In MotoGP in June of each season, there’s always another race, and another after that. No points deficit is too much to overcome. With every lap on every new track, hope springs eternal.

Right?

That’s the theory, but the reality of 2025 suggests a different picture after last weekend’s Italian Grand Prix, where Marc Marquez’s pulverising pair of performances – and ever-louder questions about his two closest title rivals – made it seem like this year’s world championship is going only one way.

At a track he’d not won at since 2014, Marquez qualified on pole, survived a start-line launch control scare on his Ducati before winning Saturday’s 11-lap sprint, and absorbed a barrage of early punches from teammate Francesco Bagnaia and Ducati stablemate (and younger brother) Alex Marquez to win Sunday’s 23-lap Grand Prix at a canter.

On a weekend where Bagnaia was hoping to continue the momentum he’d gained from a podium in the previous round at Aragon to a Mugello circuit where he’d dominated for three years to inject some life into his stuttering season, it was a hammer blow. And one that a MotoGP insider believes might have just sealed the world championship, regardless of the 13 remaining rounds and 481 points to play for that still have the entire grid in mathematical contention for the crown.

Speaking to Fox Sports’ ‘Pit Talk’ podcast, MotoGP world TV feed commentator Matt Birt – a paddock veteran of almost 30 years – feels the 2025 iteration of Marquez is the best he’s ever been. Combine that with Bagnaia’s obvious struggles and scepticism about the willingness of Alex Marquez to engage in a bare-knuckle brawl with his brother, and resistance seems futile.

“I don’t like to say after nine Grands Prix that it’s already looking inevitable that [Marc Marquez is] going to run away with the championship, but that’s where we’re at,” Birt said.

PIT TALK PODCAST: MotoGP world TV feed commentator Matt Birt joins hosts Michael Lamonato and Matt Clayton to discuss the 2025 season so far, Jack Miller’s Yamaha future, the expectations for Toprak Razgatlioglu in 2026 and if Marc Marquez is stronger than ever after his Italian Grand Prix victory.

Marquez himself knows not to take anything for granted; in 2020, after six titles in his first seven MotoGP seasons, a crash at that year’s season-opening Spanish Grand Prix saw him miss an entire season, and compete under duress for the following three.

Already this season, one where he’s amassed a 40-point championship lead after five Grands Prix wins and eight sprint victories from nine starts in each race format, he’s thrown away one certain victory in Austin and another sure-fire podium at Jerez with moments of overconfidence or inattention.

But Marquez’s 2025 form – and ever-louder doubts about the two riders who could stop his march to complete one of world sport’s most impressive redemptive stories – suggests you need to squint, hard, to visualise a different outcome.

OLDER, WISER, FASTER, STRONGER

The Marc Marquez of 2025, at age 32 with his right arm scarred from four surgeries since 2020 and with a steely focus that’s all-business, is the same rider in name to the one who won the MotoGP title as a 20-year-old rookie in 2013, but very different to the one who won the opening 10 races of his 2014 title defence, or finished 18 of 19 races in either first or second place in his 2019 campaign.

Age, wisdom – and operations – have changed him, but there’s an evolution to Marquez this season that, Birt feels, makes him more formidable than he’s ever been.

“Right now, it’s very hard to identify any weakness that Marc has,” Birt said.

“He’s brilliant in qualifying and he’s brilliant at the start of races, he’s managing races and not cooking the tyres too much, and we know how good he is at the end of races when he’s got to manage that rear grip.”

Mugello, site of his landmark 100th pole position across all three world championship classes last weekend, was a case in point. After Bagnaia attacked him ferociously in front of a fervent home crowd early in the Grand Prix, Marquez gave as good he got while simultaneously playing the long game.

It was a stoush that tiptoed perilously close to the edge – the Ducati teammates touched on lap three when Bagnaia’s front tyre hit Marquez’s rear – but Marquez boxed clever, seeing off Bagnaia by lap seven, and then chasing down Alex Marquez to take the lead on lap nine.

Five laps later, the advantage at the front was one second, and both Alex Marquez and Bagnaia had cooked their tyres to have no grip left to mount a comeback. Marquez’s lead peaked at over two seconds with two laps to go, and he cruised home to take a fifth Sunday victory in nine attempts this season.

“I was breathing more than normal,” Marquez said afterwards of the start of the race.

“I tried to be in the battle, but at the same time I tried to manage the tyres. I saw that ‘Pecco’ [Bagnaia] was pushing a lot the tyres, but then when Alex overtook us, I understand that Alex had another pace.

“I jump behind him and just wait for the middle part of the race, which is where I start to feel better. I saw that the gap was increasing step by step, and then I tried to manage the situation. When I take that 1.5-2-second [margin], I just manage the race.”

It’s the adaptability that makes Marquez, to Birt’s eye, more complete than ever. Already this season, the Spaniard has banished 11-year hoodoos at two different circuits, winning in Qatar in round four for the first time since 2014, then doing likewise to end an equally-long Mugello drought.

“In the past with the Honda, he was always good at the gnarly stop-and-go tracks where he was really strong on the brakes, but now with the Ducati, there’s no weak tracks, there’s nothing for Marc to fear anymore,” Birt said.

“He doesn’t look at a Qatar or a Mugello and think ‘OK, I’m going to be defending’. He says ‘defending’ coming into these weekends, but he’s always on the front foot and always attacking.”

HOW HARD WILL ALEX MARQUEZ REALLY PUSH?

While Marc Marquez’s dominance on a 2025-spec factory Ducati for the sport’s benchmark team isn’t a surprise, the emergence of his younger brother Alex Marquez as his closest statistical rival definitely is, based on the younger Marquez’s five previous MotoGP seasons.

In just nine rounds, the Gresini Ducati rider has scored 230 points, won his maiden Grand Prix at Jerez in April, won the sprint race at the British Grand Prix in May and finished in the top two of all nine sprints, and on the podium in six Grands Prix.

If Marquez’s season ended tomorrow, 2025 would already be, by far, the best season of his premier-class career.

Riding the GP24 machine that propelled Jorge Martin to last year’s world title and helped Bagnaia to 11 Grand Prix wins has unlocked a new level in the 29-year-old, and one that has given Birt pause.

“Alex is on one of the most rounded motorcycle packages in history, the GP24 was utterly dominant last year and he clearly had his weaknesses on the GP23 last time around,” he said.

“The new-generation Michelin rear tyre was overloading the front [tyre] too much for Alex [last year]. Alex is very much a front-end rider, he likes to really attack aggressively on the brakes into corners and he couldn’t do that last year. This year, he can.

“From the get-go, the very first lap Alex did on the GP24 in the Barcelona test last year, straight away he was like ‘I’m going to be in the game in 2025’, he knew the GP24 plays to his strengths as a rider.

“Confidence and momentum are a big thing, and Alex knew he now had the motorcycle that allowed him to be at the front, and the team with continuity and stability with Gresini. He’s just kept that ball rolling, and he’s riding the crest of a wave.”

Finally breaking through for a Grand Prix win at Jerez in his 94th career start ticked one of the boxes left unchecked for a two-time champion in the lower categories, but his accumulation of second places – 13 from 18 starts – has led to increasing chatter about his willingness to engage older brother Marc in an on-track fight with the same ferocity which he’d employ to attack any other rival.

In the Thailand, Argentina, Aragon and Italy weekends, Alex finished behind Marc eight out of eight times. He’s beaten Marc once in a head-to-head fight – the Silverstone sprint race – and his Grand Prix win came on a Sunday in Spain where Marc crashed out of podium contention in the early stages.

Questions of just how hard Alex Marquez is prepared to race his big brother – in individual races and across the championship as a whole – came up across the Mugello weekend, as Birt acknowledges.

“Marc and Alex were both asked about it in the press conference, because from the fan perspective there maybe is a growing belief that maybe Alex is a little bit more conservative, a little bit more mindful of what he’s doing on track when he’s racing closely with Marc,” Birt said.

“Alex said the reason why he’s not been able to attack Marc or be aggressive with Marc is because Marc is simply too fast. Alex’s point is that you overtake riders in MotoGP when they’re slower than you, when you’re faster than them.

“This will be a theme moving forward … Alex is going to be under a lot of scrutiny when he is racing Marc. Is he not giving Marc a free pass, is he just being that little bit more mindful? If it’s Marc ahead of him in a braking zone or [Bagnaia] ahead of him in a braking zone, would he be having two different approaches?”

While Alex Marquez dismissed the theory that he races his brother in one way and the rest of his opponents in another, Bagnaia disagreed – and pointed to his own battles with the Italian riders he grew up with in Valentino Rossi’s VR46 Academy, like Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi, Ducati’s Franco Morbidelli, or Honda’s Luca Marini.

“It’s normal, it’s like this,” Bagnaia said.

“It’s clear that Alex takes more care about what he’s doing with his brother, but it’s something normal like I’m doing with the Academy riders.”

Bagnaia’s matter-of-factly discussing the Marquez question in the wake of Mugello was understandable in the moment. For now, the two-time MotoGP champion has much bigger issues, and problems he seemingly can’t solve.

BAGNAIA GOING BACKWARDS

Marc Marquez’s move to reject a Pramac Ducati seat at Mugello 12 months earlier – effectively backing the Italian factory a corner where they had to promote him to their A-team as Bagnaia’s teammate or risk losing him to another brand – set up a delicious narrative where the sport’s best rider until 2019 would go head-to-head with the most convincing champion since, and one that is a protégé of Marquez’s bitter rival, Rossi.

It sounded like the perfect script for a championship fight, but it’s one that’s not eventuated as Bagnaia has been a shadow of his former self this season, struggling with the changed characteristics of the GP25 from the ’24 model he’s openly pined for since he got off it after winning last year’s season finale in Barcelona.

The GP25 – faster than its predecessor, but less forgiving – has tripped Bagnaia up, and has exposed the contrasting styles between the teammates.

With its altered balance thanks to a changed engine configuration and a lighter rear ride-height device to the 2024 model, Bagnaia hasn’t been able to get the bike into the sweet spot he needs to be fast and confident. Marquez – who never rode the GP24 after campaigning a year-old GP23 for Gresini last season – won titles with Honda where his bike was nowhere near the class of the field, and often so difficult to ride that none of his stablemates fired a shot on it.

Marquez, one of MotoGP’s foremost improvisers, makes do with what he has, winning when the bike isn’t perfect, and winning more when it is. When Bagnaia is at one with his machinery, his metronomic pace is almost unbeatable. If Marquez is this generation’s Casey Stoner, Bagnaia is its Jorge Lorenzo.

Mugello, for a rider with Bagnaia’s success rate at home, was devastating for his faint championship hopes. Marquez’s win, allied to Bagnaia being booted off the podium on the penultimate lap by fellow home rider Fabio Di Giannantonio and finishing fourth, meant the Spaniard’s gap over the Italian ballooned to 110 points not even halfway through 2025.

For Birt, it’s a bridge too far, even with so many points left to play for.

“In terms of the championship, there’s just no way in a million years he’s going to recover 110 points back on Marc Marquez,” Birt said.

“People say ‘he was 91 points behind [Fabio] Quartararo in 2022 and he pulled it off’, but this is a different beast this year.

“In terms of where Pecco moves forward now, it’s almost like the rest of this season is like 12 or 13 test sessions for him, just to try to find some feeling with that Ducati. He’s got to forget about the championship now and just work out a way with the engineers to get that front feeling back. To not finish on the podium at Mugello for him was a real humbling experience.”

Being beaten by Di Giannantonio on the same GP25 machine he can’t get to grips with would have hurt Bagnaia as much as losing his iron grip on his home Grand Prix, Birt feels.

“It illustrates the dark hole Pecco finds himself in,” Birt said.

“Taking nothing away from Fabio [Di Giannantonio], but for Pecco to be the fourth-best Ducati at Mugello, I don’t think any of us saw that coming.

“It’s one thing to be beaten by Marc on the same bike – Marc is an eight-time champion and one of the best we’ve seen in history – but being beaten on a regular basis by Alex [Marquez] has been tough to take, particularly because Alex is on the GP24 that Pecco knows like the back of his hand and knows, if he was on the same package, that he’d probably be as competitive as Alex.

“It’s been a very tough watch. It’s quite painful to see Pecco right now, on and off the bike.”

The Dutch TT at Assen – where Bagnaia has won the past three seasons – might bring the rider who is now unequivocally Ducati’s number two back into the frame, at least as a speck in Marquez’s rear-view mirror.

But Birt feels it’s likely to be temporary, if it happens at all.

“I just don’t see how Marc can be beaten this year, there’s no chink in his armour right now,” he said.

“You put one of the best riders in history on the best bike in the best team, and this is what’s going to happen.”