After a stuttering start to his first campaign with Aprilia, Marco Bezzecchi has now firmly entered the leading tier of riders in MotoGP in 2025 - as was underlined more emphatically than ever by the San Marino Grand Prix.
Bezzecchi had fought Marquez before, and this was ultimately another defeat, but it was a rare case of a weekend where there were no clear built-in obstacles to Marquez dominance - be it a bad track for him like Barcelona or Assen, or some tyre weirdness like Silverstone - yet someone was able to go with him and keep it interesting until the finish.
Alex Marquez's 1m31.576s on the second lap was the best laptime any of the other 21 riders logged in the race. Marc went below that laptime 11 times, but Bezzecchi nearly matched him punch-for-punch, going quicker 10 times.
A race like that, at a track where Aprilia had previously scored just the one podium (with Maverick Vinales in 2022), goes a long way to positioning Bezzecchi and Aprilia as a threat for 2026 - perhaps the only semi-credible threat to Marquez's supremacy before the regulations change.
The 2025 title race, which is obviously over in all but the purely legal sense of the word, has proven one thing - Marquez will not be toppled in-house.
You could have already suspected as much prior to the season, given he'd never been beaten over a full campaign by a rider on the same bike, but 2025 drove the point home. Alex Marquez, in a breakout, career-best season on what is potentially a better bike in the Ducati GP24, is nearly 200 points down. Pecco Bagnaia, Ducati's two-time champion, is approaching a hideous 300-point deficit.
If Marc Marquez stays healthy, they will not beat him over 20+ rounds, unless he suddenly gets absolutely pummeled by the ageing curve.
But a rival bike can beat Marquez, and the Aprilia RS-GP in Bezzecchi's hands has looked like the only machine even remotely making a case.
Laps led in MotoGP 2025 (sprints and GPs)
Marc Marquez - 309
Alex Marquez - 106
Marco Bezzecchi - 81
Fabio Quartararo - 29
Johann Zarco/Pecco Bagnaia - 19
Top scorers since Silverstone
Marc Marquez - 341
Marco Bezzecchi - 191
Alex Marquez - 181
Pedro Acosta - 142
Pecco Bagnaia - 117
Bezzecchi's average race position on Sundays since his British Grand Prix turnaround has been a rather excellent 3.6 - which is champion-level in some series, though obviously nowhere near that in modern MotoGP.
There have been some blips in the meantime, most noticeably a galling outing in the Catalan Grand Prix, previously an Aprilia stronghold, but nowhere has the Bezzecchi/Aprilia combination looked hopelessly outmatched.
"It is a fact that on those tracks where we normally were not competitive - like Austria, Misano, so the stop-and-go tracks - now we are competitive," summed up Aprilia racing boss Massimo Rivola.
"But it is also a fact that on the tracks where we used to be very competitive, like Barcelona, we don't know if we still get that advantage or not. I'm curious to go to Indonesia, to Phillip Island, to see the speed on very fast corners. I think everyone is closer, closer and closer on average at those tracks.
"The downside of that is, since the bike is quite different to before in mechanical set-up, electronical set-up, on Friday, particularly FP1, we are not immediately ready to get the best out of the bike. So we need a bit more time to get the best performance.
"Normally the fastest performance of the Aprilia in the weekend is in the race. And that's good for next year, obviously, but I'm very curious to go to the Asian races."
A peaky bike cannot beat Marquez, especially this version of Marquez. Ducati learned that lesson across 2016-2017-2018, particularly in that first year, where Andrea Dovizioso's spirited challenge crashed and burned via a 13th-place finish at Phillip Island - the result of an error but also a race in which a huge, championship-ruining points loss relative to Marquez was inevitable.
The 2025 Aprilia isn't coming to any weekend expecting to get blown out, which is huge.
Of course, given there is a near 300-point gap between Bezzecchi and Marquez, like any of his prospective title rivals Bezzecchi and Aprilia - or perhaps Jorge Martin and Aprilia, assuming he can draw level with his team-mate for the start of next year - need to make a gigantic step forward.
It still feels almost impossible. It's just marginally less impossible than for any of the other combinations hoping to defeat Marquez regularly any time soon.
