Jorge Lorenzo has realised Luigi Dall’Igna was right all along about Jorge Martin after what he’s seen in 2025

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Jorge Martin left the Ducati stable at the end of the 2024 season despite winning the title. But Jorge Lorenzo says Luigi Dall’Igna saw something that no-one else could.

Martin switched to a factory ride at Aprilia, and the Pramac satellite team defected to Yamaha. One wonders how the reigning champion would have fared on the same Ducati GP25 as Marc Marquez.

Of course, Aprilia still haven’t seen the best version of Martin because he missed almost all the races before the summer break after a succession of increasingly serious injuries. He’s still building up to the level of teammate Marco Bezzecchi.

But in a hypothetical scenario, a fully-fit Martin on a GP25 could perhaps have been the nearest challenger to Marquez. The Ant of Cervera has steered the enigmatic motorcycle to 11 wins from 16 rounds, while teammate Francesco Bagnaia has floundered and Fabio di Giannantonio watches on from seventh place.

Jorge Lorenzo says Jorge Martin is clearly not on the same ‘level’ as Marc Marquez

Enea Bastianini was surprised that Ducati chose Marquez over Martin as his replacement. While the Pramac star was fighting Bagnaia for the title, Marquez was a distant third.

MotoGP legend-turned-pundit Jorge Lorenzo found the decision ‘difficult’ to assess given that the two riders were on different machinery. He had seen signs that Marquez was at a significant performance disadvantage at Gresini.

But Luigi Dall’Igna and his Ducati engineers were the only ones who knew the truth of the situation. They had already seen in the data that Marquez was on ‘another level’ entirely.

“I didn’t know what the real difference was last year between the 2024 [bike] and the 2023 that Marc was riding,” Lorenzo told GPOne. “As a commentator, for example, at the last corner in Qatar, you could see that under acceleration, Bagnaia’s bike was getting away.

“I didn’t know there was so much difference last year. This year, we saw that there really was a big difference between the old bike compared to the new one that Martin and Bagnaia had.

“Gigi and the engineers were certainly able to see the telemetry, and that’s why the choice to take Marc instead of Martin was clear to them. For us as viewers, as he came in third, and Martin and Bagnaia were first and second, it was difficult to judge his value, wasn’t it, the true potential of all three riders.

“Now we’ve seen that Marc is on another level.”

Where does Jorge Martin rank among Jorge Lorenzo’s top MotoGP riders?

In a separate video, Lorenzo ranked his top five current MotoGP riders, excluding Marquez. He believes KTM’s Pedro Acosta is the closest in terms of talent.

Martin was third on that list overall. Lorenzo says Bezzecchi has now climbed into the top six.

Martin didn’t know if he’d ride a motorcycle again after his hospital stay in Qatar during the spring. The rest of this year is about rebuilding.

Come next season, he and Bezzecchi will be regarded as dark horses in the title race. Though based on the current campaign, Marquez may not be beatable until the 2027 regulation changes.