Aprilia Racing CEO Massimo Rivola has outlined the squad’s ambition to beat Ducati’s Marc Marquez in a straight duel before the end of the 2025 MotoGP season.
Factory Aprilia rider Marco Bezzecchi came close to ending Ducati’s dominant streak in the recent San Marino Grand Prix, only missing out by 0.568s after a race-long battle with the factory bike of Marquez.
That near miss followed Bezzecchi’s breakthrough Aprilia win in May’s red-flagged British Grand Prix, where he became the only non-Ducati rider to triumph in dry conditions this year.
However, the Silverstone race came with an asterisk, as Marquez endured a rare off weekend and finished more than six seconds behind in third. It also relied on a breakdown by Fabio Quartararo’s Yamaha, which had been leading comfortably.
Moreover, that race also came before Marquez began his dominant run at Aragon, which has seen him rack up eight grand prix wins and as many sprint victories in just nine weekends.
Rivola hopes Bezzecchi’s performance at Misano will serve as inspiration for the entire Noale factory and help the team achieve his newly set target of beating an in-form Marquez in the final rounds of the season.
“At the moment we are behind the number 93, clearly,” he said after Misano. “But thanks to the attitude of Marco, the mission is to try to beat him before the end of the season.
“Maybe at least just once, but that is something that in Noale we need to realise we can do.
“Marco will have the chance again, and we will have the chance to fight with Marc and also with other riders.
“I saw Pedro [Acosta] coming very fast, and then he had a technical problem, but he was coming very fast. We need to keep pushing, we still are not the best out there, and the target is that one.”
Marco Bezzecchi, Aprilia Racing, Massimo Rivola, Team principal Aprilia Racing
Photo by: Alexander Trienitz
One of the key objectives for Aprilia this season was to produce a bike that was consistent across a wide variety of tracks.
While it won races in each of the last three seasons, it never finished second in the constructors’ championship during that period, losing out to Yamaha in 2022 and then KTM in 2023 and 2024.
Last year, it was the only marque other than Ducati to win a grand prix and yet a lack of consistency left it 25 points down on KTM in the fight for the runner-up spot.
While Aprilia has largely succeeded in delivering a more rounded package, its progress appears to have eroded the advantage it once enjoyed at specific circuits.
For instance, it recorded a rather lacklustre outing in Barcelona, a track where it recorded a 1-2 finish just two years ago in 2023.
“It is a fact that on those tracks where we normally were not competitive, like Austria, Misano, the stop-and-go tracks, we are now competitive there,” he explained.
“But it is also a fact that on the tracks where we used to be very competitive, like Barcelona, we don’t know if we’ve still got that advantage or not.
“So I am curious to go to Indonesia, to Phillip Island, to see the speed on the very fast corners. I think everybody is closer and closer on average on those tracks.
“The downside of that is that since the bike is quite different in mechanical set-up and electronic set-up, on Friday, particularly in FP1, we are not immediately ready to get the best out of the bike.
“So we need a bit more time to get the best performance. Normally, the fastest performance of Aprilia on the weekend is in the race, because we are coming, we improve every day, and that is good for next year obviously. But I am very curious to go to the Asian races.”
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