Marco Bezzecchi gets a hug from friend Kimi Antonelli after the Aprilia rider’s win at Mugello
Motogp
Valentino Rossi’s VR46 Riders Academy – established a decade ago by the seven-times MotoGP king to create a new generation of Italian talent – has so far produced one MotoGP champion, Pecco Bagnaia. This year it may produce another, Marco Bezzecchi.
Bezzecchi is MotoGP’s newest star. He is also good friends with Mercedes Formula 1 driver Kimi Antonelli, who visited May’s Italian MotoGP round, where he watched his compatriot score an emotional home victory.
“What they do is unbelievable,” said Antonelli, when asked what he thinks of MotoGP riders. “What really is mind-blowing is they crash and then they run back, get a second bike and go even quicker. It means you’re missing something in your head. They are definitely more nuts than us.”
Antonelli’s words were to ring grimly true for Bezzecchi, whose Mugello victory was his fourth from the first seven races and marked him out as the clear title favourite. Until things went awry. Next time out in Hungary, Bezzecchi was taken out at the first corner by Aprilia team-mate Jorge Martín.
“Valentino tries to give me advice. Also when I have doubt, I always ask”
Two weeks later, still injured, he crashed out of the Czech Grand Prix sprint and succumbed to that most terrible thing: the racer’s red mist. While marshals struggled to retrieve his fallen bike from the gravel trap, he lost his cool and gave one of them a slap. For that crime, he was excluded from the following day’s main race.
“I think it’s something that maybe only sportsmen or sportswomen can really understand because it’s like, in Italian we say, trance agonistica [competitive trance],” he told me a few weeks later. “It means that during a race or some other sport, the amount of focus, the amount of anger that you have inside of you is something that you only have during this level of competition.
“It’s true that when you are doing sport you are fully focused and sometimes you don’t really understand what you are doing, but you can’t use this excuse to justify yourself. Brno was a mix of things but the result was a big mistake.”
The following weekend at Assen for the Dutch GP, Bezzecchi crashed while setting up a pass on reigning champion Marc Márquez. He went down at around 125mph, sliding and rolling so far that he hit a barrier and briefly lost consciousness. He was still hurting when the MotoGP circus rolled into Sachsenring a fortnight later.
“Apart from the arms, everything else is painful,” he said on the eve of German GP practice. “Because I went like this – head, feet, head, feet – so my body is compressed. You know, like the musical instrument…”
An accordion?
“Yeah, an accordion, I was like this.”
Two days later Bezzecchi’s 300bhp Aprilia RS-GP flicked him off during qualifying, breaking his left collarbone.
“Unfortunately, sometimes we crash very hard. And with the current MotoGP calendar we have many races, so we need to try to immediately bounce back and have the speed and try to save as many points as we can. So yeah, it’s tough, but in the end it’s our job.
“The beginning of the season was very good for me and then the races after Mugello were a tough period. But that’s something that can always happen. The MotoGP world championship season is very long, so you will always face ups and downs, so you don’t have to be stressed.”
Currently, Bezzecchi is still in the thick of the title fight, with Márquez his main opponent, along with Martín and Japanese racer Ai Ogura.
Aprilia rider Marco Bezzecchi is dominating the 2026 MotoGP season with the same quiet, truculent self-assurance that has always made him impossible to ignore, and even harder to interview
The impish 27-year-old’s career took off a decade ago, when he was signed by the VR46 academy, just after he’d won the Italian Moto3 championship.
“It was incredible! They’d never even come to see me race before we spoke. Then we spoke and they said, ‘OK, let’s go see him race.’ I got signed by the academy just before Christmas, so it was an unbelievable present, a dream, really.”
No surprise that he was overwhelmed when he started working with Rossi. “I was nervous every time I was with him. He’s always been my idol. Seeing him every day never got normal, until I grew up a bit and over the last few years we’ve started to be more like friends. At the beginning I struggled just to speak with him, even though he was very good at making me feel comfortable.”
The pair still talk regularly. “We keep in touch all the time and, of course, Valentino tries always to give me advice. Also when I have a very small doubt about anything, I always ask, because I understand he’s really clever and has a lot of experience. Riding is always the main subject because he’s very good at it, so he can really help. But he can also help me outside of the racing.”
Rossi will do everything in his power to help Bezzecchi win the 2026 MotoGP title, especially as he still hasn’t forgiven Márquez for what happened between them in 2015, when he accused the Spaniard of destroying his title hopes.
