MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

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.

After the Buriram test, it looks like Aprilia have raised their game to start to disrupt Ducati's domination of the series. And it also appears they might have overtaken KTM, with Marco Bezzecchi just a fraction slower than Pedro Acosta, and much stronger in race pace.

So where does the Austrian manufacturer stand? And how are their signings of Maverick Viñales and Enea Bastianini to the Tech3 team working out?

Will Phillip Island prove to be the decisive round in the 2024 MotoGP title? That's probably a bit premature, but the momentum definitely swung back again in the Sprint race on Saturday. Helped in no small part by the weather, a wet FP2 making it impossible for the riders to test the soft and medium tires or work on setup. They headed into qualifying and the sprint race pretty much blind.

Phillip Island dries quickly, though. Especially when the wind is as brisk as it was on Saturday, and despite the cold. By the end of FP2, a dry line was starting to appear and some riders switched from soft to medium wet tires. Ten minutes later, at the start of Q1, the majority went out on medium wets for their first run, before joining the four who started out on slicks.

Q1 was fascinating. The lap that took Raul Fernandez to the top of the timesheets was 5 seconds faster than Johann Zarco's best lap at the start of the session. Timing was everything. Being out at the end on a set of slicks you had gotten up to temperature was a ticket to Q2. Raul Fernandez and Enea Bastianini got it right, while Luca Marini just missed, finishing just too early.

It has been hot and humid at Motegi. Humid enough to rain in the morning, chasing everyone back into the garage for 20 minutes in FP1. That disrupted everyone's practice plans, forcing a rethink of the afternoon session and leaving a lot of questions unanswered.

Questions such as, will the soft rear go the distance on Sunday, or should we use the medium? A lot of riders used the medium during the limited running in the morning, but the tire just didn't want to work for most people in the afternoon. "If you see everyone that put a medium tire in PR, they make 3 laps and come in and put a soft," Pedro Acosta said. "This is not easy to understand. And even the soft is going to be difficult to finish the race with."

That puts a lot of pressure on Saturday morning, to work out whether the medium rear is a better tire for the race. "Last season with this tire they made the whole race and they were fast, and it was not an issue," Acosta said. "But I don't know why, but this soft tire will not finish the race. But the medium, I don't know how is the level of grip, you know?"