By Joe Tatulli
MotoGP Update
Well things are off to an exciting start for the 2026 MotoGP season. After much testing, and hours and hours of laps at Sepang and Buriram the riders and factories converged at the Chang Circuit in Thailand for the first weekend of qualifying and racing in 2026.
Overall it was an amazing and historic weekend for Aprilia, the other Italian company building machines at this level, Ducati being the other. Ducati has dominated the sport for the last five or so years but that run came to an end in Thailand. No doubt Ducati will bounce back but for this single weekend Aprilia made a major statement that they have a winning bike and the riders in place to contend for the Championship. Time will tell.
Just to set the stage for those of you who are not familiar with MotoGP, Friday of the race weekend is the first day riders and bikes can take to the track for Free Practice sessions and what are call “flying laps” and “time attacks”. Each full lap consists of four (4) sectors and each rider is timed for each sector of a completed lap along with the total time for a completed lap. After practice comes qualifying and the riders line up on the grid for both the Sprint on Saturday and the full Grand Prix race on Sunday in order from the the rider with the fastest lap at the end of qualifying (also known as pole position) to the slowest rider at the end of qualifying (also known as last). You get the idea. Obviously riders in the first three rows of the grid (positions 1 to 9 -three riders per row) usually end up on the podium. Another interesting thing about qualifying is the fastest riders usually break a track’s single lap records while qualifying, and rarely ever even come close to those lap times during the race itself.
The first weekend of 2026 was dominated by Aprilia rider Marco Bezzecchi (79). Bezz was the fastest rider at the end of each practice and qualifying session, and won the Sunday Grand Prix handily with a 5.5 second gap between his winning time and second place finisher Pedro Acosta (37). A second is an eternity in MotoGP. A tenth-of-a-second (or a couple of tenths in many cases) is usually the the difference between the pole sitter’s best lap time and the P2 rider’s. Many times it can be only a few hundredths-of-a-second between the qualifying lap times of the top four or five riders on the grid. Everything happens fast in MotoGP.
Acosta won the Saturday Sprint due to a penalty by Marc Marquez on the penultimate lap. Apparently the stewards gave Marquez a “Drop 1 Position” penalty for bumping Acosta as they battled shoulder-to-shoulder on that lap, and as they did on several of the previous laps. It was an exciting and well fought battle by both riders. You may be able to see the News story, with videos, from the MotoGP website by clicking here.
The next amazing thing was the of the top five Grand Prix finishers four were riding Aprilias. Ducati’s first bike to cross the finish line under the checkered flag was Fabio Di Giannantonio (49) who finished sixth.
Perennial favorite Marc Marquez had a strange tire failure near the end of the race and didn’t finish. During his post race remarks he said, “Super strange because normally on double kerbs you need to be careful when you jump in, but when you jump out, they aren’t meant to create those issues on the bike. But when you jump in, you need to be careful, which is normal. Even in the test, I jumped many times out there, and many other riders also did in Practice. This time, when I jumped out, the rim, the rear tyre just exploded, but I am happy because it was super close to a massive crash.”
The next race is in Brazil at the end of this month, and it’s been 22 years since the last MotoGP race in Brazil.