How Marc Marquez conquered his Dutch GP rivals despite a slower bike

To say that the package of Marc Marquez aboard the factory Ducati has been dominant in MotoGP 2025 is to wallow in understatement. Ten rounds into the year, the sight of him winning is all too familiar. Yet no two grand prix wins have been the same.

The six-time premier class world champion has shown off a broad range of skills as he has racked up the victories. Each time he has found a new way to win; it has been psychologically crushing for his rivals. Such victories send them back to their ‘possible chinks in Marc’s armour’ lists and force them to strike through another item.

The 10th grand prix of the season once again saw him bring a new party trick. And it’s likely to serve as the most dispiriting one yet for his competition. Assen was where Marc showed he could win races without even being the fastest rider. If that doesn’t have the opposition wondering why they even bother, nothing will.

It would have been easier to stomach had it been a classic case of leading into the first corner and then simply bottling up the field. But the alarming reality is that Marc came from the second row of the grid, had to first pass Alex Marquez and Francesco Bagnaia to reach the front, and only then launched his display of defensive riding. Utterly maddening.

Given that Marc has at times kept speed up his sleeve and made things look closer than they are this year, it’s worth exploring the facts of his Dutch Grand Prix weekend. Just to make sure that he wasn’t a rocketship disguised as a tugboat once again.

Marc appeared to be the first man to find his footing around the tricky Dutch track, topping first practice on Friday morning. That’s entirely normal – he’s always fast out of the box. But it was the one and only time he led the way in a session that wasn’t a race – and hindsight reveals that his speed may have hit a plateau right there. In fact, Marc’s fastest race lap on Sunday was actually slower than his time from FP1.

What won’t have helped – and showed how hard he was pushing – were the two heavy crashes on Friday, one in each session. Marc was clear that it didn’t affect his performance, however, saying “adrenaline is the best pain-killer”. Still, valuable track time was lost to the accidents.

A certain respect for the limits was doubtless taken on board too. Assen’s potential to derail a championship run is well known – just ask Mick Doohan – and Marc openly declared that his body could not handle another big crash on the same weekend.

The hard numbers of Marc’s pace on Friday and Saturday must have been delicious reading for Alex or the long-suffering, much-maligned Bagnaia. He was sixth in second practice, fully three tenths off Fabio Quartararo. And it’s not like he was leaving much out there: the ‘ideal lap’ made by summing up his best sectors actually would have put him one spot lower!

When Marc Marquez said he wasn’t the fastest, you had to believe him on this occasion. There’s an understandable and ever-growing level of cynicism in the room when he talks about being on the back foot these days, but at Assen the evidence was there in the numbers

Nor was anything left on the table in Q2 on Saturday. His ideal lap was fourth-best, and fourth is exactly where he qualified. As on Friday, he was reasonably good in three of the four sectors but evidently struggling in sector three, which is home to a host of those right-hand corners he prefers to avoid: Stekkenwal, Mandeveen, Duikersloot. 

For perspective, this was only the second time in 2025 that he had failed to make the front row. The other occasion was Silverstone, which turned out to be the one weekend on which he won neither sprint nor grand prix. It’s fair to say the indicators did not suggest Marc securing maximum points. 

With the sprint essentially providing the template for his Dutch Grand Prix win, let’s skip to Sunday and examine the numbers once more. Was Marc somehow getting an edge in a straight line? Not a very important metric at Assen but let’s cover it because it only takes a second to dismiss that theory. The average of his fastest five trips through the speed trap in the race was not even enough to crack the top 10.

Marc won at Assen despite his rivals having more pace on paper

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

And so to those lap times in the race, which he led from the end of lap five. Marc may have been the one to up the pace with a flier on lap 13 (later cancelled for track limits reasons), but it was third-placed Bagnaia who ended the race with the fastest lap. Following Marc’s last (legal) fastest lap on lap four, the bar was lowered nine times by other riders. Once the race settled, it was Marco Bezzecchi, Bagnaia and the charging Fabio di Giannantonio (VR46 Ducati) trading fastest times – not the man in clear air out front.

So, when Marc Marquez said he wasn’t the fastest, you had to believe him on this occasion. There’s an understandable and ever-growing level of cynicism in the room when he talks about being on the back foot these days, but at Assen the evidence was there in the numbers. Even the restrained and analytical Bagnaia claimed “I had the strongest pace throughout the weekend”.    

So how did Marc still manage to saunter out of the TT Circuit with pockets stuffed so full of points that you might mistake their contents for a supersize wheel of Gouda?

He was fast in the right parts of the track and braked like a demon, that’s how.

Dig deep enough into the sector times from the grand prix and you find that while Marc may not have been able to string a lap time together, he had pace where it was required to take and defend a lead around the curious, two-faced modern incarnation of Assen. 

Among the frontrunners, Marc was fastest in the fiddly first sector. It may be an eyesore ranking amongst the most heinous crimes of track design when compared to the rhythmic thing of beauty that went before, but it is nonetheless important for gaining positions on the first lap. Which Marc quite convincingly did in both sprint and grand prix.

Marc Marquez also won the Saturday race at Assen, meaning Silverstone is the only sprint he hasn’t won in 2025

Photo by: Dorna

More telling, though, was the fact that he also set the quickest time of the frontrunners in sector four. This is the site, of course, of Assen’s only serious overtaking spot for modern MotoGP bikes: the Geert Timmer chicane. It didn’t matter that he was still battling through the sector that preceded it: you couldn’t get near him through the kinks of Hoge Heide and the juicy left-hander Ramshoek, which leads up to the chicane. It was Ramshoek, incidentally, that had bitten him on Friday morning: hats off for putting that out of mind.

That Marc had focused so successfully on the spots that mattered was in graphic view when it came to Bezzecchi’s Sunday challenge. The Aprilia man had been passing riders for fun at the chicane all weekend and had little trouble slicing past Marc’s team-mate Bagnaia to grab second there on lap eight. But then, suddenly, Bezzecchi hit a wall. What had been so easy with everyone else became impossible with Marc Marquez. 

As for the braking, this is an omnipresent Marquez superpower, and one Marc says his base set-up is designed to exploit everywhere. But it was a particularly important factor in his situation at this circuit. And not just in defensive terms: it also helped get him to the front.

This is Marc Marquez in 2025. So even if they flipped Assen around and asked the riders to tackle the circuit backwards, you feel he’d probably find some other way to get the same result

“How the f*** did you manage to stop the bike like that at Turn 1?” asked Bagnaia as the top three watched a replay of Marc seizing second from his brother early in the race at Haarbocht, a spot where few managed passes. Bagnaia would be Marquez’s next victim on the brakes, of course – and he’s still looking for answers to exactly those kinds of questions.

Cunning and calculated though both of his wins at Assen were, was there a small element of luck that the chicane was preceded by a couple of fast left-handers, patently Marc’s strength? Would he have been able to hold out if you reshuffled a few of Assen’s corners?

The obvious answer is no. But this is Marc Marquez in 2025. So even if they flipped Assen around and asked the riders to tackle the circuit backwards, you feel he’d probably find some other way to get the same result.   

Marc Marquez is romping towards a seventh MotoGP world title

Photo by: Vincent Jannink / ANP / AFP via Getty Images