MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

With the 2025 MotoGP season slowly starting to heave into view, it's time to make a few predictions of what may lie ahead. In the second part of my predictions for the coming season, I offer a few more hostages to fortune.

Jorge Martin - sacrificing 2025 for 2026

Jorge Martin's 2024 championship campaign was a huge improvement over 2023. The Pramac Ducati rider learned from the mistakes he made at the start of his 2023 campaign, and worked to improve them. The campaign wasn't quite flawless - he crashed out of the lead at both Jerez and Sachsenring, throwing away 50 points - but it was a massive step forward.

At Mugello, we learned that Ducati had chosen Marc Márquez over Jorge Martin to partner Pecco Bagnaia in the factory squad. And on Monday evening, after a rained off test, just as we were about to pack up and head home, we were told that Jorge Martin had signed with Aprilia.

It was unexpected, but not a surprise. The main reason that riders leave a team, factory, or manufacturer is because they do not feel they are being treated with the respect they deserve. And being passed over for the factory slot definitely felt like a slight.

The tension which has been building up around the possibility of racing at Valencia after the devastating storms there defused after the MotoGP Safety Commission, the body in which the riders talk to Dorna and the FIM about everything of concern, from track safety to sporting regulations and more. Any journalist with a rider's phone number was messaging them the instant they emerged from meeting.

Which is how we found out that Dorna and the local authorities in the Valencia region had decided to cancel the 2024 Valencia round of MotoGP, set to take place from 15th-17th of November. Half an hour or so later, Dorna issued a formal announcement, stating that the round had been canceled and they were seeking an alternative location for the final event of the season. To the palpable relief of everyone concerned.

After the race weekend at Motegi, a few loose ends remain to be picked up. Though the race was hardly captivating, there were several things worth noting in Japan. So here's a quick rundown.

Champ

We have to start with the 2024 Moto3 champion. David Alonso showed the kind of speed and maturity in winning the race that brought him the title. He kept a calm head, stuck in the front group, and worked his way forward when it counted. There was never any real doubt he would win the race once he hit the front.

There is good reason to believe that Alonso is special. Winning 10 races in a season is impressive. Doing it in the space of 16 races even more so. Joan Mir and Fausto Gresini managed the same number of races in a Moto3 or 125cc season. Mir took 17 races to get to 10 wins in 2017, the year he won the Moto3 title. Gresini won 10 races in a row to win the 1987 title, though it was actually 11 in a row, counting the last race of 1986.

The start of the Asia-Pacific MotoGP tour is supposed to throw up surprises. When MotoGP arrives at tracks that the teams and factories don't know as well, the field should be leveled. The established order should be shaken up, and outsiders get a look in.

At the end of the first day of the Indonesian Grand Prix at the Mandalika International Circuit, the first of MotoGP's so-called flyaways (though that depends on where you depart from), the fastest four bikes are the four Ducati Desmosedici GP24s, the dominant machine of the 2024 season. A Ducati GP23 is in fifth, with two more GP23s in the top ten. Only Alex Márquez, who crashed trying to set a fast lap, languishes outside the top ten.

Normal order very much restored, then. Enea Bastianini just edged out Jorge Martin by four hundredths of a second, after Martin became the first rider to smash the lap record. Franco Morbidelli took a solid third on the second Pramac Ducati, while Bastianini's Ducati Lenovo teammate Pecco Bagnaia fired in a last desperate fast lap to take fourth.

The return to Misano has been a return to the current Natural Order in MotoGP. Despite a damp start in the morning, by the afternoon, the timesheet gave a very clear picture of the lie of the land. I will let Marc Márquez explain.

"We know that always in the Covid times, the second GP [at the same track] was always super tight. And in fact everything is very tight, everything is fast, everybody is fast," the Gresini Ducati rider told us.

But that closeness belied the fact that there are two riders who are a cut above the rest at the moment. "It's true that when it's better grip conditions, the pattern of this year is it looks like Martin and Bagnaia do a step, and in fact today, they were much faster than us."

A cut above

The timesheets bear this out. On Friday afternoon, Pecco Bagnaia did a lap of 1'30.902 on a set of medium tires which had 14 laps on them, just over half race distance. Jorge Martin did a 1'30.844 on a set with 12 laps on them.

Nobody else got close. Marc Márquez did a 1'31.3. Enea Bastianini a 1'31.4. Maverick Viñales did a pair of 1'31.6s, and Pedro Acosta matched that on a used soft rear. Bagnaia and Martin have four tenths on the rest of the field, and will be battling for victory at the head of the field. There will be a larger group behind fighting over the last place on the podium, most likely with Marc Márquez at their head.