and now we’ve been runner-up in MotoGP four times. I keep all these successes on track as good memories. But from a professional perspective I can tell a parallel story of many projects, sponsors and liveries, so I’ve a few commercial achievements that are also good memories.

From a more personal point of view, sometimes my relationship with Fausto went beyond a professional thing – when I got married he was by my side as a witness.

So he even managed your marriage contract!

CM: Fausto was a maniac for the stamp. He didn’t only want contracts signed, he wanted an ink stamp on top of the signature. We had some laughs when we were with the priest – please Fausto, just a signature this time!

How much was Nadia involved before Fausto’s death?

CM: Zero. Absolutely zero. She was a nurse and a full-time mum with four kids. Probably the only things she knew about Gresini Racing was what Fausto told her when he came home in the evening.

Alex had an amazing 2025 season – did you expect it?

CM: We knew we could do a good season, because Alex was fastest at the Barcelona tests [November 2024], he was fastest at the Sepang tests and second in the Buriram tests. When you get all those confirmations, you say, ‘Cool, he’s got a good feeling with the bike, he can do a good season.’ But there are different grades of goodness – if he had finished the year in fourth or fifth, I’d still call it a good season. Then he started to do very well: podium, podium, podium behind Marc, which didn’t really hurt us too much because Marc is still part of our family.

Everyone is thrilled. We are enjoying the atmosphere in the team and Nadia really deserves the payback for the effort she put in when she decided to carry on. Even our riders feel this soft atmosphere. I do believe Gresini is a good place, where a rider can feel at home and perform and give that extra bit.

The pitlane celebrations that Gresini and the factory Ducati team had during the 2025 season were some of the wildest I’ve seen – champagne and water fights, sound-system battles…

CM: That was great and that happened because there were the two brothers. I don’t know if it would’ve been the same with any other riders – Marc coming into our garage, throwing champagne or water. I think we left a deep mark in Marc, for what we did for him, helping him recover from quite a few seasons that were very tough for him.

We try every time to deliver the best to our riders, like next year Alex will have a factory machine. In terms of technical package, it will be exactly the same as the factory riders.

For us, considering what happened in 2021 and where we are now, our good times have been well deserved.