MotoGP world championship leader Marc Marquez says he is keen to do whatever he can to help Pecco Bagnaia out of the "hole" he currently finds himself in.
Ahead of Bagnaia's home race this weekend at Misano, Marquez - who is 182 points clear in the championship, and 250 ahead of his third-placed Ducati team-mate - said he was taking no enjoyment from Bagnaia's current "suffering" on Ducati’s GP25.
The topic arose ahead of the San Marino Grand Prix after a Ducati video from last weekend’s race at Barcelona showed the six-time MotoGP champion offering advice to Bagnaia, himself a double champion, about dealing with the pressure that he's under to turn around a 2025 season that he went into as a title contender but that has unravelled into a battle on some occasions just to score points.
"Of course I'm not the person to give advice to Pecco, because he has his team and his people around him," Marquez explained, when asked about the moment between the two, after last Saturday's sprint race, that Ducati had shared.
"They have a lot of experience here, and they will help him. But I want the best for Ducati, and for Ducati we need both riders there on the top, fighting for the top positions. It will be better to develop the bike for the future.
“In the end, I want to beat everyone. I want to beat my brother [Alex], I want to beat my team-mate. I want to beat everyone, but I don't want to see someone suffering like Pecco right now. It's something that is not easy for the riders, when you are in a difficult moment.
"It's difficult to forget, because every day you are in front of the journalists, every day you are doing your job and they're asking the same questions. This is something hard for us, for the athletes, but we need to accept it.
"It's the first time in his career that he's been in this situation, but he has enough talent to come out of it, to come out of this hole."
However, while Marquez might be keen to help Bagnaia regain the feeling he enjoyed on the GP24 last season and to improve Ducati's overall performance as a result, there's one step he admitted he was not prepared to take: engaging in a more thorough testing campaign of last year's bike against the current GP25.
That notion has been mooted multiple times - especially ahead of Monday's test at Misano, where Bagnaia would be free to try out his old machine - but Marquez has repeatedly rejected the idea and echoed Ducati's official line that the two machines are almost identical, even as paddock insiders explain that they have fairly substantial differences.
"I want the best for the team," Marquez insisted, "but in the end...check the notes from Thailand and Malaysia [pre-season testing]. We were saying, me and Pecco, that we followed the same direction and we chose the same thing with the same comments.
"What I understand from the engineers is that we are riding with the base of the GP24 with some evolutions in the aero package. In the end, I want the best for Ducati and it's something that normally with Pecco we have very similar comments.
"Normally if it's working for me, it's working for him, and the opposite."
Under MotoGP's rules, the current specification of engine will remain frozen for 2026 as a cost-saving exercise ahead of the arrival of new 850cc bikes in 2027 - but Ducati is permitted to revert to the 2024 engine if it wished with one important caveat: both sides of the garage must agree and run the same homologated design.
Marquez's comments suggest there is no chance of him being willing to switch designs. And as he's the one dominating the championship, Ducati is equally unlikely to disagree with his wishes.
