Marc Marquez’s sudden pace drop in the Thailand MotoGP was about more than just managing tyre pressure, claims Francesco Bagnaia. Francesco Bagnaia says Marc Marquez was “playing with us” in the Thailand Grand Prix and could have dominated the MotoGP race if he wanted to. New factory Ducati signing Marquez claimed victory in the opening round of the 2025 MotoGP season, beating brother Alex Marquez and team-mate Bagnaia to the top spot at Buriram. While the elder Marquez secured pole position and comfortably led the race early on, he suddenly slowed down on lap 7 and dropped to second position, where he stayed for the majority of the race. It was only four laps from the finish that he repassed his Gresini Ducati-mounted brother at Turn 12, before crossing the finish line with a winning margin of 1.7s. Marquez later revealed that he had to drop a place to keep the tyre temperature above the regulatory window, having noticed a significant drop while running in clear air at the front. Marquez’s tyre pressure drama brought Bagnaia into play, with the two-time MotoGP champion closing within half a second of the leading duo in the closing stages of the race. But Bagnaia believes Marquez was simply […]
Casey Stoner has weighed in on the Valentino Rossi-Marc Marquez spat that has dominated headlines on-and-off in MotoGP since 2015. It’s a feud that still captures the raging imagination of fans from across the MotoGP spectrum even 10 years on, especially as Marquez now prepares to team up with Rossi’s protege, Francesco Bagnaia, at Ducati this year. For Stoner, it’s also one in which Marquez has “deserved” the criticism levelled by some at him. “Marc [Marquez], to a certain degree, deserved his criticism,” Stoner said on the Ducati Diaries podcast. “He tried to get in there.” Stoner affirmed, though, that the blame for the whole spat lay at Rossi’s door – Marquez was simply responding to an attack. “Even though people blame Marc for the whole thing,” Stoner said, “people forget that Valentino [Rossi] started it. “Marc’s Marc, we’ve watched him do that all through his racing, and then Valentino started a war of words. “They were all friends, and all the rest of it, then Valentino started something, and then Marc retaliated because he didn’t like it. “And then of course everybody blows up about that, forgetting that Valentino went and poked the bear.” Stoner explained that the fallout […]
Nine years after the fact, only one person can truly take the blame for Valentino Rossi not winning the 2015 MotoGP world title. And it’s him. The nine-time world champion has never wavered from his stance that Marc Marquez conspired against him to ensure Jorge Lorenzo won the 2015 crown. It’s a view that has radicalised a portion of the MotoGP fanbase and is the main reason a chorus of boos tends to follow Marquez around whenever he races in front of former Rossi strongholds. It is a cloud that has forever hung over MotoGP since that Malaysian Grand Prix weekend almost a decade ago and one, sadly, that shows no signs of ever disappearing after Rossi stoked the fires again earlier this week. Taking to the ‘Mig Babol’ podcast – a show hosted by former VR46 Academy rider and current VR46 Racing team rider coach and video analyst Andrea Migno – Rossi doubled down on his rhetoric about 2015. He reiterated why he called out Marquez in the pre-event Sepang press conference after ‘irrefutable’ proof of conspiracy was discovered at Phillip Island the week before. He doubled down on the fact that, in the Malaysian GP, Marquez tried to […]