“The GP24 is clearly better”
Marc Marquez in 2023 he terminated the contract that tied him to Honda a year early to be able to play his cards riding a customer Ducati within the Gresini team in which he joined his brother Alex, bearer of Nadia Padovani's team already last season. The eight-time world champion needed to have a competitive bike again to be able to evaluate how much his physical state affected his results.
2024 started with a double top-5 for Marc Marquez in Qatar, a weekend in which he never crashed (it hadn't happened for a while, his comment). Since the winter tests, the Ducati GP-24 has shown that it has something more than the previous version. The engine has improved, as has corner entry and braking, underlined the two-time world champion Francesco Bagnaia.
The official bike does not always represent an advantage. A year ago, but also at the beginning of 2022, the 'customer' Ducati riders were able to take advantage of a prototype perfectly fine-tuned after 12 months of work by the official riders. Francesco Bagnaia's phrase in Qatar in 2022 “Bastianini just has to put in the petrol” sums up this concept. Jorge Lorenzo underlined precisely this aspect, highlighting that Marquez got on a customer Ducati in the wrong year: “There are years in which there is a big difference between the new bike and the old one, but years in which the new bike practically performs worse than the previous one. Unfortunately for Marquez, this year the new bike is clearly better”the words of the five-time world champion released to El Mundo Deportivo.
Lorenzo does not rule out that Marquez could aspire to the saddle alongside Francesco Bagnaia in the official team of 2025: “If I were in Ducati I would keep Marquez among my ranks for a long time. They have plenty of choice when it comes to which driver to promote to the factory team.”
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