A history-making MotoGP season: the best of Mat Oxley in 2025
It's been another year of MotoGP exclusives, explainers and analysis from Mat Oxley. Here are five of his best columns from 2025
Dorna/MotoGP
In January 2025, Mat Oxley was concerned. He (rightly) thought that the MotoGP season was set for a crushing title campaign by Marc Márquez.
If there was little competition in the championship, would there be enough for him to write about?
It wasn’t an outcome he’d leave to chance, and so, thanks to his tenacious ferreting in the pitlane, Mat delivered Motor Sport readers the stories of Yamaha’s V4 development, Aprilia’s resurgence, and the expanding array of of handlebar buttons.
Happily, his fears proved unfounded as the championship delivered too: both Márquez brothers made history, contrasting with the travails of Pecco Bagnaia, while Ducati started to face renewed competition.
The year brought landmark milestones, but also, sadly, once again there was tragedy on the race track, with worrying details explored by Mat.
Before we look towards a new season, here are five of the best columns from Mat in 2025.
Is Marc Márquez the GOAT?
Marc Márquez’s seventh MotoGP title, after years in the wilderness, makes more history – he now has the longest title-winning career of all time, so now is a good time to answer the biggest question of them all
September 28
Márquez celebrates a ninth world championship and seventh MotoGP title
Ducati
“Marc wants to show to himself that he’s the fastest, not the best, because to be fastest is the only thing you can do yourself. It’s the people who must say who’s the best.”
That’s one of Marc Márquez’s mechanics talking, so who is the greatest motorcycle racer, now and of all time?
There’s no doubt Márquez is the greatest rider of the moment, indeed of the last 13 seasons.
He’s been making history ever since he arrived in the premier class: he is still the youngest MotoGP king and now the fifth oldest, with the longest title-winning career of all time. Before Márquez, the riders with the longest title-winning careers were Giacomo Agostini, who won his last championships ten years after his first, and Valentino Rossi, whose title-winning career lasted nine years. Marc’s first and latest titles span 13 years and he’s probably not done yet.
Is Rossi a seven-time MotoGP king or a nine-time motorcycle world champion?
MotoGP’s owners are working to further separate grand prix racing’s class of kings from the lower series, so who’s a world champion now and what’s in store for Moto2 and Moto3?
September 24
Rossi hatched his ninth world title – his seventh in the class of kings – at the 2009 Malaysian GP
Getty Images
To answer the question in the headline, Valentino Rossi is both, of course. He won seven MotoGP championships, one 250cc title and a 125cc crown.
Why the question? MotoGP rights holders Dorna, now owned by Liberty Media, is once again pushing to further the gap between motorcycle racing’s premier class and its intermediate and junior grand prix categories to focus more attention on the big class. One-class-to-rule-them-all.
This follows the example of car racing, where Formula 1 hogs all the limelight, while the F2 and F3 classes exist in the shadows, only noticed by the cognoscenti.
Road to MotoGP: the scandal of Borja Gómez’s death
Borja Gómez died last month during a Road to MotoGP event at Magny-Cours. Newly published testimony from Filippo Fuligni, who was also involved in the incident, shines new light on an entirely avoidable tragedy
August 6
Gómez celebrates victory in June’s Barcelona-Catalunya round of the Spanish Superbike championship
Ruben De La Rosa/NurPhoto
It is just over a month since European Superstock rider Borja Gómez was killed during a Thursday test session for an FIM JuniorGP World Championship round at Magny-Cours.
Motorcycle racing is a dangerous game, which can easily turn murderous if the people in charge don’t look after the riders.
Gómez would almost certainly still be alive today but for what appears to be serious negligence, which had the test day go ahead despite a disastrous lack of marshalling and medical facilities.
The 20-year-old Spaniard, who was leading the European Superstock and Spanish Superbike championships, crashed his Honda CBR600RR on fluid dropped by another motorcycle. Usually marshals warn oncoming riders of dropped oil or water with red-and-yellow reduced-adhesion flags. But there were no marshals to wave flags.
What MotoGP handlebar buttons do: ‘Now we have more, you can miss some!’
Riders have a lot to think about aboard their 300-horsepower MotoGP bikes, including 11 levers, buttons, switches and knobs on the left handlebar alone. No wonder they get confused!
June 18
A Marquez mechanic compresses the GP25’s rear end, while pulling lever No1
Mat Oxley
There’s lots happening around the left handlebar of Marc Márquez‘s Ducati Desmosedici GP25!
Márquez’s right hand may do the most important jobs – working the throttle and front brake – but it’s his left hand that does the multitasking, with a total of 11 levers, buttons, switches and knobs to operate.
These controls look after everything from brake-lever span and clutch to electronics maps and rear brake and onto holeshot and ride-height devices.
Most of them have obvious jobs, others less so, especially the three holeshot levers. Although these will disappear from MotoGP bikes at the end of 2026 – when holeshot and ride-height devices are banned – Ducati is still secretive about which does what.
How Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha were forged by WW2
The Japanese manufacturers are having a horrible time in MotoGP, perhaps their toughest since they evolved from manufacturing weaponry for the Japanese military in World War Two
January 1
A damaged Kawasaki Ki-48 WW2 bomber. The Ki-48 was manufactured by Kawasaki. It used propellors manufactured by Yamaha’s parent company Nippon Gakki, which were made with a special milling machine created by Soichiro Honda
US National Archives
Japan’s Big Four motorcycle manufacturers – Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha – ruled bike racing from the 1960s until very recently. More than half a century of racetrack supremacy, along with (and funded by) total domination of the global road-bike market, all the way from step-thru scooters to superbikes.
After World War Two there were as many as two hundred motorcycle manufacturers in Japan, but by the early 1970s the vast majority had gone bust, while others were absorbed. Only Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha remained.
Why and how did that massive purge take place to create Japan’s so-called Big Four?