Marc Marquez will leave the Repsol Honda Team at the end of 2023 after winning six MotoGP championships with the Japanese manufacturer. For the 2024 season, the Spaniard is widely expected to join Gresini Ducati. Marc Marquez and Honda have mutually decided to end their highly successful partnership that has generated six MotoGP world championships in the eleven years between 2013 and 2023. The Spaniard won the title in his first year with Honda (2013) and repeated the feat in 2014. From 2016 to 2019, Marquez was unstoppable, winning four consecutive titles, the last one by an unprecedented margin of 151 points. Due to a serious arm injury at the beginning of 2020 and four surgeries spread out across 2020 and 2022, Marquez was unable to continue his run, and he also missed races due to two episodes of diplopia (double vision).
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MotoGP: Marc Marquez to Join Alex Marquez at Gresini Ducati?
After receiving mixed reviews while testing the 2024 Honda prototype at Misano in September, rumours have been circulating for weeks that Marquez will be leaving Honda for Gresini to ride a year-old Ducati. Despite Gresini's lack of an official announcement, it is widely believed that Marquez will be joining the Faenza-based team for the upcoming season. His brother Alex will be his garage neighbour, which no doubt had a significant factor in Marc's decision. Alex Marquez, who rode with Marc for a short time in 2020 for the factory Honda squad, has made the move from LCR to Gresini for 2023 and has already won a sprint race at Silverstone and finished third in Argentina.
If Marc Marquez joins Gresini, he will be without any of his technicians, as Ducati has shown its unwillingness to expose the inner workings of the most dominant bike of the present to engineers who, in 2025, may sign for any competitive brand. Despite the conflicting stories that have surfaced in recent weeks—some claiming that Marquez's plan was to remain at Honda, and others claiming that he had already concluded his move to Gresini—Marquez waited until the last days of the season to make his decision on whose suit he would wear next year.
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MotoGP: Honda and Marc Marquez
HRC and Marc Marquez have mutually agreed to discontinue their collaboration following the conclusion of the 2023 MotoGP World Championship season, with one year still remaining on their four-year pact. According to HRC, it was mutually decided that moving forward, each party would be better served by exploring alternative strategies for achieving their respective objectives.
In 2013, at the age of 23, Marquez became the youngest premier class winner when he won the Grand Prix of the Americas in Austin, Texas riding the Honda RC213V. That same year, he also became the youngest premier-class World Champion. After successfully defending his title in 2014 and winning the first 10 races of the year, he went on to win the championship with the HRC class in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.
A possible turning point in Marquez's decision to leave Honda happened at this year's Sachsenring round when he experienced five crashes on a track he had previously never lost on in MotoGP and then pulled out of the Sunday race. Since then, the 30-year-old has taken a more cautious approach during the racing.
There were rumours early on that they would transfer to KTM because they shared a sponsor in Red Bull. The Austrian factory's attempts to secure more grid spots were thwarted, leaving just Gresini as a workable alternative.
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