Alex Márquez makes history: 'In 10 years we'll sit on the sofa with a smile and a beer in the hand'

Twenty MotoGP races done, 14 of them won by the Márquez brothers, Marc and Alex, finally confirmed as winner and runner-up in the 2025 championship. History was made at Sepang.

Alex’s Sunday victory was his third in a year during which he finally announced the strength of his talent. Alex isn’t Marc, but he’s pretty much as good as anyone else on the grid, after his brother, Fabio Quartararo and Pedro Acosta.

The 29-year-old Spaniard secured second place in the championship with second place in Saturday’s sprint, after which he was asked about the historical significance of his family’s one-two.

“When you are living a moment like this it’s difficult to believe it… it’s strange,” he said. “I’m sure maybe in 10 years we’ll sit on the sofa with a big smile and a nice beer in the hand. That will be nice.

“We can’t ask for anything more. We’ve enjoyed every moment this year – many times first and second, many times on the podium. It’s something crazy. We need to enjoy it, because it could be a unique moment in our lives.

“In Japan [where Marc secured the title], he said, ‘Come party,’ but I said, ‘No, I need to finish my mission.’ Now we need to make a big party, together with our family and our people.”

Alex’s Gresini team had the weekend of weekends: second in the riders’ championship, independent teams’ champion and team-mate Fermin Aldeguer rookie of the year. An astonishing feat from the outfit founded by the late Fausto Gresini, twice 125cc world champion in the 1980s.

The younger Márquez didn’t make things easy for himself in Malaysia by crashing twice on Friday, hurting his neck. Therefore, in the sprint he was too stiff, physically and mentally.

“I had a pain in my neck and I didn’t ride in a good way, because I was too nervous [to secure his championship position] and too rigid on the bike, so I wasn’t helping the bike to turn and pick up. Tomorrow I can ride not being scared about crashing and I’ll try to enjoy it.”

This year we didn’t get to see Marc unleashed from point-scoring duties in a grand prix, after he was taken out on the first lap in Indonesia, but we did see Alex unleashed.

On Sunday, he was third into the first corner, divebombed Acosta three corners later, then did the same to leader Pecco Bagnaia next time around at the same corner. And that was that.

“Yesterday I was thinking too much about closing the championship, so I didn’t attack Pecco in the moment I should have done,” he said.

“Today I was clever in my plan to attack Pedro on the first lap and Pecco on the second and then try to manage the tyres to the end, so it was nearly a perfect race. The plan was to not override the tyres, because otherwise you can pay later. I was really soft with the gas, but the front tyre was difficult to manage, with many closing [tucking] feelings.”

Sepang was particularly slippery this year, with riders battling wheelspin even in sixth gear.

Bagnaia had Acosta briefly come past in the early laps, then kept the KTM behind him, with Márquez never more than nine tenths ahead. No one knows what might’ve happened in the final laps because Bagnaia got a rear puncture.

“I started to lose performance lap by lap,” he explained. “We saw on the data that I had the puncture on lap 12. I did five more laps, without knowing why I was spinning much more, not controlling the braking and running wide.”

Bagnaia rode into pitlane on lap 18 of 20, six laps after he had surrendered second place to Acosta.

Acosta had been riding the wheels off his RC16 trying to stay with Bagnaia’s Ducati, his crew having fixed the tyre-life issues that had ruined his sprint. He finished Saturday’s 10-lap outing five seconds behind winner Bagnaia and Sunday’s 20-lap GP 2.6 laps behind Márquez.

“Tyre management is quite tough for us,” said Acosta. “Alex had a little more pace than Pecco and me in the beginning. Later I was able to more or less match his lap times and at one stage I was thinking about catching him but he was already quite far ahead.”

Acosta is a new man – he scored zero podiums in the first 11 GPs and has taken four in the last nine. Bike upgrades have helped but the biggest shift has been his mentality: focusing on being the best he can be, rather than wishing he was on a Ducati.

The happiest man on the podium was probably Honda‘s Joan Mir, who rode like a demon to fight his way through from seventh at the end of the first lap.

This was the factory team’s (and Mir’s) second podium since they parted with Marc at the end of 2023 and it celebrated the result like a victory.

Honda has been through its darkest years in MotoGP (excepting their quixotic few years with the NR500 in the late 1970s and early 1980s) and now the light is shining at the end of the tunnel.

Of course, the RC213V isn’t yet good enough to win, in normal circumstances.

“We have to walk before we can run,” said Mir, who had crashed out of the sprint, while chasing a top-three finish. “Now we finish on the podium or we finish on the ground. We have to work more on the bike to make it more stable and improve the grip, to make it slightly easier to ride, because with a bike that you have to push 150% every lap it’s so easy to make a mistake. It’s hard, because every time you reach a better level, it’s more difficult to improve.”

Yamaha‘s Quartararo rode another heroic race, a fraction of a second behind fourth-placed Franco Morbidelli. The Frenchman was happy that he had, as usual, extracted everything and more from his YZR-M1.

Quartararo’s concern was for the pace of Yamaha’s all-new V4, in the hands of test rider Augusto Fernández, who finished last (apart from Pramac‘s Miguel Oliveira, who remounted after a fall), riding more than two seconds off the pace.

Fernández will race the bike again at next month’s Valencia season finale. If the engine and chassis haven’t improved by then it will be a real worry for Yamaha, where there are already mumblings that the bike might not be ready for the start of the 2026 season.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a 2025 MotoGP report without further mysteries surrounding Ducati’s GP25.

Bagnaia didn’t take a single point at last month’s San Marino GP, scored maximum points in Japan, again failed to mark any points in Indonesia and Australia, then took pole and sprint victory in Malaysia and would’ve achieved a Sunday podium if he hadn’t got a flat.

Even Ducati admit they are confused by this rollercoaster. And in four decades of covering MotoGP I’ve never known a top rider to be so up and down.

“Honestly, I’m not a good adapter to what I don’t like,” admitted Bagnaia on Saturday. “This is my weak point.”

In fact, he’s been saying as much all season, during which team-mate Marc was able to dominate, thanks to his otherworldly feel for the front tyre, while Bagnaia worked to improve his feeling with the bike.

Bagnaia did reveal something new at Sepang. He told us that his GP25 got worse after the summer break, presumably because Ducati had come up with something to make the bike better, but in fact they’d gone the wrong way. His qualifying performances mostly bombed, further compromising his race performances.

Except at Motegi and Sepang…

“I’m in trouble, they’re [his team] are in trouble too, to understand the situation,” he added on Saturday.

The good news is that Bagnaia thinks Ducati is finally making progress with his bikes. We wait to see if his Sepang upward curve continues over the Portuguese and Valencia weekends.

Most interesting of all is the fact that Bagnaia won Saturday’s sprint despite his ride-height device going AWOL. Ducati has told us that the difference between Bagnaia’s beloved GP24 and his GP25 is their ride-height devices (although many believe the real difference is the engine), so this only added confusion to the confusion.

“My ride-height device wasn’t working in the sprint,” he said. “I was scared, but then I looked at the lap times and I was super-fast. The grip level here is very low, which gives the shock more movement, so more weight on the rear. In other tracks, where the grip is good, your acceleration is much less without the ride-height device.”

In fact, the opposite is the case. The more grip, the more load the rider can put into the rear tyre, which means more suspension travel. We will have to investigate this matter more deeply at the final races…

Anyway, curiouser and curiouser.