MXGP IN 2025 – TIGHT STRUGGLE

While we all sit back and wait for 2025 to arrive, we can only get excited for what is coming in the MXGP championship of 2025. With two five-time World Motocross champions in Jeffrey Herlings and Tim Gajser, not to mention the defence of his MX2 World championship, by Dutchman Kay de Wolf, there is more than enough to keep our interest.

Herlings and Gajser have been rivals now for a decade, from the moment Gajser captured the 2015 MX2 World title after Herlings had led the championship until injury forced him out of the season and since that 2015 MX2 championship fight, Herlings has won an MX2 title in 2016, then MXGP in 2018 and 2021, while Gajser has won the MXGP championship in 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022. Herlings knows he can win, but he needs to be at the front early to achieve that.

“All I need is consistently good starts,” Herlings mentioned this year. “I feel like, I am at the level now that I can run anyone’s pace, from the guys I am racing, but I have to be with them, straight from the beginning of the moto. I don’t have the pure speed anymore, where I can come from P9 to P1. You know what I mean. The dominant days, they are over. Even today, I won, but it isn’t like a won by half a minute, you know? We just keep going from here.”

As for Gajser, he always relies on his consistent results and while not always at the same speed as Herlings in the past, his speed in 2024 was as good as anyone’s and only a mistake in the Oriental Beauty Valley MXGP of China, cost him a sixth World title.

“After having such a consistent season, to have a day like today at such a crucial time is hard to take. To lose the championship red plate with one round left was definitely not what I wanted to happen, and I had to win them all. It wasn’t an ideal situation.”

But it won’t just be Herlings and Gajser going for victory in 2025, because Kawasaki factory rider, Romain Febvre, new MXGP rider, Lucas Coenen and veteran, Jeremy Seewer on the Ducati, will all want a piece of the MXGP pie next year. Many eyes will be on Coenen on the De Carli factory KTM machine, and you just know, this young teenager isn’t racing MXGP to finish off the podium.

“I do know, on the 450 I am two seconds quicker than on the 250. From the outside, I look slow on the 450, because I am rolling the corners, but then we look at the times and it’s like, wow, this is fast. Sometimes people look fast from the outside and the lap times are slow, but I am completely the other way around. I don’t’ push the corners, just roll them and then it doesn’t look like WOW, but its fast, you know. Some of the tracks we ride now are really difficult, like Loket, on that track, you need to be in good shape and full focus the whole race. If you lose one second of concentration, you are in trouble, you cannot make a mistake there. Tracks like Lommel, I love Lommel or the other sand tracks, because you flow around that track.”

So, with Herlings and Gajser as the early favourites for 2025 and possibly adding a sixth World title, do not count out the others, because all want to be crowned World motocross champion at the end of the season. Just like 2024, and that legendary 2021 season, tough, tight racing will be what we expect in 2025.

Photo Credit: Ray Archer