Once upon a time, MotoGP would travel to Motegi and the big question would be whether Yamaha would finally be able to beat Honda at their home track. It was pretty much a given that a Japanese bike would win the Japanese GP, in no small part because Japanese bikes dominated grand prix motorcycle racing since the arrival of two strokes in the mid-1970s. Except for a brief period from 2005 through 2007, when Loris Capirossi took three wins in a row on a Ducati, Japanese bikes had a virtual monopoly on the Japanese GP.
That ended when MotoGP returned to Japan in 2022 after two seasons away due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Between Marc Márquez’ last win in 2019 and the return in 2022, MotoGP had changed almost beyond recognition. The arrival of the ride-height device, coupled to the huge leaps made in aerodynamics, meant that now, it was European brands that were ruling MotoGP.
In the three Sunday GPs held from 2022 to 2024, only one Japanese machine ended up on the podium at Motegi: Marc Márquez on a Honda in 2023, the race where he finally made his decision to give up the €25 million he was being paid by HRC and ride a Gresini Ducati for nothing. The other eight podium positions were taken by seven Ducatis and a KTM. In the two sprint races held in 2023 and 2024, the podium spots went to five Ducatis and a KTM. In 2024, there wasn’t a single Japanese bike in the top ten of either the GP or sprint race.
Playing a different game
Ducati, KTM, and Aprilia had moved the sport on, and were building MotoGP bikes to maximally exploit the technical regulations and Michelin’s rear tire. Honda and Yamaha were still building racing motorcycles, and racing motorcycles were no longer competitive.
In 2025, both Yamaha and Honda have made a huge step forward. Honda has won a race this year, albeit after Johann Zarco made a perfect gamble at a wet Le Mans. Fabio Quartararo has four poles and a podium, and should have won at Silverstone if he hadn’t been let down by Yamaha’s new and improved ride-height device. The progress is real, and fascinating.
But Honda’s top executives will not get to celebrate a victory for the Honda RC213V at the circuit they own this weekend, unless something truly unexpected happens. Victory at the Twin Ring Motegi is pretty much guaranteed to go to a European motorcycle, in all likelihood a Ducati.
A look at the layout explains why that might be. There are two things you want your motorcycle to be able to do well at Motegi: accelerate and brake. The rest you can stitch together, but if you can’t get drive out of slow corners, and you can’t get the bike stopped, you’re in real trouble.
The track starts as it means to go on. Accelerating hard onto the front straight, changing up through the gears until you over 280 km/h, you then get hard on the brakes for the first corner, shifting all the way back to second gear and flicking right, then right again through Turn 2. Out of Turn 2 you are hard on the gas again and shifting up through the gearbox.
Just as you hit 280 km/h, it is time brake hard again, more and more temperature seeping into the brakes as they scrub nearly 200 km/h off your speed. Turn 1 is a great place to overtake, but Turn 3 is a little trickier, the first of two lefts which are a little longer and slightly more sweeping. A dab of gas and then through the second left of Turn 4 and you are driving on to the next right at Turn 5, your brake discs now over 700°C and leaving you little margin for error.
Turn 5 is another place you can overtake if you line up the exit of Turn 4 correctly and accelerate hard enough. You need to brake later – yet again, another very hard braking point – and jam your nose underneath the rider ahead on the entrance to the right-hand hairpin.
From there, you dash into darkness as you fire through the tunnel that goes underneath the vast oval that is the second of Motegi’s Twin Ring circuits. You flick the bike through the fast right of the 130R corner at Turn 6, then click up a gear before hitting the brakes again for Turn 7, the first of the left-right combination that goes to make up the S Curve.
Preparing the finale
Out of Turn 8, and another burst of throttle before it’s time to brake hard again for the left hander at Turn 9, the V Corner. Drive out of here matters, because you are lining up the next hairpin to maximize drive onto the back straight. Up two gears before more hard braking and the slowest corner on the circuit, the first gear Turn 10, the appropriately named Hairpin Curve.
A little like Tramonto at Misano, the hairpin before the main straight, your line here is everything. You can attempt a pass on the way into Turn 10, but you risk running wide and losing drive onto the back straight. Likewise, if you are following, you can turn in a little later and try to cut back, focusing on getting the bike upright earlier and getting harder on the gas.
Because that is what matters down Motegi’s back straight. Getting tucked in as tightly as possible while fighting the bike, despite the ride-height device and aero. Now it’s about trying to coax as much drive out of your tires as possible, and squeeze the final couple of kilometers per hour out of the top speed.
The fact you are rolling downhill helps, except for the fact that the track drops away more steeply right at the point you want to get really hard on the brakes. So you need to get the bike pitched on its front wheel and the front tire loaded as you hold the brakes for the better part of a quarter of a kilometer. It is easy to get it wrong, and if you do, you are headed into the gravel at Turn 11.
Last chance saloon (ish)
That immense braking distance also makes Turn 11 one of the best places to overtake. But again, you are skating a very fine line. If you judge it just right, you dive underneath at Turn 11 and are ideally positioned to cross the finish line first. Get it anything less than perfect, however, and you throw the door wide open to a counterattack.
Once you have flung the bike right into Turn 11, you dive into the other tunnel under the oval again, and emerge blinking on the other side, just in time to flick the bike left twice and then right into the final corner, the aptly named Victory Corner. All you need is to get out of Turn 14 first, and victory is yours.
You will have noticed a lot of hard on the gas/hard on the brakes language, and that has consequences. For the brakes, as Motegi is one of the hardest circuits for braking, the rules mandating the use of 340mm discs at the circuit. But braking forces have increased even further since that rule was introduced, so most riders will be using the finned 355mm carbon discs by Brembo. It is a tough old place for the brakes, and the price of brakes overheating is very high indeed.
It is also a tough old place for fuel use. The bikes spend a lot of time with the throttle wide open, and that means the sound of the bikes being drowned out by the sound of fuel being sucked from the tank. So fuel management is crucial. So crucial that the teams use a special fuel saving map for the sighting lap, as we discovered when Aleix Espargaro’s electronics engineer forgot to swap out the sighting lap for the race map on the grid in 2022, forcing him to swap bikes and start from pit lane. Nobody can afford to use full power for the duration of the race.
Beyond the favorites
With all that acceleration and braking, you can see why the Ducatis have done so well here in the last few years. Which makes you think that Marc Márquez would have to start as favorite for victory here. But Márquez is coming to Motegi with one objective in mind: to finally wrap up the 2025 MotoGP title.
I wrote about the most important ways he can achieve that earlier this week, so I don’t want to spend too much time on this. Marc Márquez might be starting the weekend as favorite to win, but he is more likely to spend the weekend looking to see where the Gresini Ducati of his brother Alex is and trying to make sure he finishes ahead of that. So that opens up opportunities.
Not for Alex Márquez, of course. He will be in the crosshairs of brother Marc, and so is likely to struggle. The Gresini Ducati rider does not have a particularly illustrious history in the premier class at Motegi, and so could struggle to make a dent on the weekend.
Redemption arc
Looking at the rest of the field, KTM is where the interest lies. Pedro Acosta threw away a chance to win his first MotoGP sprint race at Motegi last year, crashing out of the lead. He was in the mix for the Sunday GP as well before crashing out, a result you have to believe would have been different had he not crashed on Saturday.
So there is very good reason to keep an eye out on Acosta. The KTM is the only other bike to have been on the podium at Motegi in the last three years, and Acosta has made real progress recently. At the post-race test after Misano, Acosta spent his time working on his setup and with the new aero that has improved the turning of the KTM RC16. You have to believe that Acosta is back at Motegi to atone for his mistakes last year. And that puts him at the top of the names to watch.
Brad Binder isn’t too shabby here either. The Red Bull KTM Factory Racing rider was second here in 2022, and second again in the sprint race in 2023. Like his teammate, Binder has been making steady progress in the second half of the season, and is working his way back to the front of the grid. Binder could very well be a dark horse in Motegi.
Noale rising
The other intrigue will be in the Aprilia Racing garage. Marco Bezzecchi is coming off four podiums in five races, plus victory in the sprint race at Misano. The Aprilia RS-GP is arguably the second best bike on the grid, and not all that far off the Ducati now. And Bezzecchi is in full form, almost completely adapted to the Aprilia and showing the potential which prompted the Noale factory to sign him. His best result in Motegi is a fourth place in 2023, and you feel he could go even better here.
His teammate is another rider to watch. Now that Jorge Martin has five races under his belt, his adaptation to the Aprilia is starting to really gel. The test on the Monday at Misano had been crucial, as he was able to work on ergonomics and really understanding the bike. He found a better riding position with more potential, and heads to Japan with more confidence. At a track where he has a win and a couple more podiums, he could be much closer to the sharp end in Japan.
The one note of caution when it comes to Aprilia is that the Italian factory always seems to find new ways for their bikes to fail during the overseas races. Electronics problems, parts shortages, and more have trouble the Noale factory in recent years. Martin and Bezzecchi will be hoping they have put all that behind them.
False dawn or real daylight?
What of Pecco Bagnaia? He will have the big 355mm discs in Motegi, which have helped to give him some of the feeling he was missing in braking. He worked on his riding and on setup at the Misano test, his crew changing the weight distribution which gave him more confidence.
Of course, the problem with this sort of thing from Pecco Bagnaia is that we have heard a lot of it before several times this season. Even Bagnaia isn’t getting his hopes up, the Ducati Lenovo rider saying in Misano that he wanted to remain calm about it. At times he has shown much stronger pace than his finishing result showed, and you get the feeling that he is not missing much more than a few very small details. When he puts everything together, it will be a revelation. And that could come this weekend. Or not. And that’s the problem.
The other Ducatis are likely to also be a feature. This is a very strong track for the Bologna bikes, and the riders are showing promise. Fermin Aldeguer is having an excellent rookie season, Franco Morbidelli has been fast the last couple of races, and the talking to he received at Misano appears to have calmed him down and given him the patience he needs to succeed. The only question mark is what Fabio Di Giannantonio can do, the VR46 rider being as up and down as the Ducati GP25 this year.
What of Yamaha? This is not a track that plays to the strengths of the Yamaha M1. The stop-and-go nature of the track should help with acceleration, the bike spending less time on the edge of the tire, so having less time to start spinning. But with the M1 reliant almost entirely on its front tire to stop the bike, it is going to lose out in braking. If Austria is a guide to how the Yamaha will do at Motegi, it is going to be a long weekend.
Optimism abounds
And so we return to where we started, to the owners of the Motegi Twin Ring circuit and Mobility Resort which houses it. A year ago, Honda was incapable of getting a bike inside the top ten. This year, the Honda RC213V has made a huge step forward, the bike now regularly finishing in the top six and pushing the top five.
Honda HRC Castrol’s Luca Marini and LCR Honda’s Johann Zarco have been the mainstay of Honda’s efforts, though Zarco has tailed off in the second half of the season. But he is due to receive some of the upgrades the factory riders have had since MotoGP returned from the summer break, and should be nearer the front of the pack again.
There is real reason for optimism at HRC. It is extremely unlikely that a Honda is going to win this weekend, and a podium is fairly unlikely. But the fact that there is a good chance that a Honda will finish in the top five, and that a podium is not completely unthinkable is a sign of the progress they have made.
The Japanese factories are once again starting to catch the Europeans that have dominated MotoGP for the past five years. Just in time for the rules to change and a new tire manufacturer to arrive in 2027, and turn the sport upside down once again. Still, at least they might get a chance to enjoy the uptick in their form before that happens.
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