Tim Gajser enters 2025 MXGP as title favourite while feeding from the pain of excellence in 2024: “Maybe I needed to take more risks…”
The 28-year-old HRC rider, now in his twelfth season with Honda, reflects on the anguish of losing a fifth premier class title by 10 points and how frustration led to THAT move at the MXoN.
2025 should be the year of Tim Gajser. The Slovenian has certainly been patient in the last half-decade. A blameless nudge off-track exiting the first turn at Mantova for the Lombardia Grand Prix in 2021 – the penultimate date on the calendar - led to a penalisation to 8th place and a ruinous 12-point loss to Romain Febvre that afternoon in Italy. Three days later and he was overall runner-up in the second event at the same sandy course (the GP ‘Citta di Mantova’) in the pandemic-blighted season and took 3rd in the championship behind Herlings and Romain Febvre. Only 20 points was the difference between all three. 2022 went to plan but with Herlings out of action, Jorge Prado struggling, Tony Cairoli recently retired and Febvre missing the first half of the contest due to a broken leg. It was Gajser’s turn for a fracture during the first laps of 2023 preseason and a snapped femur at Pietramurata: the biggest injury of his career to-date.
Then 2024 came around. And Prado, Gajser and Herlings put on a near-masterclass, clocking 16, 16 and 15 podium finishes each from 20 rounds to take the dispute to the final race for the second time in three years. Gajser registered red plates in all but five events last year (both he and Prado were actually tied for the honour as MXGP championship leader for five GPs) but a 7th overall in China – another pivotal penultimate race - handed Prado the initiative. The gap after the last motos in Spain was 996 points to 986 as the Spaniard prevailed for the second time in succession; his 17 moto chequered flags contrasted greatly to his Honda rival’s 7.
Tim was given little time to dwell on the disappointment of having fronted MXGP for so long and having come so close once again. The following weekend he was in the grim wintery conditions of Matterley Basin in the UK for Team Slovenia; the pressure of MXGP far removed but the emotions of the campaign still raw and fresh.
Having beaten Eli Tomac to win the first moto, in the second race he sensationally swept past the steamroller of skill, confidence and achievement that is Jett Lawrence™ nearing the last corner to win one of the most thrilling disputes (and finales) of the 77-year history of the event.
Through a TV screen (it was the first Motocross of Nations I’d missed since 2000) it seemed that Gajser was expelling a few ghosts. He made an exorcism with a throttle cable and some holy fuel. His volley represented a resounding closing statement of a campaign in which he’d barely put a wheel out of line.
He hasn’t spoken much about the manoeuvre. So, it felt like the first thing to ask about on the eve of 2025 MXGP and his tenth attempt at the class he initially conquered as a 20-year-old rookie in 2016. How much did the torment of the title defeat filter into the Lawrence mugging?
“I mean, maybe…a little bit!” he said over the phone last week and with typical modesty. “It had been a long year…I was leading until China where I made a little mistake and had some bad luck. There had been a lot of red plates. I lost it by only a couple of points…so I went to the Nations disappointed and it was not easy to put what had happened in MXGP to one side but, I like the event, and Matterley Basin is my favourite track. The conditions were amazing: lots of lines, ruts and bumps it was really technical.”
Still, to debunk the AMA 450SX Champion and SMX #1 as well as Honda stablemate – of all people – must have been satisfying. Talk about a scalp. “It was!” he laughs. “It was a nice move…but it didn’t change how I felt about the weekend before. However; a nice moment, and it gave some motivation going into the off-season.”
My first interview with Tim had come at Matterley Basin in 2014. He was new to Honda but highly rated and so young. That year, and for the next five, he would largely be surrounded by his family and overseeing father, Bogo. At its most exuberant point, the Gajser clan would form a small organisation of campers and make their own mini enclosure in the living area. In 2014 he was in a very plain vehicle, parked on the hill at Matterley. When we sat down in Sweden exactly ten years later (for a story for HRC published HERE), it was in the immaculately ordered opulence of his American-style unit. The surroundings had changed but the person hadn’t. Yes, the face was older, wizened, but the disarming honesty, politeness and endearing tendency to laugh easily at himself and other jokes was the same as it had been.
We speak now a few days after his first race (and win) of 2025 and through the deluge of cold, rain and sand at Mantova. Gajser has represented Italian teams his whole career and his association with Giacomo Gariboldi’s Honda outfit since 2014 makes him the longest-serving racer for any brand behind Jeffrey Herlings, whose link with Red Bull KTM since the 2010 season is an anomaly in the sport. Garboldi switched from Yamaha to a customer Honda team in 2013 and was shrewd enough to snare the -then 17-year-old European Champion who had been having an unhappy time in EMX250 and MX2 with KTM. Gariboldi’s trajectory inside Honda mirrored Gajser’s own quick rise as he was soon entrusted with HRC equipment and then became the official outfit for the Japanese. The wealthy and charming Italian’s wish to still impact Grand Prix beyond the remit of HRC’s objectives meant he would continue his own Honda MX2 crew, assisting the careers of Hunter Lawrence and Ruben Fernandez before Honda saw the merits of further expansion and will have four factory bikes in two classes within the same set-up for 2025.
Gajser has been consistent. Not just with his personality, his group (partner Spela has been with him also almost ten years) and his team but with the force of strength, physicality and relentlessness on the motorcycle. Check out this memorable GoPro charge from last to 1st at the Grand Prix of Russia for an example. He deserves to be spoken about as one of the true greats of the FIM series: the only back-to-back world champion in MX2 and MXGP in 2015 and 2016 and he has not placed out of the top five in a championship for eleven of his twelve Grand Prix seasons. The 2024 Nations double was another tick for a sensational CV that ensures he is one of the highest paid riders in MXGP. A multi-millionaire. Gajser’s success was achieved from the confines of a small country, and partially from the fanaticism of a father figure that flamed the unusual desire that creates sporting specimens like Tim. And it’s fitting that Slovenia borders Italy for the influence the nation has had on his career.
Gajser won his first ever Grand Prix at Pietramurata in 2015. He would secure the MXGP crown at the same track that lies close to Lake Garda in 2020, a year after he lifted the gold plate as world champion at the makeshift circuit in Imola. The low points have also come on Italian soil: the leg break at Pietramurata in 2023, the 2021 Mantova double disappointment and the 2018 pre-season smash, also at Mantova, that left him with a broken jaw and a concussion, ruining his threat against Herlings that year.
Tim is partially a creature of habit. He has spent most of January riding and testing through more Italian terrain, using the pleasant winter temperatures of Sardinia as a base. When at home in Slovenia he trains and laps at his own facility. “It’s been a normal off-season but I changed a few things,” he says. “After so many years doing motocross you need to find some variety and make some changes.”
I wonder aloud what those changes could be. He might have been able to briefly extinguish some of his MXGP loss at Matterley Basin but then had plenty of downtime to analyse and reconcile why the 2024 championship slipped away.
“It had been a strong year with Jeffrey, Jorge and me,” he explains. “Jorge and I did not make many mistakes…but when there was a small one from all those races then it cost both of us a lot. Looking back, I feel I did everything quite good. I didn’t take too many risks; when I had to take 2nd or 3rd then I did. I rode smart. But, again looking back, I was 2nd quite a few times and maybe did need to take more risks, ride out of the comfort zone. In the end, I needed those few extra points.”
“You know, experience tells you to manage the season…and I don’t see too many weakpoints from 2024,” he adds. “Those little mistakes just added up to a big one.”
Gajser might know what he must adjust for 2025 but question marks hover over Honda. It’s a contract year, although it would be hard to imagine the #243 in any other colour or another brand with the clout and resources to steal Tim away. While Honda are unlikely to find anybody else that hits the regular levels of performance, minimum fuss and dedication that Gajser still brings. Expect a renewal press release to come sooner rather than later. Fingers could be pointed instead at the CRF450R, and the deeper scrutiny of the equipment that came after the Lawrences’ shaky start to 2025 SMX.
I asked both Tim and the ever-amiable MXGP Team Manager Marcus Pereira de Freitas what changes both parties have sought for 2025. “Between Tim and Ruben [Fernandez]’s machine, there isn’t too much difference on engine specification for 2025, obviously some adjustment setting to suit their two different ways to ride the bike, on another hand the chassis, is a quite few parts of riding position differences between both,” he said. Gajser will not use factory Showa suspension (Fernandez will), instead plumping for unmarked KYB hardware. He also feels that his potential away from the start gate – an area that Prado largely reigned supreme – is not cause for concern.
“We are talking all the time about the way to improve and what we can do on the bike during the year,” Gajser said. “We worked hard on my starts for the last two years. They have improved a lot, and I feel comfortable and confident because in the past it was a weakpoint…but, you know, there is always space to work on settings and get better. To do that bit extra.”
When I spoke with Tim in Sweden during the summer of 2024 we chatted about his experience with the CRF and his journey with a bike that he used to train with, even while competing in MX2. “I really like the CRF I have now,” he said of the 2024 spec model and the 2025 basis for the Lawrences under the AMA’s production bike rule. “But I also have to mention previous one in 2023 and how nice that felt to ride. It was another new generation so it was for 2021, ‘22 and ’23 and we did not have to change much at all, just some little things and I was comfortable. Hondas are normally really good for handling and the power is amazing: it’s a good package for tight corners, long corners but also the way to power comes in is really nice and consistent. Obviously, you can change these things and Ruben has a different setting. HRC can do whatever you want and they have open hands, even if you want to change something with the frame.”
“I was a bit surprised,” he says cautiously, of American Honda’s travails with Jett and Hunter. “At first I heard they were happy with the new bikes but then it seemed they were struggling for supercross. From what I understand they tested and got some things sorted after Anaheim and it looked way-better. Obviously, it’s HRC so the teams and the staff are in contact. There are so many people working and helping to give support and to make as many changes as you might need to find some success.”
Come Argentina and Gajser will need to look at Febvre but cannot discount the potential of Maxime Renaux in Yamaha blue. Herlings starts on the back foot although the Dutchman has never been an also-ran. 2025 could be Tim’s to lose but motocross rarely likes a reliable script. To decry Gajser’s credentials is a withered view. Sustained excellence might just do the job this time.
By Adam Wheeler.
Photos by HRC/ShotbyBavo