Sachsenring's treacherous Turn 1: Where MotoGP braking is taken to its limits

The team of marshals that guard Turn 1 at Sachsenring, the compact and twisty home of sell-out MotoGP grands prix since 1998, don’t have much space. Beyond the gravel trap and behind the first Alpina air fence and rack of prone tyres lies a replacement synthetic barrier waiting to be deployed.

The sturdy cushion at Turn 1 is regularly abused when MotoGP comes to town, thanks to errant, spiralling machinery that is often tumbling from a speed cresting 186mph (300km/h) for the premier class bikes. A punctured fence equals an automatic red flag for a session or race and the marshals quickly inflate another. A few metres further back and a large steel mesh fence and concrete wall is the only protection from Sachsenring’s neighbouring Turn 10. Space is at a premium. Safety can be a worry.

Sachsenring is a technical and curious playground for MotoGP. It’s been described as a “kart track” by many riders with 13 corners in 2.24 miles (thus 30 race laps), 10 of which to the left, and puts the motorcycle into constant lean, emphasising edge grip and agility. It’s why Marc Márquez’s extreme modus operandi and flat track sensibility have been so ruthlessly effective with nine wins in 11 attempts in the MotoGP class, including last weekend’s eleventh round of 2025.

“He can really turn with the full lean angle and pick up the bike, [with] much less spin than us,” lamented Monster Energy Yamaha‘s Fabio Quartararo, whose last MotoGP win came at Sachsenring in 2022. “It’s a completely different riding style… and we are not able to do it. They [the Ducati riders] have so much grip on the full lean angle and on the pickup, they overheat much less the tyre than us and lap by lap we can see that our bike is getting worse and worse.”

There are few points for the bikes to roar at Sachsenring. The fearful downhill Turn 11 being one, and racers have resorted to skipping across part of the curb to gain the maximum possible momentum into 12 and one of two principal overtaking zones on the layout. The other exists into Turn 1, and at the end of a short uphill start straight. Watching MotoGP riders braking here can be breathtaking; the front wheel and suspension compressed under force, aerodynamics increasing load, rear wheel airborne and the bike pivoting. For a duration of 5.2 seconds and in 243 metres, MotoGP athletes (they have to be able to pump 5.4kg of pressure into the lever, manage 1.4g of deceleration) slow from more than 186mph to just 44. They also do it ‘blind’ while cresting a small rise and then drop steeply into a double apex ‘180’ before flicking left into Turn 2.

Only 10 riders finished the race on Sunday at Sachsenring

Opinions vary among MotoGP stars as to whether the curve is one of the hardest on the calendar, but it is certainly one of the more treacherous due to several factors: some highlighted in last weekend’s 2025 Grand Prix that had a hefty grandstand from the total 98,400-attendance poised on the periphery of Turn 1, sensing potential calamity. Firstly, there is the braking approach and full lean onto the right-hand side of the tyre that has not been worked since Turn 11 and is only worn three times a lap.

For 2025, there was also the combination of a tailwind, cooler temperatures on race day and a track that had been ‘cleaned’ of deposited rubber from the previous two days by rain on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Only 10 riders crossed the finish line at Sachsenring. Eight crashed, five in Turn 1 and two of those fallers out of unharried runner-up positions.

“It’s very difficult because you have to brake very hard but there’s a moment when the rear start to pick up because of the little hill,” described Márquez’s team-mate Pecco Bagnaia in 2024 after he’d benefitted from title rival Jorge Martín‘s error and crash at the same spot to win. “So as soon [as the rear] starts to go down, you have to brake more, but the front can lock because it’s in the right side…it’s very tricky.”

“If you are braking well and hard you can gain a lot of time,” offered HRC’s Luca Marini. “Turn 1 is very important and quite critical because you need to brake over the crest, the hill, so the rear contact is always zero and you have front lock, but if you are able to brake deep there then you are able to gain two tenths every lap, so it is still important.”

“It’s quite OK; enjoyable actually,” commented VR46’s Fabio Di Giannantonio on Friday. “The first braking is cool because you go onto a rise…you have the bike sliding a lot.” ‘Diggia’ was less enthusiastic on Sunday afternoon after his crash out of P2 on lap 18. “I just braked five metres later compared to the lap before and [with] 2 degrees more of angle, and I lost it,’ he grimaced. “You have to pay attention to many, many things. It was one of my good corners…but it destroyed the trust to me, let’s say!”

Hard braking is a measure of a rider’s feeling and belief in the front end of his motorcycle. Therefore, it is also a barometer of his confidence, and a yardstick for any style changes he needs to apply to suit the tyres or the characteristic of the bike: this is the case for the KTM trio of Pedro Acosta, Enea Bastianini and Brad Binder in 2025 all of whom are pursuing more grip and less understeer. The KTMs are the only bikes to use WP suspension, compared to the blanket use of Öhlins on the MotoGP grid, but the Austrians fall into the rank and file when it comes to brakes. Brembo technology has been setting the standard for carbon-fibre performance for half a century in Grand Prix as well as F1. Brembo’s expensive products bring a halt to all 22 bikes.

The start of the German GP

“There is no other company that can provide this kind of system when it comes to reliability for carbon friction material,” MotoGP Brembo Race Engineer Mattia Tombolan told Motor Sport. “If you look at World Superbike and other categories like Moto2 where they have steel brakes then that’s when competitors come in because, at the end of the day, carbon material requires such high-tech components that not every company can handle it.”

It’s a big investment and mandate, so Brembo has its own service team and truck inside the paddock. It also must be diplomatic as well as proficient with systems that generate up to 800 degrees temperature (and need to be over 250 degrees just to work). “It’s difficult to manage the same development at the same time,” Tombolan admits. “You need to be a politician and clear. Some differences [between the teams] come from the amount of data sharing. They ask us more frequently to join them and make more assumptions together. Some prefer to do their data collection by themselves and then give us some results.”

Aside from Turn 1 and Turn 12, Sachsenring is one of the softer circuits in MotoGP for braking. The easiest in terms of demands are the flowing cauldrons of speed that are Phillip Island in Australia and the TT Circuit Assen in the Netherlands. The harshest for the Brembos involve the squared corners at Motegi in Japan and Red Bull Ring in Austria; both tracks still to come on the 2025 schedule. At those venues, teams will shroud almost the entire front wheel with the largest 355mm carbon discs (that cost well over £9000 each ).

Brembo has also been working on a new master cylinder and caliper in recent seasons. “We are at the limit of the temperature that our system can use,” Tombolan admits. “After the 355 disc there is no room left on the front wheel! Actually, the first design of the disc was for a 360, but the mechanics did not have enough space with their fingers to change the tyre pressure!

“We could not provide more diameter or thickness or dimensions of the pads; to have a bigger pad, we needed a bigger caliper, so it passed from a fixing point of 108mm to 130mm,” he adds, outlining the age-old technical compromise between performance gain and loss and, in this case, the addition of more ‘baggage’ to a very crowded region of the motorcycle. “The fixing point on the fork was bigger. Most of the teams tested during pre-season to see if all was OK, and if it’s in the range then somewhere like Red Bull Ring they could use the caliper with just a bigger pad.

“We took advantage of this to adjust the piston. It means more lever stroke because you have more fluid from the master cylinder to the caliper but, on the other hand, you have more force due to the pressure. It means more weight and a bigger pad means more to handle for wear. There are cons to go with the pros, and the main thing the teams were worried about was weight.”

“I think they are being successful at not being a ‘bottleneck’ and to be able to offer the next step when it comes to the limit of the thermal capacity of the brakes,” reassures Risse. “It’s one of the leading directions of brake development at the moment, and it is not an easy job to keep that up because the bikes get faster and faster. It can create situations where the feelings can suffer because you end up in a compromise: the need for the right temperature range, but also the correct feeling.”

The company was also at the front of MotoGP news stories at the recent Aragon Grand Prix when 2022 and 2023 world champion Bagnaia found some long overdue improvement with the front-end sensation of his Ducati GP25 thanks to the unusual move of bolting on 355 discs at the MotorLand circuit. How did Brembo see this approach?

“The increase in diameter has a difference for the feeling of the rider; that must be the only reason they do it. There is an increase in radius where the caliper is activating the force, and with the same pressure the braking torque increases. It’s not too much because if you make the calculation between 340 and 355, then we are only talking about 5% but, still, in MotoGP 5% is something! We understood the rider preferred the configuration. You can achieve the same feeling by increasing the caliper but it is much easier and faster to change the disc and that’s what the team did.”

Brembo helped fashion the thumb-operated rear brake (as if riders needed another lever or switch in an already crowded cockpit) and one of the latest and highest-profile adopters of the mechanism was the Sachsenring king. “Marc had tried it before but never really liked it that much,” Tombolan says, “but now, like all of them, he is looking for details.”

Thumb-power is extra handy in Germany. “It is about how a rider uses the bike in corners at high lean and the thumb brake is very helpful,” the Italian explains. “He [Márquez] was not used to it but is trying it more and more to help the bike turn better. We have a standard lever at Brembo but the teams design their own for the riders’ specific wishes.”