Marco Bezzecchi
Alex Marquez enjoyed the best season of his MotoGP career last year, but it may not have happened if Gresini hadn’t intervened at a time when his career was at a crossroads.
The 2025 MotoGP campaign saw the grid dominated by the Marquez surname. As Marc Marquez ran away with the championship, his younger brother, Alex Marquez, earned the moniker of being the best of the rest.
The rivalry between the two Marquez brothers is what made it one of Marc’s favourite seasons since joining the premier class in 2013.
It began at the first round of the season, in which Marc and Alex scored a respective one-two to mark the first time that a podium has been dominated by the same family.
Alex kept up his fine form by continuing to score impressive results on year-old machinery, finishing the season in the second-place spot of the riders’ standings with three Grand Prix victories, 12 podiums and a single pole position.
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Alex Marquez was nearly left stranded before Gresini signed him for 2023
In a recent interview with Moto.it, Gresini boss Nadia Padovani detailed how the Italian satellite team offered the younger Marquez brother a lifeline ahead of the 2023 MotoGP campaign following his exit from LCR Honda in the year before.
She said, “Alex believes that, in 2023, if we hadn’t taken him on, he would have been left behind. We placed a lot of trust in Alex, and he believed in himself.
“Then the rewards came, because Alex has grown a lot; he grew a lot with his brother last year, because he learned to observe what Marc did.
“And then this year he managed to put what he learned into practice, so he had a fabulous season.”
Miguel Oliveira was also in the running for a seat at Gresini during the period. In the end, the Portuguese rider decided against the move due to the Italian team not showing enough ‘financial health’.
After the departure of Oliveira from the MotoGP grid at the end of the 2025 campaign, it raises the question of what could have happened to their respective careers if he had taken the ride at Gresini over the 29-year-old.
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Ducati do not want Alex Marquez to partner Marc Marquez at the factory MotoGP team
Due to the impressive term atop the GP24, Alex has been rewarded with a factory-spec Ducati for the upcoming season.
It marks the Spaniard’s first year with factory machinery from the Italian constructor, and he is widely regarded as the biggest threat to Marc’s title defence.
Despite some calling for Alex to pair with Marc at Borgo Panigale, Ducati ‘sources’ revealed that the team doesn’t want the partnership to happen to avoid the fierce competition between their two riders becoming lacklustre.
Their on-track battles at the front of the pack left some fans wanting more aggression between the two brothers. As of right now, there doesn’t seem to be much rivalry at all between anyone on the grid.
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