Marquez brothers Marc and Alex were quickest on the opening day of MotoGP’s second and final pre-season test of 2025 in Thailand.
In the scorching heat at Buriram, Gresini rider Alex Marquez had picked up right where he’d left off in the previous test at Sepang a few days ago – logging a 1m29.649s in the early going that stood as the best time for the vast majority of the day.
Nobody would surpass that time either before or for a long time after a midday break for practice starts, until works Ducati rider Marc Marquez – already second in the classification at that point – suddenly uncorked a superb 1m29.184s just minutes before the chequered flag.
Leading positions
1 M Marquez (Ducati)
2 Morbidelli (VR46 Ducati)
3 Bezzecchi (Aprilia)
4 Acosta (KTM)
5 Zarco (LCR Honda)
Full times at bottom of page
Marquez, who – according to Ducati team manager Davide Tardozzi – was working on riding position during the day to address a lack of comfort on the bike, ended up half a second off the lap record held by team-mate Pecco Bagnaia.
Marquez and Bagnaia’s Ducati team is increasingly expected to homologate the 2024-spec Desmosedici engine for this and next year instead of the newer version, and it was notable that both he and Bagnaia were primarily testing an older aero configuration on Wednesday – bringing them closer to spec to riders on hand-me-down GP24s like the aforementioned Alex Marquez.
“We have to freeze for two years and we don’t want to take a risk,” Tardozzi told MotoGP.com.
“The 2024 engine gave us good feedback in the past, reliability – my feeling is that it will be the decision.”
Franco Morbidelli, the sole VR46 Ducait representative in this test due to Fabio Di Giannantonio’s injury absence, posted an improvement with less than a minute left on his 2024-spec Desmosedici to make it a Ducati 1-2-3 – although was only just within half a second of the day’s best lap.
While reigning champion Jorge Martin is absent, his pre-season officially a write-off following a contentious crash very early in the Sepang test, Marco Bezzecchi showed a convincing turn of pace in the 2025-spec Aprilia by rounding out the top four, albeit with the gap to the front ballooning courtesy of the elder Marquez’s late push.
Pedro Acosta was the best of the KTMs in fifth, competitive through the day and again further up the order than his KTM peers – albeit Brad Binder did get within a tenth and a half of Acosta before a crash late in the session.
It had been an impressively compact session until Marquez’s late burst, which in the end meant 11 riders still did place within just nine tenths.
Impressively, three of those 11 were Honda riders, the RC213V catching the eye right away on Wednesday – at what should be a considerably more favourable-for-Honda Buriram track layout – through an impressive lap for Luca Marini (sixth-fastest in the end).
On the other hand, Yamaha – led by newcomer Jack Miller – didn’t quite scale the heights of its excellent Sepang test, with usual lead rider Fabio Quartararo lamenting that he “didn’t like any tyres on the front” in the allocation, so “wasn’t riding well”.
Quartararo is thus convinced Yamaha is still “quite in a good position” in terms of pure performance.
Fermin Aldeguer (Gresini Ducati) was the top rookie again, albeit with Ai Ogura (Trackhouse Aprilia) not far behind – and both having crashes during the day. They were not as far forward as at Sepang – where they’d been aided by having three days of shakedown running before the test – but still respectably mid-pack.
Ogura’s team-mate Raul Fernandez had a day of impressive mileage – approaching 70 laps – given he had been in serious doubt for the test after suffering a hand fracture and other injuries at Sepang.
Day one classification
1 Marc Marquez (Ducati) 1m29.184s
2 Alex Marquez (Gresini Ducati) 1m29.649s
3 Franco Morbidelli (VR46 Ducati) 1m29.683s
4 Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia) 1m29.794s
5 Pedro Acosta (KTM) 1m29.904s
6 Luca Marini (Honda) 1m29.928s
7 Johann Zarco (LCR Honda) 1m29.961s
8 Pecco Bagnaia (Ducati) 1m30.028s
9 Brad Binder (KTM) 1m30.041s
10 Jack Miller (Pramac Yamaha) 1m30.047s
11 Joan Mir (Honda) 1m30.067s
12 Alex Rins (Yamaha) 1m30.206s
13 Fabio Quartararo (Yamaha) 1m30.233s
14 Fermin Aldeguer (Gresini Ducati) 1m30.373s
15 Ai Ogura (Trackhouse Aprilia) 1m30.453s
16 Enea Bastianini (Tech3 KTM) 1m30.461s
17 Miguel Oliveira (Pramac Yamaha) 1m30.738s
18 Maverick Vinales (Tech3 KTM) 1m30.827s
19 Raul Fernandez (Trackhouse Aprilia) 1m30.975s
20 Somkiat Chantra (LCR Honda) 1m31.208s
21 Lorenzo Savadori (Aprilia) 1m31.730s
