‘Smiling assassin’ Márquez v ‘Rossi’s boy’ Bagnaia: an epic MotoGP season awaits

The second-last year of the current 1,000cc generation puts 22 riders on the grid on five different marques, from Italy, Austria and Japan. But the focus will be on just two of them, on one make. Pecco Bagnaia and his factory Ducati team-mate Marc Márquez. A pair with 11 championships between them, separated by just four years of age … and a rivalry that dares not speak its name.

On the contrary, there will be sweetness and light between the two, if the pre-season chit-chat is to be believed. This is thanks to a level of maturity and mutual respect that overrules any thoughts of knives out. Forget Marc’s reputation as a smiling assassin. Blandishments massaged by a lotion of combined PR soft-soap and wishful thinking. I don’t believe it will last much longer than a minute.

There may be real friendship between some riders, and it may even survive a fight for the championship – as seems to have been the case between Bagnaia and Jorge Martín in 2024. But it is a rare thing for it to survive the on-track emotions intrinsic to the sport.

As anyone who has raced knows, it’s the same as the feeling that anyone you pass is a no-hoper (to be polite) and anyone passing you a dangerous maniac. At GP level even more so. And once the race is on, every other rider is a deadly enemy. It’s hard for the feeling not to persist once the race is over.

There are extra elements to the Márquez -Bagnaia face-off. National pride for one – Spain versus Italy. Recent history for another: Bagnaia blamed Marc when the pair clashed and fell in Portugal last year, and blamed the younger Márquez, Alex, for a similar incident at Aragon. No love lost there.

But it runs deeper – to the seismic chasm between Márquez and Valentino Rossi. Marc played the greatest part in the eventual unravelling of the previously utterly dominant Italian, and Rossi took no pains in concealing his fury. It famously came to a head in Malaysia in 2012, when Rossi hung back in order to kick Márquez off into the gravel, thereby earning a next-race penalty and sacrificing his chance for an eighth premier-class title

More than a decade later, Rossi is still ready to bad-mouth Márquez, as he did in a rare 2024 interview. The enmity runs deep.

And Bagnaia is nothing if not Rossi’s boy. He was hand-picked as a core member of his hugely influential VR46 Academy, mentored through Moto3, then signed up in Valentino’s early days as a Moto2 team owner, where he won their first championship in 2018. Pecco and Vale remain ultra-close, in constant touch, talking things through at every race-track. So, for Rossi at least, Pecco’s new team-mate means a resumption of hostilities.

There is a rich history of uneasy bedfellows in racing. Team-mates whose simmering enmity inspired them to greater feats … at least on a good day; whose mutual loathing reshaped racing history. As back in 1973, when Phil Read not only beat career-long MV Agusta star Agostini to the title, but sent the legendary Italian off to Yamaha in a huff … where he won the first-ever two-stroke title for the Japanese upstarts.

1987 champion Wayne Gardner had openly hostile relations with team-mates Mick Doohan and then Eddie Lawson, multi-champions both. And triple-champion Wayne Rainey made an art form of unsettling erstwhile Yamaha team-mate John Kocinski.

Nobody did it better than Rossi, who demanded a wall be built down the middle of the shared pit when Jorge Lorenzo joined Yamaha in 2008. This was ostensibly because they were using different tyre suppliers, Michelin and Bridgestone respectively. But when Bridgestone became exclusive suppliers the next year, the pit wall stayed in place.

It was always because these team-mates were threateningly competitive. It’s a racing adage that your team-mate is the first you have to beat, and in each case this was a particularly difficult task. Ducati’s decision to pair their reigning champion with Márquez, on the come-back trail after years with Honda, took most people in racing by surprise (especially Jorge Martín, who thought he had done enough to earn the factory seat, and promptly left Ducati to join Aprilia instead).

Yet it was a canny choice. The Bologna firm already had the dominant motorcycle, which is unlikely to change in 2025. Why not add some extra spice to the factory squad, and spur Bagnaia out of any hint of complacency? As a manufacturer, they had nothing to lose.

As race fans, nor do we. Accidents apart, we should be in for an epic.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.