MotoGP 2025 hasn’t taken its final lap yet; the longest campaign in world championship history ends in Valencia this weekend, the 22nd round of this season.

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The moments that defined 2025? They’re in the books, done, had their podium ceremonies and are living large in an Ibiza nightclub, much like plenty of the sport’s riders will be sometime soon.

Part of the reason why the storylines that shaped the season showed themselves earlier than usual was because how the championship was run and won, Marc Marquez securing it with five rounds to go in Japan to earn a seventh MotoGP crown six years after he won his sixth, and after going to hell and back physically and mentally in that hiatus from the champion’s throne.

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Surprise contenders emerged, three riders (Alex Marquez, Fermin Aldeguer and Raul Fernandez) won their first premier-class Grands Prix – although one most observers thought would in Pedro Acosta hasn’t, at least yet – and several big names didn’t fire many shots, or any shots at all for reasons partially out of their control.

The moments that had the biggest impact on the shape of MotoGP in 2025? Chronologically, for sake of clarity and what they led to, these.

Thriller Sprint goes down to the wire! | 01:24

JUNE (2024): MARQUEZ SIGNS WITH DUCATI’S FACTORY TEAM

Note we said the moments that had the biggest impact on the shape of 2025, not those that happened this calendar year … yes, that’s some creative license, but in this instance and for this rider, it’s entirely appropriate.

Marc Marquez was only six rounds into his first season at the satellite Gresini Ducati team at the Italian Grand Prix in June 2024 when he reminded everyone of his power off track as well as on it, publicly rejecting a plan for Ducati to insert him at the factory-aligned Pramac team and forcing his way into Ducati’s factory squad in place of the rider earmarked for – even told, according to the Italian press – he was going to be Francesco Bagnaia’s teammate for 2025, Jorge Martin.

PIT TALK PODCAST: Renita and Matt are joined by MotoGP writer and broadcaster Neil Morrison to review the Portuguese Grand Prix, and debate the five moments that defined the season ahead of the final round of 2025 this weekend in Valencia. Listen to Pit Talk below.

The fallout was immense for a 2025 season still 13 rounds and nine months away. Martin rage-quit Ducati for Aprilia, while Pramac – for whom Martin would later win the 2024 championship – ended a near two-decade association with Ducati to sign with Yamaha.

Other race-winners – Enea Bastianini (Ducati to KTM), Marco Bezzecchi (Ducati to Aprilia), Jack Miller (KTM to Yamaha), Maverick Vinales (Aprilia to KTM) – all scattered to new teams and manufacturers in the aftermath. It was madness, seismic, and completely changed the shape of 2025 before less than half of 2024 was over.

Consider the fortunes of the riders who switched sides in the context of what they achieved this season, and you can see why Marquez’s decision 17 months ago had the wider ripple effect that it did.

For Ducati – likely terrified of losing a rider of Marquez’s talent to another manufacturer and prepared to live with the short-term fallout – the end has justified the means, uncomfortable as that journey has undoubtedly been at times.

Season 2025 doesn’t happen without Marquez reminding everyone who the boss was, even if he was five years removed from his most recent title when he did …

Marquez and Martin – both in different teams in 2024 – shaped a lot of the way 2025 played out, with different levels of success. (Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)Source: AFP

FEBRUARY: THE START OF MARTIN’S YEAR FROM HELL

Jorge Martin arrived at pre-season testing in Malaysia in February with a wide grin, the number 1 plate from his world title with Ducati slapped on a brand-new Aprilia RS-GP chassis, and a significantly heavier wallet from having become a full-factory rider for the first time.

From there? Martin’s 2025 went from one crisis to another, some of them of his own doing, and all of them painful.

Even the abridged version reads like a career’s worth of calamities.

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Martin broke his left and right foot in a Sepang testing crash, then busted his left radius and scaphoid in a training accident at home in Andorra as he tried to race the clock to be ready for round one in Thailand. He returned for round four in Qatar, crashed in the Grand Prix and was hit by Ducati’s Fabio Di Giannantonio and was left holed up in a Doha hospital with 11 fractured ribs and a collapsed lung, missed the next seven rounds, raced while physically underdone for the next five rounds, then broke his right collarbone in Japan in September after crashing into Aprilia teammate Marco Bezzecchi at the start of the sprint race.

Of a possible 42 race starts (sprints and Grands Prix) heading into Valencia this weekend, Martin has been on the grid for 13 of them.

Between injuries and recoveries, Martin tried to use a clause in his contract with Aprilia to get out a year early to be elsewhere – likely Honda – in 2026, only to back out after an ugly, public spat came to a head when his management realised court proceedings could be financially costly and protracted.

He’ll be a free agent again for 2027, but will race for an Aprilia team that enters next year off its most successful season in the premier-class – Aprilia riders have won three Grands Prix in 2025 – and for whom Marco Bezzecchi is almost certain to take third place in the riders’ standings, and has filled the void as team leader in Martin’s absence.

Where the Martin/Aprilia story advances will be one of the key narratives of 2026, but only because of one pre-season crash in February 2025 and the maelstrom of misery it unlocked.

Of all the riders keen to see the back of 2025, Martin might be top of the list. (Photo by MOHD RASFAN / AFP)Source: AFP

MAY: ZARCO’S STUNNING HOME VICTORY

With Marc Marquez winning 25 times in the year’s first 35 races across sprints and Grands Prix, suspense wasn’t in regular supply throughout 2025. But in France in May, the heavens opened and dumped a year’s worth of drama in 26 laps, and produced the season’s most unlikely and heartfelt moment.

French rider Johann Zarco had enjoyed one premier-class victory – in Australia in 2023 – in 149 starts before his home Grand Prix, but in a wild, weather-hit race at Le Mans, the sport’s oldest rider kept his head while seemingly everyone else was losing theirs, taking victory in front of an almost disbelieving 120,000-strong crowd to become the first French rider to win their home Grand Prix in 71 years.

The 35-year-old started the race on wet-weather tyres on a track that was soaked but expected to dry; as his rivals pitted and switched from slicks to wets and back, Zarco stayed the course, stayed on – which potential race-winners Fabio Quartararo and Jack Miller didn’t do – and won by 19 seconds. The delirious crowd scenes afterwards – Zarco reprised his Moto2 victory celebratory backflip off a trackside wall in front of the main Le Mans grandstand while his mother Francoise, at the first race she’d ever attended to watch her son ride, visibly shook with emotion as the crowd chanted Zarco’s name – were images that anyone who watched MotoGP in 2025 will never forget.

Zarco, being the mercurial rider he is, took just one more podium finish the rest of the season, dropped outside the top 10 in the standings, and – because he’s Zarco – signed a two-year deal with Honda to guarantee his place on the grid for 2027, one of only four riders in the field next year to have a contract that doesn’t run out at the end of it.

The 2027 rider market – which Zarco won’t be a part of – will be a dominant storyline of next season; his win from (or perhaps because of) the clouds at Le Mans will be one of the first that comes to mind when anyone looks back at 2025 in years to come.

Zarco’s home Grand Prix win was a stunning upset absolutely nobody saw coming. (Photo by Loic VENANCE / AFP)Source: AFP

SEPTEMBER: MILLER DEFIES THE ODDS TO RACE ON

Taking a wider, global, lens, Jack Miller extending his career into a 12th MotoGP season in 2026 might not make a list of defining moments outside of Australia … and perhaps Portugal.

But given Australia has had at least one rider on the grid every year since MotoGP superseded the 500cc class in 2002, it’s a big deal. And one that, for quite some time, looked very unlikely.

Miller, 30, came to Yamaha on a one-year contract after his time at KTM only occasionally hit the high notes in 2023-24; given KTM had fast-rising Spanish star Pedro Acosta on the books in its Tech3 team as a rookie in ’24, it made sense that Miller was ejected for one of the sport’s brightest rising talents.

Pramac’s aforementioned move to Yamaha – Miller rode a Ducati for Pramac from 2018-20 – and his renowned developmental skills saw Pramac sign him as the final rider to complete the 2025 grid, but only on a one-year make-good deal as fellow Yamaha riders Quartararo, Alex Rins and Miguel Oliveira all had multi-year contracts.

Miller began brightly enough – he was a strong fifth for Pramac in just his third Grand Prix start in Texas – but an incident the round earlier in Argentina that saw Oliveira left with left shoulder ligament damage after a crash caused by Ducati rookie Fermin Aldeguer cracked open the door for Miller to extend his career.

With Oliveira out and with a clause in his contract that gave Yamaha the option on his services if he was the fourth-placed of the four Yamaha riders in the standings, Miller emerged as the Japanese manufacturer’s second-best rider behind – a long way behind, but still – Quartararo. Once Yamaha signed World Superbikes champion Toprak Razgatliolglu for a long-awaited MotoGP switch for 2026, Oliveira’s cards were marked, and Miller was retained for next year at the Portuguese rider’s expense ahead of the Catalan Grand Prix in September.

Miller’s 2025 has regressed to the level of the YZR-M1 – the once-mighty Yamaha sits comfortably last in MotoGP’s constructors’ championship – and his first year at his fourth MotoGP manufacturer will go down as one of his lowest-scoring across most metrics since he debuted in the class in 2015.

But that’s not the point for Yamaha, which is bringing in a new V4-engined bike for next year ahead of MotoGP’s 850cc regulation revolution for 2027, and needs all the experienced operators it can lay its hands on to propel the project forwards.

It’s a skill set that few riders have more than Miller, and it’s why his retention for next year was such an important moment for local fans, especially with the Australian Grand Prix’s contract with MotoGP running out next season.

Miller sealed his – and Oliveira’s – fate when he re-signed with Yamaha for 2026 in Catalunya. (Yamaha Motor Racing Srl)Source: Supplied

SEPTEMBER: MARQUEZ HITS, MARQUEZ MISSES

After Marc Marquez began life at Ducati’s factory team with back-to-back sprint and Grand Prix doubles in Thailand and Argentina – and then went on to win 14 of the year’s first 15 sprints and rattle off seven unbeaten rounds from Aragon to Hungary – there was little doubt as to where this year’s world title was headed, and Marquez wrapped things up in Japan in September with second on a rare weekend where Ducati teammate Francesco Bagnaia had his – and everyone else’s – measure.

Of his seven premier-class titles, Marquez’s season statistically stacks up with 2019 and 2014 as his most dominant; reprising those glory days he must have wondered might’ve been over after his injury-hit spell between 2020-22 in his early 30s was a reminder that his ambition and talent haven’t dimmed since he came into MotoGP as a 20-year-old whirlwind, even if his victories these days come with him riding as smart as he does hard.

Six years after his most recent MotoGP crown, Marquez got his hands on the trophy he craved once again in Japan. (Photo by Toshifumi KITAMURA / AFP)Source: AFP

With years of anguish extinguished with that Motegi denouement, Marquez arrived at the next round in Indonesia one week later understandably flat and seemingly distracted, qualifying a season-worst ninth and finishing the sprint in a muted seventh.

It was the last race he completed this year; clattered by Bezzecchi on lap one of the Grand Prix at Mandalika the next day, Marquez fractured his right shoulder and flew back to Europe, initially eschewing surgery before going under the knife and missing the final four rounds of the year in a bid to be ready for the 2026 pre-season.

Marquez knows all too well the potential perils of coming back too soon; in 2020, when he injured his right arm in the first race of the new season at Jerez and immediately rushed back as he chased a fifth straight world title, the subsequent injury setbacks and surgeries robbed him of four years of his prime.

With the redemptive title he craved now finally in his grasp, he wasn’t about to make the same mistake; that Marquez won his seventh MotoGP crown in 2025 will be the headline act of any season review, but what he chose to do afterwards might shape what happens next, too.