MotoGP's 'new Márquez' set for the leap into Honda hot seat

“I heard a sentence once, and it was about waiters in a restaurant: they need to go fast with their brain but not with their legs. They didn’t need to move fast but they needed to think fast. I think it is the same for racing a bike. You need to think fast with your brain and the decisions you make: the gearing, the braking, the turning but, at the same time, go slowly. Smoothly. That’s where the ‘to go fast, go slower’ saying comes from.”

Is top-flight motor sport ready for another Alonso?

Judging by the big, bright-eyed grin opposite me and the strong attempt at insight and eloquence in his second language, David Alonso is aware of the ingredients necessary for star power. The record-breaking former Moto3 world champion and current Moto2 ace already seems to have the motorcycling part of the job in hand.

Right now, MotoGP is bubbling with potential thanks to the presence of Pedro Acosta, Diogo Moreira, WorldSBK icon Toprak Razgatlıoğlu, Ai Ogura and the ‘establishment’ consisting of 17 premier class grand prix winners from the 22. Then there’s the enduring generational excellence of reigning world champion Marc Márquez and the approaching 2027 rule change to 850cc (Moto2 runs 765cc Triumph triple motors). It’s a heady mix.

Spanish-born Colombian Alonso will add his name to the bunch, and not with a gentle satellite team induction but straight into the centre of the bear pit wearing (allegedly) factory Honda HRC colours; the formidable fortress of Mick Doohan, Alex Criville, Valentino Rossi, Nicky Hayden, Dani Pedrosa and Márquez amongst others. His move comes at a time when Honda could be poised for a return to former imperious days; the team has been dry of victory for almost half a decade.

Alonso seems too young and too boyish for the jungle of MotoGP but he is learning some hard yards in Moto2 in 2026 for what is only his fourth grand prix year and his second in the intermediate category. His 14 wins and comprehensive Moto3 title claim in 2024 and his five podiums (including a maiden success in Hungary) during a rookie Moto2 term in 2025 indicate that Alonso has the tools and the talent to take on any MotoGP gatekeeper.

He’s going for his second career crown in 2026, despite some rough tumbles in Germany last year and Thailand at the beginning of this season, but the pathway to the peak had already been laid midway through 2025 as MotoGP teams rushed to present him with a pen.

“He has something that you cannot teach. When you say his name in the paddock then every single person wants to work with him,” his agent, The Team’s Bob Moore, told Motor Sport. “Other than with Valentino Rossi, I’ve never seen that.”

It’s also off the bike where this product of Jorge ‘Aspar’ Martinez’s famed academy and race team is impressing. His Iberian/Latin roots are barely a distinction in MotoGP these days but there are other facets that made Alonso the pick of every factory as well as the American sport agency behemoth.

“He’s a very smart individual and he analyses things with a lot of detail. He has an amazing character as well, so nice and generous, as are his parents,” Moore, a former motocross world champion himself, added. “It’s a combination that creates a spark; people are attracted to that.”

Alonso does have a poster-boy likeability. His slight, wispy monotone English is deceptive because he makes an earnest attempt to articulate and impart, something that not all of his peers can be bothered with. During our chat at the recent United States Grand Prix and while we were ensconced in a corner of the bland COTA Media Centre, I asked him to try and define how he sees his technique and his capability to ride a motorcycle on a perilous edge.

“For me it changes a lot when I really feel the bike or if I’m just riding it,” he offered. “You don’t push to the same limit. To have that connection, which is not easy, you must feel part of the bike. It’s like…I am braking, not that I am braking the bike. You think less. The ground also; you need to feel the ground a lot and the tyre. It’s necessary to go super-fast but with control. 100% is difficult, but you achieve this speed and this control with this connection.

“There is one point when you just look and go,” he adds. “Where you put the eyes, the bike goes. When you achieve this, it is very special.”

Before I can ask another question, he blurts: “Do you know the movie Avatar?” (at this moment Aspar Team PR Vicente Vila, sitting with us, makes a face and says “I want to know where this is going.”). I reply that I do. “You know when the Avatar takes the hair and connects with the bird, or the dragon? They feel the connection, and the dragon does what they feel. It’s something similar with the bike.”

I then say if we see him with a long ponytail in the future, then we’ll know the reason, and he cracks up. “I’m connected to the exhaust!” he giggles.

Is Alonso this light-hearted when he’s in action? How much emotion comes into his race performances? “It’s strange. I have dialogue and emotions on the bike but without talking. You are really focused, but you have that internal talk, things like ‘OK, I will overtake him there’ or ‘how many laps left?’ or ‘how much time do I have?’ And then the emotional dialogue, like when I am tired then I will tell myself that the others are tired also, or when I need to stay calm or to be more aggressive. You are the only person making decisions during a race.”

He is a curated project of Aspar, Vila and people like team manager Nico Terol and is accustomed to the hype of being in the world championship and being a ”’name’. His jovial antics on Instagram and his outgoing character (some of his post-win celebrations in 2024 were lovably zany) mean he is Gen Alpha fodder and is throttling his way to the cusp of MotoGP’s transition to an entertainment product rather than just a sweaty, oily and noisy motor sport.

He is warmer and more relatable than Moreira or Ogura and less edgy than Acosta. Like all freaky-formed sporting hybrids, he is able to switch between iterations of Alonso. “Sometimes my face talks too much,” he tries to explain. “I can be super-happy, or it’s difficult to hide when I am not going well. I am trying to reduce this and not be white or black but somewhere in between.”

This is especially the case when the algorithm must be fed, and the commercial rights holder MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group (SEG) will be relentless with its cameras for that behind-the-scenes content gold. “I’m usually dealing with my own brain, my own battle,” he says of the constant public gaze and comments/judgements. “Some situations or races don’t go as you expect and you have to reset from those: try to prepare each race without thinking only of the final result.”

He pauses and thinks. “It’s strange to stay in your own bubble sometimes and not pay any attention to what people say,” he says eventually. “I think what you end up saying to yourself is more painful than what people or media can say about you. Maybe you need to take care of your own conversation, your own dialogue.”

Moto3 seemed like child’s play. Moto2 is forcing Alonso to refine his craft, purely because of the parity of grand prix’s most competitive class. “The dynamic of Moto2 means there might be only five guys who are really constant, otherwise there are some that are really good on some tracks but not on all,” he explains. “Consistency in every race is very valuable, but you also know that a few guys will sometimes have a ‘perfect day’ and be unbeatable and you just need to be as close to them as you can and accept that it is not your race. The mentality to work on something or make something better each session: that’s the key to trying to be a complete rider.”

MotoGP is both the end game and the start of real pressure. “It’s normal that people talk about the next category for you. It always happens, even when you are in the Spanish championship! Of course, in that series there is not much noise. For MotoGP there is a bit more.”

“He is going to be on a completely different planet when it comes to money very soon and that has changed people in the past…but he has a really good group of people around him already,” says Moore. “We’re going to be very tight with that circle.”