Sunday’s Czech Grand Prix was the 12th round of the 2025 MotoGP world championship, so there have been 36 podium finishers so far this season. You won’t be surprised to learn that all but six of those podium places have been filled by Ducati riders, with two going to Honda, two to Aprilia, one to Yamaha and one to KTM.

And Brno was only the second time this season that there weren’t two or more Ducati riders on the podium, with winner Marc Márquez joined by Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi and KTM’s Pedro Acosta.

Is this a reason for MotoGP fans to be cheerful? Is the Brno result a sign that Aprilia and KTM are finally taking the fight to Ducati, having made up the ground they lost when MotoGP’s current rear slick was introduced at the start of last season?

Possibly, but probably not.

The other race where only one Ducati rider climbed the podium (no surprise that it was Marc Márquez again) was Silverstone, where the runaway world championship leader was joined by winner Bezzecchi and Honda’s Johann Zarco.

There are straightforward reasons why Ducati couldn’t assert its usual dominance at these two grands prix, making them exceptions to the rule of the Desmosedici.

At Silverstone, Ducati found itself between a rock and a hard place with front tyre allocation – the medium was too hard and the soft was too soft, which is why Ducati got beaten and why four of the five riders that crashed on Sunday afternoon were Ducati riders.

At Brno, Ducati found itself without the usual mountain of data to help it get the best out of the Desmosedici, because it’s five years since MotoGP visited the awesome Czech venue and the circuit has been completely resurfaced, transforming Brno from ice rink to grip city. Thus, Ducati lost one of its biggest advantages last weekend.

In recent seasons, Ducati was able to gather double the data gathered by most of its rivals, because it had twice as many bikes on the grid. This gave them a huge advantage, not so much through conventional data use, which has engineers reading a dizzying array of squiggly lines on computer screens to work out better set-ups, but through loading all that data into artificial-intelligence and machine-learning programmes which can find solutions no one even dreamed about.

“AI has increased a lot in the last years,” says Ducati MotoGP boss Gigi Dall’Igna. “We also did many things like this in the past, but the results weren’t good, because you need to build up the data. Now AI is really important for us to achieve our results.”

The most important factor in all motor sports is grip, because grip ultimately determines how fast you go around a racetrack. Therefore, the most important use of data in this way during race weekends is tyre analysis, because when the racing is so tight (yes, MotoGP is still super-tight, with usually less than 20 seconds between winner and 10th place), nothing is more important than tyre choice and tyre management.

AI can make sense of the huge amount of data captured by MotoGP bikes, which would otherwise require thousands of computer technicians and thousands of hours to hunt through. AI zooms into areas of data where there are interesting connections and ignores others, so it massively speeds up the process of analysis and number crunching.

Engineers use this knowledge to choose the correct tyres and, more importantly, tell their riders how to use the tyres, in incredible detail.

The data may tell the engineers that one section of the track generates too much heat in the front tyre, so they ask their riders to reduce the stress they put into the tyre through that section, whenever possible.

The data may also tell them that one area of a tyre will suffer during a particular part of the race, so the rider should be ready for that and adjust his riding technique accordingly.

Inevitably, this sort of analysis started in Formula 1, because F1 is motor sport’s richest and therefore most technically advanced championship.

“In F1, tyre performance is pretty much the only question they ask,” says Mike Russell, who races classic bikes and works at ESI, one of Britain’s biggest automotive computer simulation companies. “Everything else is what compromise do you make to keep the tyres in their operating window.

“The first thing is how do you make sure the tyre is in its temperature window and keep it there? The rest is creating compromises around the bike and rider for the benefit of the tyres: what kind of load do you want on the tyre and how do you achieve that load through changes to geometry, suspension, whatever?

“In F1 the engineers tell drivers stuff like, ‘Please turn into Turn Seven three metres later,’ and that’s probably to make the tyres last longer. You may lose 0.001 seconds in that corner, but the tyres stay in their operating window for three or four laps longer, which is much more important.”

If you think all this is getting too high-tech for your liking, well, that’s life. These are the areas in which the manufacturers want to work because this is where the biggest technological advances are to be found, not only in race departments, but also in production departments.

“We also use [MotoGP computer] models to make cutting-edge computer models for the development of all Yamaha motorcycles,” says Yamaha Motor Racing president Takahiro Sumi, who runs the company’s MotoGP project.

The good thing, of course, is that motorcycles are much more complicated than cars, because they move in so many ways and the rider is part of the machine dynamics, unlike a car driver, who sits static in the car. Therefore, MotoGP is still more human than F1.

“Yes, motorcycle racing is more human-related,” affirms Sumi. “This makes it difficult to find clear answers, so we are not at the level of F1 in simulations. That’s why the vehicle-dynamics model of a motorcycle is maybe a never-ending job!”

And this is why a MotoGP rider can make more of a difference than an F1 driver, which is why Marc Márquez has scored almost twice as many points so far this year as team-mate Pecco Bagnaia.

Márquez has won the last 10 races – five sprints and five grands prix – because he is by far the best rider on the grid. Not only faster, cleverer too.

After Sunday’s race, he told us that when Bezzecchi mounted his second attack at around three-quarters distance, he simply raised his pace by three to four tenths a lap! This is a rider completely in control. And not only in laptimes, but in how he works at increasing performance in every situation, always trying to think ahead of his rivals.

For example, compare how Márquez and Bagnaia reacted when they got their tyre-pressure warnings during Saturday’s sprint race.

Bagnaia was the first to get the warning from his dash, which tells the rider that he’s heading towards a penalty for low front tyre pressure, so he needs to let someone past and slot in behind them to raise the tyre’s temperature and pressure. The very next lap, Márquez got the same warning.

Bagnaia let Pedro Acosta through as they rode downhill into the Turn 5 braking area. Márquez waited for Acosta in the Turn 7 acceleration area.

There was a big difference between the two. As soon as Bagnaia had let Acosta past, he was a good ten metres behind the KTM, because he was still slowing for the corner, whereas Márquez was already on the throttle as Acosta came past, so he ended up only a metre or two behind the KTM. Not only did this allow him to get his front tyre back up to temperature quicker, it also allowed him to keep track position, whereas Bagnaia immediately got beaten up by Enea Bastianini and Fabio Quartararo.

Márquez has always had this ability to deal with disasters better than others because he stays calm and thinks better. Think of his comebacks at Estoril 2010 and Motegi 2012, both situations which would’ve fried the brains of most riders.