Alex Marquez: "My brother Marc and I have a pact

Alex Marquez approaches the Valencia GP with emotion, having mathematically secured 2nd place in the MotoGP riders’ standings. It will be his final weekend on a non-factory Ducati; from Tuesday’s test he will climb onto the first factory prototype.

Having achieved the goal of finishing runner-up in the world championship, the Gresini rider can also enjoy this weekend without too much stress. It will be important to close this Grand Prix in the best way to arrive in great psychological shape for Tuesday’s MotoGP test. That will be when he turns the page in his professional life, with new components to test, providing feedback to the Borgo Panigale engineers in order to push forward the GP26’s development over the winter break.

His brother Marc Marquez will not be on track, but his presence in the box is likely. “Our job isn’t to say whether something is better or worse, because we don’t produce the components, but to test everything they tell us to at the limit so they can see if it works or not and gather better data. That’s my job,” Alex Marquez explained at the press conference. “I’ll try to do my best and be as professional as always, but it’s true that tests, when you have things to try, are more interesting.”

It will be his first outing as a factory rider, a chance to make the most of, especially in the first part of next MotoGP season. In a conversation with his brother Marc, he stated that on track they will be rivals even if they remain brothers. “We arrived in Argentina after Thailand, where he had to let me pass because he was having issues with the front,” the Gresini rider recalls.

“He told me: ‘Don’t you feel a weird sensation when you have to overtake me?’ I told him that sometimes, yes, it makes me a little nervous. And he said that couldn’t happen to us and that we needed to make a pact. Mistakes can happen in MotoGP, and we said that if we crashed into each other, one of us would tell the other that he was wrong and that’s it, we would remain brothers.”