MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

There is an entirely unsubstantiated rumor, which I have personally decided to believe regardless of the evidence, that Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta worked hard to prevent Ducati from signing Marc Márquez to the factory team. After two sprints and a GP, you have to concede that he would have been right to try to interfere. So far, Márquez has looked pretty much unstoppable. Exactly as you would expect when you put the best rider on the best bike.

At the end of every Friday practice, the riders like to remind us that it is only Friday, and we shouldn't read too much into the times. Fat chance, of course, but they have a point. But "it's only Friday" takes on extra potency at the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit, given the changing nature of the track. Especially after it rained heavily overnight, and the track started the day wet and took a long time to dry out. High humidity and low temperatures add another layer of complexity, just to liven things up.

The track started off cleaner than expected. "Yesterday when I made the track walk, I thought that the track was more dirty," Marco Bezzecchi said at the end of the first day. "But when I rode the bike this morning, to be honest it was much much better compared to the past times we came here."

The track may have started from a better base, but the grip levels were still changing on pretty much every exit as more and more rubber got laid down. That makes working out where riders stand relatively complicated, though we can take a stab at it by looking at the timesheets.

In many ways, the 2025 MotoGP championship promises to be one of the more interesting in recent years. Perhaps not the most closely contested - the general consensus among fans and pundits alike is that you can take your pick of whether it will be Pecco Bagnaia or Marc Márquez who ends up lifting the 2025 MotoGP crown - but behind the title fight, there are some fascinating developments to watch out for.

We may as well start with that title battle. The dominance of Ducati was so great last year that it is hard to imagine anyone other than Marc Márquez or Pecco Bagnaia walking off with the title. Despite the fact that they are sticking with their GP24 engine - a little more on that later - both Bagnaia and Márquez showed pace during the test, Márquez' race simulation at Buriram almost fast enough to win a sprint race.

It has been quite the day at the Sepang International Circuit. The first day of the official MotoGP test at Sepang and we are already three riders down. For the second consecutive year, Raul Fernandez has crashed during testing and ruled himself out of the remainder of the test, fracturing a metacarpal bone in his left hand, as well has his little toe. Fabio Di Giannantonio had a silly crash, landing a wheelie badly at the end of the day after doing his practice starts, and breaking his left collarbone.

But the biggest news is that Jorge Martin had a massive highside at Turn 2, after completing just a dozen laps. The force of the crash was so severe that he fractured the fifth metacarpal of his right hand and the third, fourth, and fifth metatarsals of his left foot. The injury on his right hand is to the head of the metacarpal, where the bone in the hand joins the bone of the little or pinky finger. The metatarsal bones are the long bones in his foot joining his ankle to his toes.

The injury to his right hand will probably rule the reigning world champion out for the Buriram test, which takes place next week, and will leave him to ride the fully homologated 2025 Aprilia RS-GP for the first time at the opening round of MotoGP in Buriram at the start of March.

The Blame Game

And then there were two. With both Marc Márquez and Enea Bastianini finishing outside the top ten Sunday's Grand Prix of Thailand at Buriram, and Pecco Bagnaia storming to a superb win ahead of Jorge Martin, the 2024 MotoGP championship became a mathematical impossibility for Márquez and Bastianini. The title will be decided between Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia.

Sunday's race was a textbook example of exactly why Martin and Bagnaia are left. In extraordinarily difficult conditions, Pecco Bagnaia rode a near-perfect race to take victory, while Jorge Martin got his excess of enthusiasm under control after a couple of tricky moments and did exactly what he needed to if he is to win this championship: finish second behind Pecco Bagnaia.

Intellectually, we all understand that championships are won over an entire season. But nobody watches MotoGP, or any form of sports intellectually. The passion for sports is a deep-seated emotion that goes back to the dawn of human history. So when we get to the end of a championship, fans tend to look back and try to pinpoint a single event that decided the championship. Usually, that's the most recent and shocking or surprising event that fans can remember.

Take 2006. Ask a long-time MotoGP fan what cost Valentino Rossi the title and they will tell you it was the 5 points Rossi lost to Toni Elias when Elias beat him at Estoril at the penultimate round. But this glosses over the fact that Elias had knocked Rossi into the gravel at the opening round in Jerez, that Rossi had suffered massive tire problems in China, had mechanicals at Le Mans and Laguna Seca, and struggled with chatter in the first half of the season after being distracted by the possibility of a switch to F1. And there was the crash at Valencia. Nicky Hayden won the 2006 MotoGP title simply by being more consistent than Rossi over the full 17 rounds.

Phillip Island can be counted on to deliver two things: great racing, and big surprises. This weekend is no different, with the wildcards being the complex interplay between the weather, the new asphalt, and the tires. The new surface is going to be both fast and very hard on rear tires. Michelin have three rear tires to choose from: a soft rear with the normal construction, and a medium and a hard using the heat-resistant construction used at Mandalika.

At any other circuit, the soft would only be used for qualifying with the riders choosing between the medium and hard for the race. But this is Phillip Island, and the forecast is for low temperatures - highs of 15°C on Saturday and Sunday - allied with strong winds. "The harder one I don’t think we will even test," Aleix Espargaro said on Thursday.

So the task for the riders is to decide whether they think they can make the soft last race distance, or are better off using the medium. Normally, they would spend Friday working on this, especially the Friday afternoon practice session. The trouble is, it is raining in Phillip Island, and it looks set to be wet all day. Testing tires is going to be nigh on impossible.

Damp squib