After 11 years, Marc Marquez is leaving Honda HRC to join the Gresini team. The announcement comes in a terse press release, with no signatures and no photos, from the house of the Golden Wing itself. The same one to which the Spaniard has delivered six MotoGP world titles since 2013. Good luck to everyone and all the best.

The length of the dance, the endless rumors in the paddock, the back and forth of bar-room gossip take some of the shine off what is, in fact, the biggest thing to happen in MotoGP since Marquez himself arrived in the class more than a decade ago. In short, the news is huge, but it has been out in the open for so long that it feels a bit like the mountain giving birth to a mouse. Today, at the dawn of a divorce that looks consensual, everyone is already here saying “we told you so”, as if anyone had ever bothered to look for the owner of an open secret. All very nice, but we knew.

The subtext, which few are discussing today because it has already been discussed for the past two months, is that MotoGP as we knew it is changing its face and its colors. First, because Marquez is still Marquez, and when he is fit he is competitive even on a tricycle, let alone on a Ducati. Second, because a great many balances shift, for fans, operators, sponsors and manufacturers.

We loved each other so much

Marquez did not like the new Honda that HRC brought to the Misano test. It was the last chance the Japanese manufacturer had to keep one of the most extraordinary talents in motorcycle racing history, and it blew it. “It’s not you, it’s me”, and all the other things people say when they break up and know the truth is a little too heavy to pull out right at the end. That is the official story.

In reality, reports say the new project is not that terrible after all. Rejected by Marquez and Nakagami, of course, but judged far more kindly by Mir and Bradl, the other sides of the moon. Alex Rins’s opinion would have been useful, if the Catalan talent riding for LCR (not for much longer, because when Athens weeps, Sparta is hardly laughing) had not been beaten like a drum mid-season, at Mugello, by the RC213V itself. Another goodbye and thank you.

The technical project has, in fact, been the elephant in the room for several years. The bike that doesn’t bike, the development that doesn’t develop, the progress that doesn’t progress. Many point the finger towards Minato, forgetting a fundamental fact about Japanese organization: the Japanese are extraordinary bureaucrats. The endless layers of management at the very heart of Japanese industry mean that every decision is not only slow, but often heavily modified on its way from the bottom to the top and then from the top back to the bottom. It is an organization impossible to compare with that of nimbler manufacturers like KTM, Aprilia and Ducati, where a decision takes three flights of stairs and probably an afternoon.

What is happening to Honda is the same thing that is happening to Yamaha, and it is no different from what happened to Suzuki a year ago, when the Hamamatsu company pulled the plug on its MotoGP project just as it was winning in Valencia with Rins. Equally, we should not forget that the Japanese, for all their complex management structure, always get there in the end. And when they get there, they do so with the might of a company that sells more than eighteen million motorcycles a year. The same company that was mocked when it returned to Formula 1 in the middle of the last decade and is now the unbeatable power unit behind a record-devouring Red Bull.

Now, it is clear that Honda suffered terribly from Marc’s absence during the twenty-odd months of his physical ordeal. After all, it is unthinkable that things would keep working if the person they were designed for is no longer on the handlebars. In essence, and to stop beating around the bush, it was no surprise to see that nobody, from Mir to Espargaró to Rins to Nakagami, managed to come to terms in recent years with a bike that had been designed for Marquez. A bike that fit him like a glove, and that has always been unrideable for everyone else.

On the right track

Once the initial shock wears off, Marc’s departure is good news for Honda’s technical department, which can now go back to the drawing board without the pressure of having to design a machine that pleases its multiple world champion, and for all the other manufacturers too. Honda starts again from scratch, and that is not necessarily bad news: with no ambitions and no expectations, the Racing Corporation can go back to doing what it does best, which is designing great motorcycles in silence.

Ducati can finally complete the puzzle, putting the Desmosedici through its ultimate stress test and gaining someone who is probably already able to fight for the world title right away. The rumors, of which there are now two, say that Borgo Panigale is already preparing a factory-spec Desmo for Marquez, like those of Bagnaia, Bastianini and the Pramac team. That is probably exactly why Ducati said yes to Marquez but no to his entourage, which stays in its Repsol shirts or goes looking for work. The mistrust probably comes from the fact that Marquez has signed for just one year with the Gresini team while the forecast says KTM in 2025, which is why Bologna would like the people working alongside number 93 to be from Bologna, and not the Spaniards who would then take away both the goat (the rider) and the cabbage (the technical details) the following year.

On the KTM side, and above all the Red Bull side, the separation papers signed by the Cabroncito and Alberto Puig smell good. If there was no room for the rider from Cervera this year, because KTM has more riders than motorcycles, the future is full of possibilities. KTM is waiting for Acosta, the next big thing, after 2025, and would certainly not mind a lineup that also includes Marquez, probably alongside Binder. Red Bull is ready, it seems, to chip in to close the circle and complete, within its great international design, an incredible multi-sport dream team that would once again prove its extraordinary media, sporting and economic power.

The others are watching, well aware that such a shift in weight can open up big opportunities, both in terms of on-track performance and contract possibilities.

Guess who’s coming to dinner

In terms of spectacle, audience and viewership, Marquez’s move from Honda to Gresini can only be an extraordinary wild card in Dorna’s deck. Like him or not, Marquez is an exceptionally talented and combative rider, as well as a major media personality. Putting him on what is currently the best bike in the field could be any fan’s dream.

It remains to be seen whether he will be fast right away and whether the Italians will be patient: the earlier cases of Rossi and Lorenzo (who did start winning towards the end) are not a good litmus test, especially considering the different technical levels of the bikes and the ferocity of the competition. If we had to make a comparison, it is a bit as if Hamilton went to Red Bull, Mbappé ended up at Manchester City or Stephen Curry pulled on a Denver Nuggets jersey. In short, pick whichever sport you prefer, but in terms of the market it is hard to find anything more interesting.

Precisely for this reason, and to end on a note more suited to these pages, this “great resignation” of Cervera origin is excellent news for sponsors, partners and broadcasters, who will be able to take advantage of the surge in global interest and a reshuffled pecking order. Marc is an indispensable asset of this championship, which, if we had to split hairs, is not short of phenomenal riders but of personalities. The new Gresini rider is the most marketable on the whole grid and the most sought after by companies interested in two wheels. Having him uncompetitive and unmotivated at the back of the grid is good for nobody, neither for the companies that sponsor him nor for the others, because the most important thing for any partner is a healthy, competitive championship with the highest values on track.

In short, this is the beginning of a new, small era for MotoGP: a brief thaw of one or two years in which the balance of power is bound to change, but in which the end result will probably be better than what we leave behind.

Three years later: how it actually turned out

What you have read so far I wrote on October 4, 2023, the day of the announcement. Rereading it today is a small exercise in humility, and also a fair amount of satisfaction.

First, the things that went differently. The divorce from Honda came a year before the end of the contract, and the move to Gresini was made official a week later, on October 12. The factory-spec Desmo the rumors talked about never arrived: in 2024 Marquez raced a year-old Ducati, the GP23. And the forecast that said KTM was wrong: in 2025 number 93 went straight into the factory Ducati team, alongside Bagnaia, while Pedro Acosta arrived in Mattighofen.

Then the things that went as predicted, and even better. On a year-old bike Marquez won three races in 2024, Aragón, Misano and Phillip Island, and finished the championship in third place. In 2025, on the factory Ducati, he won eleven Grands Prix and fourteen Sprints, and on September 28 at Motegi he took his seventh premier-class title, the ninth of his career, 2,184 days after his sixth: the same number of top-class titles as Valentino Rossi, one fewer than Giacomo Agostini. A week later, at Mandalika, a first-lap crash with Bezzecchi cost him a shoulder fracture and the last four races of the season, but the title was already in the bag. In June 2026 Ducati extended his contract through 2028.

And Honda? It did exactly what the Japanese do: it got there, slowly. In 2025 Johann Zarco won at home at Le Mans on the LCR team’s Honda, and from 2027 Red Bull will once again be one of the main partners of the factory Honda team, as we explain in our article on Red Bull and Honda. Meanwhile Dorna is no longer called Dorna: since 2026 it has been MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group, controlled by Liberty Media.

The part that matters most for these pages, though, is the one I had put at the end: a competitive, motivated champion is good for everyone, not just his sponsors. We have seen it on track and we can see it in the commercial portfolios of the factory teams, which we analyze in our deep dive on the 2026 MotoGP factory teams. For anyone weighing an entry into the championship, opportunities and costs are gathered on our MotoGP sponsorship page.