MotoGP is back: with one race done, here are 2026’s big talking points

Ready your bucket of rotten eggs and your best pantomime boos, everyone - racing on two wheels. Hiss, boo, shame, etcetera. While we’re rather more partial to four wheels, the inconvenient truth is that people steering machines around a track by leaning off them until their limbs scrape along the ground is quite watchable. 

MotoGP kicked off its 2026 season last weekend at Thailand’s Mandalika circuit, and it was anything but the Marc Marquez ticker tape parade of dominance that many feared it would be. The opening race weekend has thrown up many talking points, and these are only the most succulent of them. 

Aprilia’s incumbent Rubik's cube enthusiast Marco Bezzecchi was the only rider who looked capable of beating Marc Marquez without help from weather, injuries or Kafkaesque tyre pressure rules in 2025. And he did it in his first season with a new manufacturer. Impressive isn’t a big enough word. IMPRESSIVE might be, though.

After a very encouraging pre-season, at the time of writing he’s started 2026 by topping the Friday practice sessions, securing pole, crashing out of the lead in the Saturday sprint, and then bouncing back on Sunday with a grand prix win.

Based on pre-season and round one alone, Bez looks genuinely capable of beating the red peril - a modern incarnation of Marquez who many feared would be unbeatable this season.

Is it an early season form blip, or can Bez keep it going long enough to mount a championship run?

KTM protege Pedro Acosta has reportedly already secured a factory Ducati ride for 2027, and there was chatter in the pre-season that the Murcian might be mentally signed out until he gets the big red bike. He silenced that chatter instantly at Mandalika by taking a maiden victory in the sprint race – albeit under conditions even spicier than the local delicacies – and then a P2 on Sunday. 

Being handed the victory in the last corner by the stewards after an overly aggressive Marquez move can’t have felt like the most satisfying way to take that monkey off his back, but nevertheless it means Acosta leaves Thailand as the championship leader. Nobody thought the KTM would be good enough to launch a title fight this year. Acosta might have already begun proving them wrong.  

Both Japanese manufacturers have been in a tough spot since the early 2020s, having resisted the category’s shift towards aero-led performance and fallen badly behind as a result. While Honda has been capitalising on its concessions and making quietly encouraging progress over the last calendar year, the outlook for Yamaha is… murkier.

For starters, the M1 is running a V4 engine for the first time, after decades of tried-and-tested inline four power units that delivered the manufacturer’s signature corner speed and compliance. With those characteristics now gone, factory riders Fabio Quartararo and Alex Rins must contend with a raw development bike whose V4 hasn’t delivered the straight-line speed boost they hoped it would. Reports are circulating that Quartararo’s already signed a factory ride with Honda next year, so his motivation to bring the M1 up to pace might be, er, slightly compromised.

As for the customer Pramac team, Jack Miller will continue to work primarily on bike development over results, and WSBK sensation Toprak Razgatlioglu must learn how to adapt his two-wheeled circus skills to a rigid race bike that looks so far like the slowest on the grid.

Quite a good season Marc had last year, wasn’t it? The eight-time champion was so dominant from the off that not even missing the final four rounds through injury could make the final points totals look like a close fight between him and little bro Alex. He almost literally won the 2025 championship with one hand tied behind his back.

No one’s doubting Marc’s ability in 2026, but with a lingering shoulder injury and a lack of winter training there are question marks about whether he can hit that preposterous level again. Particularly not on a Ducati package that looks more vulnerable and finicky than it did in the glory days between 2023-24.

As for Alex, who’d previously resided resolutely in his brother’s shadow since moving up to the premier class in 2020, 2025 was a breakout year in which he earned three grand prix victories and was a mainstay on the podium’s second step. In order to maintain that performance level, everything from his fitness to Gresini’s bike package to the precise orientation of the stars and planets in our Milky Way will have to go right. 

So far, he’s started that mission by launching a very 2020–2024 Alex Marquez divebomb on Fabio Di Giannantonio in the sprint race, running them both wide and ruining their races, then crashing out of P8 in the Sunday race. Tough start.

Since Maverick Vinales announced that he’s been working with five-time champion Jorge Lorenzo as a mentor and coach, MotoGP has gained its most compelling bromance story in years. 

Vinales has always been an enigma. The cliche is that on his day, he’s the most talented rider of his generation, but that day happens roughly once every calendar year and quite often falls during pre-season testing. Through the rest of the season he seems to get lost pursuing the perfect bike setup, or unsettled by modern MotoGP’s teeth-and-claws aggression in his opening laps and unable to regain his rhythm. 

Lorenzo was the precise opposite of that persona. Ice cool, metronomically consistent, and preternaturally good at imposing himself in the opening laps. Clearly Lorenzo thought that he was able to bestow some of those traits on Vinales, and so began working with the Tech3 KTM rider during the off-season. But will it amount to race wins, or just a lot of bromantic social media content?

Based on Mandalika alone, er, we hope the social content’s at least going to give us a few laughs. Mav finished out of the points in P16 on Sunday, 36 seconds off the leader and riding his worst performance on a KTM since he joined the Tech3 squad last season. Back to the drawing board, Jorge. 

A lot of the chatter this year is about where certain riders will be in 2027 and whether they’ll kick on from their 2025 performances. VR46’s Frankie Morbidelli, on the other hand, will simply want to distance himself from the lowlights of last season. 

It was a year characterised by mistakes, rash moves and long lap penalties for the Italian, the most toe-curling being a crash with longtime rival Aleix Espargaro while taking their places on the grid before the race start. In MotoGP terms, he basically called the teacher ‘mum’ in front of his crush. 

Morbidelli is fast. He was runner-up in the bizarro 2020 championship, and has shown brief flashes of that form thereafter, but he’s also had to work his way back from multiple serious injuries. Last season his instincts simply seemed to be off. He went for gaps that weren’t there. This year, progress looks like showing that he’s a cooler head on some experienced fluro yellow shoulders. 

Dive-bombing Pecco Bagnaia for P8 on the final corner of the last lap might not have been the most obvious way to do that, but at least it was a clean move.