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The 75th and longest season of world championship motorcycle roadracing begins this weekend with the Qatar Airways Grand Prix at Lusail International Circuit in Qatar. With 21 rounds scheduled, and a sprint race added to each round as of last year, there will be more MotoGP racing than ever, and there are many questions to be answered.
This longest-ever season of MotoGP racing was originally supposed to be 22 rounds, but the Argentina round has already been canceled. Last year was supposed to be 21 rounds, but ended up being 20, as the Grand Prix of Kazakhstan was canceled. (That race is back on this year's schedule.) The series will visit the United States in April, spend most of the summer in Europe, then make a swing through Asia before concluding at Valencia in Spain. Last year, the grueling schedule meant that at least one regular MotoGP rider was missing from every round, and this year will only be longer and harder.
Before we look ahead at 2024, consider just a couple of stats from the last seven and a half decades of racing. Honda has the most race wins at 821, more than 300 ahead of Yamaha — which is a striking figure considering that those two marques finished last in the constructor's standings in 2023 and seem likely to stay there in 2024, despite some progress in the off-season. All told, 126 riders have won world championships in the various solo classes. And that's as good a segue as any into the first of our five questions.
Question #1: Who will win?
Of course this is the most fundamental question every year, the obvious topic that keeps us entertained as pre-season testing unfurls and we wait for the lights to go out for real. When I wrote my preseason look at the Superbike World Championship two weeks ago, I noted that 2024 was likely to be very different from 2023, when three men dominated. The actual racing at Phillip Island showed that the difference was even greater than I expected.
In MotoGP, meanwhile, it's looking like 2024 will not be so different from 2023. Last year's favorites are this year's favorites.
That starts with the obvious favorite, Pecco Bagnaia (top photo). He's back on the factory Ducati Lenovo team and aiming to join Marc Márquez and Valentino Rossi (good company there) as the only riders to win three consecutive MotoGP titles this century. Bagnaia finished both the pre-season tests in Malaysia and Qatar at the top of the time sheets and looked comfortable doing it on the new factory Ducati Lenovo Team GP24. He's healthy, confident, fast, and has the best motorcycle in the paddock. Who can prevent him from a threepeat?
You have to start with Prima Pramac Racing's Jorge Martín, who challenged Bagnaia to the end last year. Martín has been close to Bagnaia's times but not quite there, struggling at the Qatar test with some small and elusive problems. Just as threatening to the champion is his teammate, Enea Bastianini, who was hampered last year by injury but looks comfortable this year on the GP24 and finished the Qatar test with the second-best time.
Ducatis would have swept the top spots of the final day of testing if not for a few Aprilias sneaking in. Fastest was veteran Aleix Espargaró on the factory Aprilia team.
Bagnaia is the easy pick for a favorite, but if you want to put some money down with the London bookies, you may be surprised to learn that another rider will get you similarly slim odds. How can that be? That brings us to the next question.
Question #2: Will a Ducati revive Márquez?
Actually, this is probably the most debated question of all. Marc Márquez joins Gresini Racing, alongside his brother, Alex, putting him on a Ducati (albeit a year-old GP23, not the new GP24) for the first time in his career. During the heart of his run of six MotoGP championships in seven years, it would have been impossible to imagine Márquez leaving Repsol Honda to ride a Ducati, but times have changed. The once dominant Honda Racing Corp. has lost its way in roadracing, and European manufacturers, not Japanese, dominate today.
MM93 seems to bring out the strongest opinions, so many fans expect him to return to his all-conquering ways now that he is on the top brand of motorcycle in the MotoGP paddock. And others are hoping he'll fall flat on his face (without taking out their favorite riders in the process).
Since 2019, when Márquez won 12 of 19 races and easily wrapped up the championship, his life has been a bad soap opera, with his broken arm, botched recovery, multiple surgeries, occasional bouts of double vision, and all while wrestling with the hard-to-ride Honda that left fellow RC213V riders injured and demoralized.
I'm already on record as predicting Márquez will finish third in the championship this year, so bookmark that page if you want to serve me crow at the end of the year.
Question #3: Can we skip the boring stuff (rules)?
The answer: not entirely.
The stickiest issue is the threat of riders being disqualified if their tire pressure falls below a required minimum level for a specified percentage of a race. This became an issue last year as Michelin didn't want riders using lower pressures (it's mainly a front tire issue) for fear of failures, and riders wanting to avoid pressures rising too high during races, which reduces grip under braking and makes crashes more likely. The problem is that it's impossible for teams to know what will happen during a race. If the rider is stuck in a pack, the front tire temperature will stay higher and pressure will rise. If he's riding alone on the track, it won't.
Last year, teams were given warnings first and time penalties for repeat violations. Supposedly, this year, riders will be disqualified if their machines don't keep to the required pressure range. Discussions have been ongoing and there have been rumors of adjustments to the range of pressure allowed and the percentage of laps it must stay in that range, but so far there has been no official adjustment to the rule. Riders are worried about crashing or being uncompetitive if the front tire pressure rises or being disqualified if it stays too low. About the only thing that seems certain on the eve of racing is that nobody's happy with the situation.
Meanwhile, aerodynamic features keep expanding and evolving, with bigger rear wings and stegosaurus fins sprouting to go along with bigger, more intricately shaped moustache wings, not to mention tinkering with curved and flat surfaces on the sides and bottom of the fairing. But that's an entire discussion on its own.
Question #4: Who will be the surprise of 2024?
If we knew, it wouldn't be a surprise, right? But here are a few riders to watch.
For some time, Pedro Acosta has been touted as the next big thing in MotoGP, and the former Moto3 and Moto2 champion joins the Red Bull GASGAS Tech 3 team this year and has adapted to the MotoGP class quickly. His numbers looked better in Malaysia than in Qatar, but he's exceeding expectations for a rookie on a KTM. Raúl Fernández on an Aprilia for the Trackhouse Racing team (see more below) had a pre-season that promises a big step forward from his rookie year in MotoGP. Another is Fabio Di Giannantonio. After he learned last year that he was losing his Gresini Ducati ride to Márquez, Di Giannantonio won his first premier-class race in Qatar and finished the season strong, landing with the Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team for 2024, also riding a Desmosedici GP23.
Question #5: What's with this stars and stripes stuff?
Lance's Theory of Inverse Dominance/Display in Racing states that the smaller the U.S. presence in MotoGP, the greater the likelihood that a stars and stripes motif will be used by the few remaining survivors. You don't see Spanish and Italian flags all over the livery of MotoGP bikes because everyone knows that riders from those countries have taken over, no reminder necessary.
The new and much talked-about U.S. presence is a new team in MotoGP, Trackhouse Racing, which got the grid spots taken away from CryptoDATA RNF team. Trackhouse was founded by car racer Justin Marks and fields a team in NASCAR. Trackhouse will take over where the RNF team left off, with many of the same personnel and with the same riders, Raúl Fernández and Miguel Oliveira, Aprilias. Trackhouse has further convinced the MotoGP paddock it is serious by hiring Davide Brivio, one of the most successful team managers in MotoGP, who returns after two years in Formula One.
The only full-time U.S. rider in MotoGP, Moto2, or Moto3 is Joe Roberts, who returns to the Onlyfans American Racing Team he rode for previously after racing for the Italtrans team. Roberts finished the Moto2 pre-season test in Qatar with the second-fastest lap time, and former racer and current rider coach John Hopkins is on record saying he thinks Roberts can contend for the title. But with as many as 20 riders within a second of the fastest lap times in testing, margins are razor-thin and it's hard to predict who will actually win on track.
Bonus factoid: Moto3 bikes are how fast?
The Moto2 and Moto3 classes are switching from spec Dunlop tires to Pirelli tires for 2024. In Moto2, lap times have been similar, but the Moto3 bikes are significantly quicker than they were last year. And it's easy to underestimate just how fast a Moto3 motorcycle is.
Consider this: At the recent pre-season test at Circuito de Jerez Ángel Nieto in Spain, Red Bull KTM Ajo rider José Antonio Rueda set the fastest lap with a time of 1:43.276. In 2002, the first year of 990 cc four-strokes in the premier class, Valentino Rossi won pole position at Jerez on his Honda RC211V with a lap time of 1:42.193. So a 250 cc Moto3 motorcycle of today laps Jerez less than 1.1 seconds slower than a 990 cc MotoGP bike of 2002.
The performance that riders turn in during the first half of 2024 could have repercussions for years to come, as 18 of the 22 riders in MotoGP will see their contracts expire at the end of this year. (And that number was 19 until a few days ago, when Ducati announced that it had signed Bagnaia for two more years, through the 2026 season.) That means it's likely to be a particularly busy silly season with riders jockeying for position not just on the track, but also in the contract negotiating arena. Just one more added layer of pressure to the longest season.
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