MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

After the disaster of the first day of the Sepang MotoGP test, we got through the second day without losing another rider, reducing the rate of attrition to just 1.5 MotoGP riders out through injury a day. No doubt the massive crashes of Jorge Martin, Raul Fernandez, and Fabio Di Giannantonio had served as a useful warning of what is at stake in this preseason. But the conditions helped too.

It was a lot hotter on Thursday, and the sun drove air and track temperatures up much closer to what we would normally expect in Sepang. Yesterday's 38°C track temperatures were replaced by a much more usual 55°C. And also, nobody was much interested in using the medium rear, concentrating instead on the soft.

"I think the medium here is the same as Silverstone and Barcelona, but we struggle a lot to make it work," Fabio Quartararo told us. "The gap between the soft and the medium is too much and the drop is the same as the soft. So, I’m not using the medium any more, and I think everybody is using the soft."

A day relative free of drama - there were still more than a few crashes, including both Ducati Lenovo riders, though nothing serious - and a day on which the riders could focus on working. The heat kept a lot of riders in the garage for a couple of hours around 2pm, then a very brief rain shower chased everyone off the track again, but 15 minutes later work was underway again.

A lot of work got done today, but that meant relatively few laps. Big changes were being made to bikes, swingarms, chassis, engines, all requiring hours of work by the mechanics. And that also meant hours of track time lost to making changes to the bike.

Such is the work of a factory MotoGP rider. There is a lot more sitting around waiting than you might expect from the Instagram glamour posts.

That work got done was clear from the timesheets. Three Ducati GP24s in the top four is a sign that the riders who only had to focus on setup had time to try a fast lap. Franco Morbidelli's best lap was a few hundredths under his best time in Q2 at the race in November, a sign he is comfortable with the bike. When he was asked what he was happiest about with the GP24, his answer was simple: "the fact that I'm P1 with the bike."

Very impressive was rookie Fermín Aldeguer's best lap, a time that would have put him sixth on the grid at last year's race. Aldeguer has the benefit of experience from the shakedown, but he is making rapid progress.

He was not getting carried away with himself, however. "We are there. We have to continue like this and not look at the positions. Just going with my feeling and my adaptation," the Gresini Ducati rider told us.

Ducati

In the factory team, work continued on deciding on whether to use the new 2025 engine in the GP25, or stick with the tried and trusted GP24. The fact that there were three GP24s in the top four was proof enough that the engine is plenty good enough. "The GP24 is a fantastic base," Pecco Bagnaia said after the session. "We all think it still has some margin."

The issue is that the GP25 engine has more top end and a smoother power delivery, but it is worse on corner entry, the engine braking not as manageable. "The GP25 is very fast and good on straight and acceleration because you can only do a good top speed if the bike is exiting well from the corners," Bagnaia explained. "This is the case because it’s very smooth and you can manage the acceleration a lot with the throttle. But the braking the GP24 was out of this world. We were doing something incredible in braking. This is difficult to reach with the 25 even if we’ve closed the gap."

But there is less to be gained in acceleration than there is to be lost in braking. "The thing is now we are a bit on limit with tires and all the rear devices. All the bikes are accelerating well out of the corners. We have to say our electronics are working better than the rest and helps to have a gap," Bagnaia said. "But the gap in acceleration is not the same as what you can have riding, braking and entering. We have to balance it a bit. In this moment what we’re gaining in acceleration is a bit less than what we’re losing in braking."

This is going to be a crucial challenge. The engine Ducati (and Aprilia and KTM) choose after testing here and in Buriram will be the one they are stuck with for two years, as the engine development freeze ahead of the new 2027 technical regulations kicks in. Ducati appear to be tending toward choosing the devil they know.

Aprilia

Swaying the choice in favor of sticking with the GP24 is the fact that no other manufacturer has shown signs of getting close. That may be distorted by the fact that Jorge Martin crashed out, as Martin was set to be the reference on the Aprilia RS-GP.

Test rider Lorenzo Savadori was drafted back in to take the place of the injured Martin, assisting Marco Bezzecchi in the factory team. But the weight of responsibility for choosing an engine falls squarely on the shoulders of Bezzecchi, as he will be the rider who has to live with it. While Ai Ogura is showing solid progress on the Trackhouse Aprilia, he does not have the experience to be choosing which engine the entire Aprilia program should be using for the next two years.

Though Bezzecchi's lap time is nothing to write home about, his pace over the test is more impressive. He is capable of running consistent 1'58s, not far off the pace of the Ducatis. "Today I’m happier than yesterday. I’m building more confidence with the bike. I’m starting to brake quite good and enter the corner with more confidence. The bike is giving me more feedback. We still have to try many things but at the moment I can’t complain," the factory Aprilia rider said.

The focus for Aprilia, according to Bezzecchi, has to be on the electronics. "The power impressed me. There’s a lot of power. The electronics parts need to improve to control it better and put all this power to the ground." Electronics is where Ducati have their biggest advantage, and where the other factories, including Aprilia, have the most to gain.

Yamaha

Electronics have also been the focus of Yamaha, in part because the new engine has more power, and is giving the M1 riders a bit of a boost in acceleration. But their biggest problem - rear grip - remains, despite some gains made with a new chassis, which Fabio Quartararo described as being halfway between the new prototype and the Barcelona test frame. "When it is fast corners then the grip is not that bad. But starting from slow corners is where we struggle," the Frenchman said.

The work done so far had made some improvements. "In some areas yes, in others no. It is 50-50. We ride in a much better way but the traction is still very low for us," Quartararo told us.

Above all, it was electronics where the most work was needed, Jack Miller said. "They need work. But they’re working hard at that." What would also help is making the software for changing the electronics strategies more user friendly. "In terms of the strategy as well as the program to help engineers make a change. It’s not the easiest program to use to make slight adjustments corner by corner, gear by gear. It takes time. But they know that. they’re working on it to improve the speed of the action as well as the quality in terms of the cut."

Honda

Honda had a lot to test, including a new engine for Joan Mir. In contrast to his sullen demeanor at most tests last year, the factory Honda HRC Castrol rider is positively chirpy. The fact that he finished sixth on the timesheets on both days is a major factor here.

And he could have finished higher up, if he hadn't run out of fuel before crossing the finish line on his flying lap. "I made from the last corner to the finish line with the bike not in full power," Mir told us. "We lost 3 tenths. We are very close without that problem. Let’s say I’m happy with how everything is going."

He and Johann Zarco tried a new engine configuration, which Luca Marini is set to try on Friday. It has a bit more power, but also more potential. Zarco said he couldn't really notice the difference in power. "But I can feel a better behavior from the rear of the bike, which might be positive because it's one of our weak points." But he didn't have a good feeling with the tire he had at that moment, which made it more difficult to judge.

The top speed was a bigger step than acceleration, Joan Mir said. "We improved 1 km/h on the straight. We probably need 4 or 5 more. That’s a bit the reality at the moment." But the engine was enough of an upgrade to give Mir room for optimism. "If yesterday we were more or less happy but with an engine that wasn’t good, and today we’re looking for more horsepower, and the bike is more rideable. It’s better."

On the aero front, the Honda camp was far more split. HRC had brought a new set of aero with significantly larger downwash ducts and a different side fairing. Despite the very different look, the difference it made in performance was quite small.

"I expected a bigger difference," Luca Marini said. "Looks huge, super different. It’s small." He and his crew had spent all day trying to find the right mix of components to extract the maximum performance from the new package, only succeeding at the end of the day.

"It’s improved in turning without losing in acceleration, wheelie and stopping power," Marini said, before thanking his team for working so hard to find the right balance. "A perfect job. Thanks to my mechanics, they made a fantastic job preparing well trying to match all the pieces with the fairing."

Johann Zarco also felt the new fairing was positive, but Joan Mir was not convinced. It had too many negatives to outweigh the benefits, and he was considering starting the season on the old fairing they finished the end of last year with.

KTM

KTM were busy testing a large box on the rear of the tail that looks exactly like the sort of (beautifully manufactured, it is KTM after all) thing you would hide a tuned mass damper in. Did it help much with the rear vibration they had been suffering? "Well…it’s a work in progress," was Brad Binder's cagey reply when we asked him about it. "The balance is quite good for some of our issues but we still need to work on it and get some information."

Above all, KTM were doing their usual job of testing a seemingly unending mountain of new parts and ideas. "Some back-to-back runs this morning, checking off some different configurations on the engine side," Binder said. "It was interesting. We did a lot of ‘jump back, jump there, now there’. It was cool. Nothing too serious. This afternoon we tried some stuff with the suspension, different rear shocks, different front forks and found some stuff that had a little bit of potential, for sure. Tonight is the time to sit-down, put it all together and then send it tomorrow and see what happens."

The worry for KTM is that though they have the parts, they don't have the pace, as both Binder and Acosta were well down the order. Even their pace over the test was nothing to write home about. If they haven't made a step for 2025, then it is going to be another long year for the Austrian manufacturer (and they are already coming off one of the longest and most difficult in their history).

The trouble is, of course, that we don't really know where everyone stands, because over the first two days of testing there has been a lot of work done but not very many genuine time attacks. That is likely to change on the final day of the test on Friday, with everyone likely to attempt to post a time, especially in the morning when there is grip to spare.

Tomorrow we will have a better idea of where the factories really stand relative to each other. But it is still only testing. And as fascinating as testing is, trying to interpret the results is still more like reading tea leaves than cold, objective analysis. Only racing will reveal the truth.

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