Portugese GP winner Bezzecchi proved that Aprilia’s RS-GP finally has a rear end to match its awesome front end to score the brand’s third win of the year so far. Meanwhile Ducati’s factory team had something to celebrate – its first Sunday point since September!
Márquez couldn’t stay with Bezzecchi, who scored a third 2025 victory for Aprilia, making it the Noale brand’s best-ever year in MotoGP
Another MotoGP weekend, another miserable three days for Ducati’s Desmosedici GP25, ending with an eighth, a 15th and a crash in Sunday’s Portuguese Grand Prix.
There was a silver lining of sorts. Nico Bulega’s ride to 15th (the World Superbike runner-up is subbing for injured world champion Marc Márquez) gave the factory team its first grand prix point since Márquez won the championship in Japan, six weeks and four race weekends ago!
Pecco Bagnaia was pushing hard in fourth place on Sunday when he tumbled out — a gentle squeeze of front brake as he swept into Turn 11 a little faster than usual and the front was gone, like always, no warning, no nothing. His fourth crash from the last six GPs.
And then the long trudge back to pitlane, shoulders slumped, head bowed. And yet… and yet… maybe there was just a glimmer of a smile behind his dark visor, because Bagnaia is very nearly at the end of his 2025 nightmare, which started ten months ago during the opening pre-season tests at Sepang, Malaysia.
Eight days from now, Bagnaia will awake from his nightmare when he rolls out of Valencia pitlane to commence testing for the 2026 season aboard what will be — in all but name — a GP24.
“I said, ‘I’ll do Turn 7 like Marc,’ and boom, I crashed!”
The one-day Valencia test doesn’t usually mean much, but it will be interesting to watch Bagnaia and VR46’s GP25 rider Fabio Di Giannantonio during their get-out-of-jail day. They will both be in heaven, instead of hell, riding motorcycles that do what they want them to do and keep them informed about what’s happening with the front tyre, just like Alex Márquez, when he went from a GP23 to a GP24 at last November’s post-season Barcelona tests.
“The first time I tried the GP24 in the Catalunya tests, it was like, wow, this bike is super-nice to ride!” recalls Alex. “I could ride the bike as I wanted, I didn’t need to adapt a lot to extract its potential. I had struggled a lot with the GP23, so it was so nice to find a bike that was quite natural.”
Márquez and Acosta spent lots of time together in the sprint, less in the main race
Dorna
Throughout his ten-month 2025 prison sentence, Bagnaia has had to sit and examine his own data and compare it with data from Ducati’s other five riders, two of them on GP25s, three of them on GP24s.
He has looked at team-mate Marc’s GP25 data and wondered how the hell the Spaniard is doing what he’s doing. And occasionally he’s made the mistake of trying to emulate the 2025 champ.
“It’s impossible [to do what you do], especially at Turn 7,” Bagnaia told Marc during April’s Spanish GP at Jerez. “This morning I said, ‘I’ll do Turn 7 like Marc,’ and boom, I crashed!”
And he’s also had to look at Alex’s GP24 data and get all nostalgic for his 2024 campaign, during which he rode his GP24 to 11 grand prix victories and scored an average 24.9 points per weekend. This season he is averaging 13.7 points per weekend, a drop of 45%!
“Last year I never had this feeling and I was doing things that this year I cannot do,” said Bagnaia earlier this season and he wasn’t making it up.
Of course, Ducati won’t admit next week that its GP26 prototype is basically a GP24, because manufacturers rarely admit they’ve gone backwards, because this means their engineers didn’t do their sums right.
Is the GP24 still the best motorcycle on the grid? There’s been no doubt that through most of this season the bike has been faster and friendlier than all the others. But perhaps Aprilia’s RS-GP is now the best.
And we should stop right there and think about that — one of Ducati’s four rivals has finally built a bike that’s better than last year’s Desmosedici.
When Aprilia gets it right and keeps moving forward over the weekend it gets to Sunday afternoon with a bike that’s at least as fast as anything out there.
The pace of the podium men – Márquez, Bezzecchi and Acosta – made this the second most spread out dry race of the year
MotoGP
And this isn’t easy for the Noale factory, because most of the season it’s only had one rider that’s really on it, which is a huge handicap, because it’s working from only one good data and feedback source.
Marco Bezzecchi didn’t have what he needed on Saturday afternoon, when he couldn’t run with Alex or KTM’s Pedro Acosta, but no-one even got close to him on Sunday afternoon.
He took half a second out of the rest of the pack on the very first lap and the closest anyone got after that was Alex, who briefly closed the gap to four-tenths once he got into the groove.
A fascinating chat with Aprilia tech boss Fabiano Sterlacchini, during which we discuss MotoGP’s new rules, how he’s helped transform the RS-GP into a title contender, how the bike’s so-called leg wings work and why Marco Bezzecchi is a feedback genius
By
Mat Oxley
But it was all to no avail. By half-distance Bezzecchi was 1.8 seconds further up the road and with three laps to go he had stretched his advantage to 4.1 seconds, which means his pace was around two-tenths better than Alex’s and Acosta’s. A significant difference.
Sprint winner Alex might have built a better challenge but he destroyed the right side of his front tyre by pushing too hard to stay with the Aprilia through the last, fast, downhill, uphill right-hander.
Meanwhile, Bezzecchi and his crew had fixed some issues overnight. After watching Alex in the sprint, he improved his line through the all-important final corner, one of the very few places where you can really make a difference at Portimao.
And his engineers had tweaked machine balance, so he could be less aggressive on the bike and really make it flow, which is what you need to do around the Algarve international rollercoaster.
What’s really changed with the RS-GP is that it’s always had a great front end, whereas now it’s got a great front and rear end.
Bagnaia was pushing hard in fourth place when he fell – that’s what happens when you can’t feel the front
Ducati
Acosta was where he’s been since KTM’s midseason upgrade: so near but so far. He was excellent in the sprint, time and again attacking Alex, leading half the laps but finally coming up short by a tantalising tenth.
On Sunday he never had the grip – medium rear instead of the soft he had used in the sprint – to go with Bezzecchi or Alex. By one-third distance he was already more than a second behind the Gresini Ducati, though he had closed the gap to less than a second as Alex struggled to maintain his pace with his knackered front tyre.
KTM has now gone more than 90 grands prix without a dry win.
The rest were nowhere – this was the second most stretched-out dry race of the year, with 16.8 seconds covering the first five and 26.5 separating the top ten. Sachsenring has the biggest top-five gap of the year so far – at 18.9 seconds – because the German venue is another flowing layout, where you struggle to stay on the fast line if your motorcycle won’t behave itself.
It’s a strange day when the MotoGP winner is a rookie and the winner of the last race looks like a rookie. So what the hell is going on? Ducati finally tells us the reasons behind Bagnaia’s downfall, while Fermín Aldeguer takes an astonishing first victory
By
Mat Oxley
Rookie of the year Fermin Aldeguer finished fourth, nine seconds behind Acosta, after winning a barging match with Acosta’s team-mate Brad Binder. This was a rare turn of speed from the South African; his second top five of the year, following his fourth place at Mandalika, where five riders crashed out.
Massive respect as always to Fabio Quartararo, who once again rode the wheels off his Yamaha YZR-M1 to take sixth, two seconds behind Binder, despite a top-speed handicap of more than 5mph. That’s an agonising disadvantage!
And now to Valencia for the grand finale, although it won’t seem much like that with the championship decided almost two months before, the reigning champ injured and 2024 champ Jorge Martin and Tech3’s Maverick Viñales limping back from injury.
Once again, Tuesday at Valencia will be more important than Sunday, with all the 2026 prototypes (or 2024 revamps) coming out to play.
