With the longest chore of a MotoGP season now well and truly over let’s sit back and review the standout performances in our ‘Good, Bad and Ugly” awards of 2025
The Good
Marco Bezzechhi
When Jorge Martin rage quit Ducati at the end of 2024 Aprilia were ready to pounce. They gathered up all their cash they’d acquired from scooter sales and, more significantly, selling shares back and forth between their 48 sister companies. With all this greasy cash the Italian firm made an offer to Jorge Martin that he couldn’t refuse…well not until six months later.
Despite the expensive purchase of the then world champion Aprilia still had a bit of cash left over. With that cash they all went out for a classic Italian meal that involved a carbohydrate food source covered in a tomato sauce and cheese…along with a bucket or two of cheap red wine. After the meal they still had some cash left over…so what did they do?
With the remaining coins Aprilia decided to buy Jorge a teammate as a stop-gap solution. That stop-gap rider was Marco Bezzechhi. The theory was that Jorge would dominate the championship on their bike and Marco would probably be a bit turd. Then, seeing Martin’s results, in 2026 they could ditch their number two number two as all the top riders would be queuing up to join for free…
But that’s not how it went. At all. Instead Jorge was terrible (don’t worry, we’ll get to him) whereas Bezzechhi was incredible.
Aprilia had their best season thanks entirely to Marco’s performances.
Marc Marquez
Interestingly Marc’s season can be broken up, in order, to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly…
The Good
For the first three quarters of the season the Spanish Antichrist was sublime. He was everything Ducati hoped he’d be and everything Italy feared he would be. His outright dominance on the track left his poor teammate a broken, quivering mess whilst bitter yellow fans screamed fraudulence then cried into their mother’s unwashed bosom.
By the two-thirds mark Marc had marked his claim on the title.
The Bad
Then at Indonesia (which isn’t a real place) Marquez was rammed off into the gravel by a determined Marco Bezzechhi who had been watching Morbidelli’s races on repeat the night before. The crash looked bad…
The Ugly
It was bad….and the results were ugly. As usual Marc’s shoulder had fallen off leaving the Spaniard unable to ride again for the rest of the season.
Despite this the Good outweighed the rest and Marquez, deservedly, was our 2025 world champion.
Pedro Acosta
Acosta’s amazing performances in 2025 seemed to negatively correlate with the utter shitness of his haircut.
And speaking of shit his KTM MotoGP nail was anything but a race winner thanks to a year of financial turmoil as the Austrians realised they actually had to pay bills. Because of this all development was toned down to roughly zero percent with KTM adopting a blasé “race what you bring” attitude.
But despite being on a KTM and not being on a Ducati the flying stoat was able to finish fourth in the championship with five podium finishes – ahead of the disgraced ex-champion Pecco Bagnaia.
The Spaniard’s strong season have given rise to many rumours that Pedro may be weaselling his way over to Ducati for the 2027 season to create a “super team” with Marc Marquez…and of course not with Bagnaia.
The Bad
Pecco Bagnaia
Back in 2024 when Ducati signed Marc Marquez Bagnaia probably visualised ‘the worst-case scenario’ of having the Spanish antichrist as his teammate. If Pecco did then it would not have even come close to the epic disaster that was his 2025 season.
It started ‘okay’. Sure the Italian was being absolutely spanked by both Marquez brothers…but third places were okay? Right? If only.
Whilst trying to fix the problem that he didn’t have a massive mechanical advantage over the field and a teammate that wasn’t average Baggers went down a deeper and deeper brown hole of misery. By mid-season the bearded Ducati rider couldn’t even get finish the points. Even Bradly Smith was trolling him on Facebook.
Pecco tried desperately to find excuses. Fuel tank sizes, tyre specifications, yeast infections…but the real excuse was staring him in the sullen face and he knew it. He wasn’t as good as the Ducati had been making him look for the past five seasons.
Somkiat Chantra
Poor Chantra never stood a chance in MotoGP as he was held back by the fact he wasn’t very good. If the theory that ‘nice guys finish last’ is to be believed then Somkiat must be the loveliest man in the known universe.
Why Honda ever chose a rider that they knew would be worse than half-ply toilet paper is anyone’s guess. One can only assume it was because he looked ‘kinda Japanese’ to us uneducated Westerners.
Despite having a two-year MotoGP contract Honda, Chantra and everyone involved in anything decided that one year was quite enough with HRC sending the Thai rider off to WSBK where we’ll never hear of him again unless he gets injured.
Brad Binder
A couple of seasons back any bright-eyed MotoGP fan couldn’t safely navigate the world wide web without being yelled at by Sarth Afikans (who had presumably taken time off from shooting white rhinos and flamethrowing carjackers) about the brilliance of Brad Binder. According to them Brad was the bestestestest rider ever and would be a multi-world champion if he was on a Ducati.
And as much as we all hate South Africans they did have a point. Back then Brad was leading the KTM charge and winning the occasional rain-affected race. But then the super stoat Pedro Acosta turned up and it all went Oscar Pistorius.
This season Acosta was promoted to the factory KTM team as Binder’s teammate and went on to absolutely destroy poor Brad. The young mustelid outqualified Binder in every race and racked up almost double the points of his once-rated teammate on his way to finishing fourth in the championship.
Meanwhile Brad was generally a midfield nobody who occasionally made a good start then faded away backwards.
The good news though is that the internet is now a lot less annoying at the expense of a few white rhinos.
The Ugly
Jorge Martin
When it comes to ugly seasons Jorge’s looked like Kurtis Roberts after an angioedema attack.
It all started pre-season when the then world champion, debuting on the factory Aprilia, fell off in testing after just 37 seconds. He then fell off again and was posted off to hospital where he would spend most of 2025.
We at MGPNews have kind of conveniently forgot all of Mr Glass’s mishaps but they broadly followed the following formula:
- Spend ages recovering from being injured
- Say you’re coming back then don’t
- Spend more time being injured.
- Finally come back, then fall off whilst being underwhelming and get injured
- Repeat
That formula would have been a sorry enough tale for any current champion…but it ended up a lot uglier. Kurtis Roberts after an angioedema attack whilst getting his head stuck in a thrashing machine kind of ugly.
How? Well Martin, whilst sat in a posh hospital bed paid for by Aprilia, decided he wanted to leave Aprilia…coincidentally as Honda waved a huge chequebook under his grubby hooter. The Spaniard tried to invoke a performance clause in his contract that stated if he wasn’t a title contender then he could leave. Aprilia were not happy and threatened to sue him. Then the president of Dorna got involved claiming he’d booted Jorge out of the series should he attempt to move.
In the end Jorge had to concede the fight and stay with Aprilia stating that he’d never wanted to leave anyway…honest.
It all ended up looking very ugly. [Insert your own Kurtis Roberts gag here]
Johann Zarco
The beret bashing accountant Johann Zarco finished the 2025 season as the top Honda rider whilst claiming the best win of the season at his local race at Le Moans. So how did the unwashed LCR rider end up on the ugly list?
Crashes. And lots of them. More than any other rider – including Joan Mir.
Last year Zarco won the MGPNews rider of the year award in part because he never crashed yet in 2025 he could stay upright.
Was it the bike? Was it the red wine? Was it the inbuild French DNA desire to quit? We don’t know and neither did Johann. But it all ended up more bizarre and unpleasant to watch than a French art film.
Franco Morbidelli
The 2025 season was an absolutely brainless shocker for Franky – even by his own incredibly lofty standards of stupidity.
There wasn’t a single weekend where the blockheaded Italian Brazilian hybrid didn’t stupidly obstruct someone, ram someone or commit a random act of idiocy that saw himself (and usually others) barrelling through the gravel traps.
Morbidelli was just awful.
Franco finished off his stella-clown season by crashing into a stationary rider on the way to the grid, falling off at 0mph and breaking his finger. A total joke that none of the other riders found funny.
