'I thought, MotoGP is not for me' - The rise of Alex Márquez

Glimmering like the Silver Surfer, Alex Márquez‘s special chrome livery on the Gresini Ducati for the 22nd and final grand prix of the year was a blinding way to remind the capacity crowd of one of the undisputed stars of the series. The 29-year-old was undone in his quest for a 13th podium result due to inexplicable fading rear tyre grip as he slowed from second to sixth, but he’d aced the Saturday Sprint for a sixth P1 from the 44 races in the longest campaign on record.

The silver guise on Sunday was entirely appropriate. Alex, now a six-season veteran of MotoGP and one of just three riders from the 22 on the grid to have conquered both the Moto2 and Moto3 classes (and one of 13 to have won GPs in all three divisions), has had an outstanding term. He has spent his life in his older sibling’s ‘exhaust haze’, but by doing so in 2025, he was the second best motorcycle grand prix racer in the world, and from exalted company.

Alex Márquez, empowered by a year-old Ducati but one that had won 16 of 20 grands prix in 2024, crushed his previous attempts at MotoGP. The nadir was 2022 when he couldn’t help stall the spiralling competitiveness of Honda‘s RCV and was 17th in the championship with just two top 10 finishes. After three seasons with the Japanese maker, he’d had enough.

“I felt stupid on the bike,” he says now with a dramatic look and across the table in Gresini’s bright race truck office. Márquez jumped off the plank and away from the powerhouse manufacturer in 2023 and, ironically, started to part the waves for Marc to then follow and build up his own Ducati momentum to 2025.

Around 2021 and 2022 it was not hard to secure interview time with Alex. It is also not an exaggeration to say that a large quota of media interest in that period was more about his brother’s health that his own racing exploits. Marc Márquez might be the ultimate King of the MotoGP jungle but Alex’s decision for 2023 to slice his earnings and prospects by leaving HRC for outdated machinery as part of a satellite team took the same size balls as any of Marc’s career steps.

Now, at the end of 2025, Alex is in demand. We’ve got 10 minutes to chat and the clock is ticking. Rather than delve into the enabling force of Ducati’s GP24, which he’s been asked about all year, the subject of his volte-face from zero to hero is more interesting. After all, Márquez’s agent and manager and overseer of the Velocity Agency – a Márquez family business enterprise – Jaime Martinez, summed it up admirably in a separate interview. “I think he made a large forward stride in 2025 in terms of confidence. The bike allowed him to do that. It’s clear that the [GP] 24 was much better than those [bikes] from 2023 and 2022. It gave him the chance to show his potential.”

“When you have a tough year then you see things clearly,” Alex explains. “You can say ‘OK: I will have patience, I won’t doubt, and when I have the tools I will be fast.’ When I had a year like I did with Honda in ’21 and was suffering a bit – with only a few ups – and then in 2022, honestly, I thought ‘this [MotoGP] is not for me’. That was my feeling. I tried everything to be faster and every time I was going slower and slower to the point where I thought, ‘What’s going on?!’”

Doubts were unavoidable but Márquez had a close support structure. “In those moments, if you have people around you that help keep your feet on the ground – and explain that it’s not only you but the whole package – then it can be easier [to handle]. I have to say that not at any moment did I stop training or believing that it would eventually come good. I think, as a rider, that’s the last thing you can lose. If you have doubts and you want to stop training to improve, than that’s the time to retire. You need to keep competing and to still have that thing in the stomach when you wake up and want to be better.”

2024 was Márquez’s second stint with Gresini, with another year-old Ducati (the GP23) and with Marc as a team-mate for the second time after their union at HRC. He moved from ninth to eighth in the championship and consolidated his status, but Alex was unhappy. “I was disappointed because I was expecting much more,” he frowns about 2024. “Only Marc was able to make the difference with the ’23 bike.”

With Marc’s stage-left exit to the factory team and the next cycle of machinery, his process and patience were finally rewarded towards the end of the calendar. “When I first tried the ’24 bike in Montmeló [the last test of 2024] I thought ‘OK, now you have to give everything…this could be a good year’.

“Honestly, at that moment, I did not think it would mean second in the championship but I was expecting the top five constantly. I thought ‘a few podiums, some consistency and then top five at the end of the year would be a good thing…’ To be second is really good for me but also the team. We cannot forget that this is an independent team with last year’s bike and it is not easy sometimes but we did an amazing job altogether.”

“Alex is a rider that needs to go through all the steps, but he is someone that is willing to do that,” says Martinez, who has known the brothers for more than a decade and from his previous role at Red Bull Spain. ‘Jimmy’ has been handling their affairs since mid-2022 and had to create Marc and Alex’s pathways from Honda to Ducati. “In every category he needed to take his time to get to know the bike and the team, the crew chief, the technical team and work his way through.

“He is ‘top’ and this year is the result of this evolution. 2025 has been about more maturity and more understanding. When you share a home with a rider like Marc, who with his natural talent was able to jump over those steps, then it can be hard to understand how good you can be. Alex had to be more systematic and find his way and, in the end, he became Moto3 champion, Moto2 champion and runner-up in MotoGP. His next goal has to be [becoming] a rider that is a lot more consistent in making those podiums.”

Alex could have been overwhelmed or dwarfed by Marc’s footprint on the sport but he has always been very accepting of his status. In fact, Martinez believes Alex’s closeness to Marc has been a blessing for his development. “Alex has always lived in the shadow of a genius, but he also was able build up a confidence in himself that might have been difficult if he didn’t have that proximity to a rider like Marc,” he says. “It’s ‘easier’ to have this motivation and drive when you grow up next to one of the all-time greats. It’s something he had to learn once he saw that he also had a spectacular talent and could also make very good results. He just needed his own time, like many riders need their own direction and timescale. The difference between Alex and other riders is that he did meet each challenge.”

Márquez says 2025 has been a “big satisfaction” because, ultimately, of vindication. “When I decided to come to Gresini it was because I would have a Ducati and I would be able to say to myself: ‘Are you ready for MotoGP?’ We’ve seen many riders in the past make a great job in Moto2 or Moto3 but MotoGP is another story and they never perform there. It’s a big thing.”

Alex laughs easily and endearingly at himself. “I feel like I am not invisible anymore!” he grins. “When you don’t make results then it’s like this, even if it was not a big problem for me. It’s like that question I get often: ‘Which superpower would you like to have?’ ‘Invisibility!’ There have been a lot more interviews, more sponsors and many more things to do.”

Has he felt the reverberations of success? “In Vertical, we have an agency to measure ‘impact’ and we get the results every three months or so and you send it to the sponsors,” he says without getting too specific. “Last year, with Alpinestars, it was something like 300 and this year it’s 1.5 million!

“Last Tuesday I did an Estrella Galicia [a personal 0.0 beverage sponsor] event in Madrid,” he continues. “I remember in 2022 doing a similar thing and there were seven journalists in this big room. This time, it was full!” he laughs. “This is what it means to be fighting for 15th or being second in the championship.”

Three years Marc’s junior, Alex has a wealth of his own elite sport experience but has also been able to observe another person’s plight with the pressures, attention and scrutiny that comes in the public eye.

“It’s like a bubble,” he describes of the fame game as he curves his hands. “But this bubble in sport is so easy to puncture. One day you are there and the bubble is growing and people are saying you are the best, you are unbelievable and all that…but when the bubble pops you disappear! How to you calculate the ‘value’ of someone like me in the last race or the last two races? I might do really well but if at the following two races I am not at that level again then what I did before almost gets ‘forgotten’. Sport, many times, is like that, and it’s not fair, but it’s like that for everybody. It’s…difficult. I say many times: to ‘arrive’ is easy but to ‘stay’ [relevant] is so difficult.”

He is asked which question he’s heard the most in 2025. Again, the laugh. “I think: ‘when will you beat your brother?’! Honestly speaking, on the track I was the only one close to him many times. Then there was [Marco] Bezzecchi and Pecco [Bagnaia] at moments, but mostly it was us,” he pauses. “When someone is dominating, there still has to be one person that is close; we saw it in F1 when there was Hamilton and Verstappen. I was the one closest to Marc and closer in the championship. That ‘person’ is good for the show, so I think that’s why I got the question more and more.”

Defeating Marc on level pegging might be an impossible task, and not just for Alex. Both brothers will have the same Ducati machinery in 2026, however, after the factory updated their support to Gresini on the back of Alex’s efforts. Alex flew second to Marc in GPs five times in 2025 and managed to push Marc to P2 on one occasion.