Many people have been predicting Ducati’s half-decade of MotoGP dominance will finally come under threat this season. After three days of testing at Sepang, I’m not sure.
It’s the same old story. When you’re in front you can keep chipping away at improvements, a tenth here, a tenth there, while your rivals are falling over themselves trying to catch up.
No one knows this better than Yamaha technical director Max Bartolini, who had a particularly stressful Sepang test, with all his motorcycles withdrawn from day two for safety reasons.
“When I worked with Ross Brawn in Formula 1 [at Ferrari], he always said that if you’re in front and you work properly no one can catch you,” the Italian told me a while back. “Because the others need to rush and make tests and try things and make mistakes, but if you are in front and you work in a proper way, you just bring something better and better and better and better. I think this is exactly what Ducati is doing now.”
Aprilia, KTM and Honda have all made progress into 2026, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to beat Ducati to the championship.
What has Ducati done to stay ahead? Not a lot, but this year’s Desmosedici equation is either GP24 + GP25 = GP26, GP24 ÷ GP25 = GP26 or GP24 x GP25 = GP26. In other words, they’ve mixed their wondrous GP24 with what they learned last season to create the GP26. It’s a mongrel bike (factories are only allowed to use 2024 or 2025 engines this year) but you wouldn’t want to fight it.
One thing is 99.99% certain, the Desmosedici GP26, ridden by Marc Marquez, Pecco Bagnaia, Alex Maquez and Fabio Di Giannantonio, and the GP25, ridden by Frankie Morbidelli and Fermin Aldeguer, all have the same heart this year.
How low can you go? Honda’s latest ride-height device drops the RC213V’s rear end super-low. This is Mir, on his way to his 1m 56s best
Michelin
How do we know they all use GP24 engines? We don’t but it’s unconscionable that Ducati would equip their riders with the 2025 engine that nearly burned down half of their factory garage last year. It would be like a general equipping his troops with a gun that doesn’t shoot straight.
The only reason half their factory garage nearly burned down last season was because there was nothing they could do to stop it burning down, because they weren’t allowed to swap their 2025 engines for 2024 engines.
When Ducati told us last October that Bagnaia’s problems were related to the 2025 ride-height device, it had to be lying. Because no way would it have let its twice world champion fall into a pit of despair, thereby creating a swirl of anti-Ducati conspiracy theories, if they could’ve avoided those difficulties simply by swapping ride-height devices.
Bagnaia looked a different man at Sepang this week – relaxed and smiling because he knows he’s back in the game.
When the 2022 and 2023 champion was asked where his 2026 Desmosedici is better than his 2025 bike, he answered, “Braking into the corner”.
Alex underlined the situation when he added that his GP26 feels just like his GP24 during corner entry.
In other words, the engine inertia problems – either too much or too little – that destroyed his 2025 season and put Marc on a knife-edge, are gone.
The big question now is will the 2024 engine give more to Bagnaia and Di Giannantonio or more to Marc, last year’s three factory-bike riders? If it helps Bagnaia and Di Giannantonio more than Marc, it’s good news for the fans.
Meanwhile, Alex was faster than all of them, just like he was during last year’s Sepang tests and again at the Malaysian GP. His best time on this visit was a 1m 56.402s, a fraction faster than the 56.493 he rode last year. Is Alex a better rider than he was in 2025? Quite possibly, but it’s too soon to be certain.
Either way it was no surprise that Alex, Bagnaia and Marc rode the best sprint simulations, all lapping within a few tenths of each other.
Aprilia is using more downforce tricks than anyone, including its new hedgehog seat aero
Michelin
Like always, Ducati’s biggest focus at Sepang was aerodynamics, because aero must be homologated on the eve of the season-opening Thai grand prix at the end of this month. All four GP26 riders have four different aero sets to choose from, consisting of different combinations of front wings, diffusers/ground-effect bulges and seat aero.
It also tried tiny new winglets at the bottom of the bike’s front-fork shrouds.
So far it looks like Ducati’s 2026 front wings create too much downforce, so either their 2024 and 2025 upper fairings will probably be the choice, with 2026 diffusers/ground-effect bulges. The other most significant new part on the GP26 is a lower-than-ever ride-height device, Gigi Dall’Igna’s proudest achievement.
The best news for Marc is that his much-mangled right shoulder, injured once again at Mandalika last October, survived the tests and on day three he completed his sprint simulation feeling “comfortable”.
Ducati’s five riders (injured Aldeguer won’t return until the Brazilian GP) were all inside the top six – super-fast and super-smooth – so there’s not much to say except they’re all happy. Thus the championship will go to whoever can maximise their performance at all tracks and in all conditions, and you know what that means.
Lonesome against the Ducati legions was Marco Bezzecchi, who left it to the final moments of the final day to move into the 56s and go second fastest, splitting Alex and Di Giannantonio in the top three.
Sepang was one of Aprilia’s worst circuits last year, Bezzecchi qualifying 14th and finishing 11th in October’s Malaysian GP, so Aprilia will go into the final pre-season tests at Buriram, Thailand (21/22 February) confident they can cause Ducati more pain in 2026. There’s a real needle between Noale and Bologna, which gives this duel for engineering supremacy a real edge.
Acosta gave himself and KTM a six out of ten for the test – is he on his way to Ducati?
MotoGP
Aprilia tech director Fabiano Sterlacchini described his 2026 creation an evolution of the 2025 RS-GP, which gave the brand their greatest season, with three victories and third in the championship.
Once again Aprilia is the most radical on aerodynamics, with the latest RS-GP sprouting all sorts of aero appendages, including a hedgehog-like seat hump.
“Not too bad, positive days, can’t complain at all,” was Bezzecchi’s evaluation. His sprint-simulation pace was more than half a second down on Alex, Bagnaia and Marc, but he ran used tyres to get better data.
Honda was the last factory in the 56s, with Joan Mir fastest on the second day, using the RC213V’s new and super-low ride-height device to maximum effect. Mir’s sprint simulation was also faster than most, but nearly a second off Alex’s pace.
“We are moderately satisfied – the bike is performing well and we are competitive,” said HRC technical director Romano Albesiano. “We have improved what was already a good base. It’s always a composition of small improvements – the engine, engine control strategies, the chassis and the bike is lighter and narrower.”
KTM didn’t make it into the 56s, with Pedro Acosta only managing a 57.2 and running half a second off Alex in his sprint simulation, so he only gave himself and KTM a six out of ten for the test. The latest RC16 features various new details, many of them designed to fix the bike’s biggest problem, its appetite for rear tyres.
But will that be enough to keep Acosta at KTM in 2027, when 19 of MotoGP’s 22 riders are out of contract?
Razgatlıoğlu had a horrible start to his rookie MotoGP campaign: a slow, unreliable bike and no seat aero, because he’s so tall that his seat unit doesn’t allow it
MotoGP
Sepang rumours suggested that the Spanish youngster will join Marc in the factory Ducati team, while his place at KTM will be taken by Alex, a move the 2025 MotoGP runner-up hopes to announce before the season gets underway. Martin is supposed to have already signed with Yamaha, to replace Fabio Quartararo who is going to Honda, because if Quartararo had any doubts about his move, the first tests of 2026 will have got rid of them.
Yamaha’s technical director Max Bartolini reveals the details, plus why he knew Fabio Quartararo would be disappointed the first time he rode the V4
By
Mat Oxley
Yamaha had a grim Sepang, its all-new V4 both slow and unreliable. In racing, slow and reliable isn’t great, and neither is fast and unreliable, but slow and unreliable is an unmitigated disaster.
Quartararo crashed on Day 1, then broke an engine. The engine problem – so far unknown – was bad enough to put Yamaha into panic mode, withdrawing all its YZR-M1s from day two. The bikes were back on track on day three – minus Quartararo, who broke a finger in his crash – but Jack Miller, Alex Rins and rookie Toprak Razgatlıoğlu were running detuned engines and were way off the pace.
Yamaha will need to work night and day to prepare for the final Buriram tests. It hadn’t planned to upgrade its engine until the Brazil GP at the earliest, but now it really has to find more speed and reliability sooner than that.
Yamaha’s nightmare reminds me of Honda’s disastrous start to the 1984 MotoGP season, when reigning champion Freddie Spencer crashed during testing at Kyalami, South Africa. Spencer fell when his NSR500’s fancy new carbon-fibre rear wheel collapsed, putting him out of the first race.
Things like that can happen to the best of them. And, after all, this is why people go racing, to learn. Yamaha is the first manufacturer to entirely change its motorcycle configuration since Suzuki switched from a V4 to an inline-four in 2015. It will be interesting to watch its progress from what it will hope is its rock bottom.
