There are some circuits that are so significant to grand prix motorcycle racing that they have changed its history. The Mountain Course on the Isle of Man was a seminal part of GP, until Giacomo Agostini refused to race there after Gilberto Parlotti was killed in the Ultra-Lightweight race in 1972. His refusal became part of a larger boycott, which caused the Isle of Man TT to be removed from the grand prix calendar from 1977, and sparked a wider debate over the safety of circuits.
The TT Circuit at Assen is another such circuit. The only circuit still left on the calendar since the FIM instituted a world championship in 1949, it has provided a sense of continuity for grand prix motorcycle racing, as well as a focus for race fans from all over Europe. Assen is the backbone of MotoGP, part of the foundation on which it is built.
Which brings me to Mugello. If you wanted to design a circuit specifically for the world’s most advanced racing motorcycles, it would be impossible to improve on the layout of the circuit in the heart of Tuscany. Mugello challenges every aspect of a bike: top speed, braking, turning, stability, agility. And it does all this without throwing up hurdles for bikes which are limited in one area or another. Is your bike not fast enough? There are no corners where you are accelerating from very low speed, so you usually stand a chance of at least holding on in the slipstream. Does your bike struggle with slow corners? There are plenty of fast corners and straights to compensate.
Mugello is MotoGP. It has become such a significant part of the iconography of the sport that a season without Mugello is as unthinkable as a year without Assen. Only a global pandemic could do that.
Shaping the sport
Mugello’s status as one of the untouchable calendar fixtures has also shaped MotoGP. On lap 6 of the 2023 sprint race, Brad Binder’s KTM RC16 was clocked at a breathtaking 366.1 km/h, the highest top speed ever recorded through official speed traps at a MotoGP event. Speeds of that magnitude had also been clocked at the Lusail International Circuit in Qatar. But the difference between Qatar and Mugello is that beyond Turn 1 at Lusail, there is nothing but flat desert. If speeds increase, they can push back the wall another 10, 20, 30 meters with no obstacles.
Moving the walls at San Donato in Mugello is a far tougher challenge. As the front straight dips down into Turn 1, it is heading directly into the bottom of a hill. That hillside has already been moved back to accommodate the greater speeds, but there are limits to what is possible. If Mugello is to stay on the calendar, top speeds have to come down.
From speaking to those involved, I know that Mugello was one name that was brought up during discussions over the new technical regulations for 2027. Keeping Mugello on the calendar is essential to MotoGP: if Assen is the backbone of grand prix motorcycle racing, Mugello is its soul.
To keep Mugello, the bikes had to go slower. Hence 850cc, reduced aerodynamics, and an end to ride-height devices. The bikes will accelerate later and less hard without ride-height devices, and the smaller engines won’t have the excess power to push huge aero packages through the air, and the tech rules will make producing packages with massive downforce much more difficult. The lap times of the 850s are unlikely to be significantly slower. But the top speeds will. Mugello is safe for the next decade or so, to the delight of all motorcycle racing fans.
Ironically, Turn 1 at Mugello is the best argument in favor of aerodynamics in MotoGP. Well, not so much Turn 1, as the approach along the straight. Out of the last corner, the speed builds down the straight. A straight that is not so straight: as the riders pass pit lane exit, there is a slight kink that barely registers when viewed on a track map, first to the right, then to the left. But at 360+ km/h, the bike is leaned a long way over, before hitting the brakes and wrestling the bike to the left.
The braking point is right on a crest, the bikes going light as the track drops away from them. In the past, riders were on the edge of grip there, Marc Márquez losing control when he locked the front and found himself heading to the wall on the left. He was forced to leap off the bike at 300 km/h before the bike clipped the wall. To visualize this, imagine being on a high speed train – a TGV or a Japanese bullet train – and jumping out at top speed wearing only a helmet and leathers.
Here is where the aero helps. It keeps the front wheel in contact over the crest, making braking a much more secure affair. And it keeps the rear wheel in contact with the asphalt too, preventing it from spinning up at top speed and wrecking the engine, a fate that Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo suffered in 2016.
Chances in, chances out
Braking for San Donato, or Turn 1, is the hardest on the circuit, hauling the bike back from 360 km/h to something more like 90. Turn 1 is one of the best overtaking spots, but also one where it is easy to get in too deep and lose the position you just gained.
Because San Donato is relatively wide, it is more of a double apex turn. That allows a couple of approaches, either diving up the inside or entry or carrying speed through the corner and on exit. From San Donato, a quick burst of throttle to accelerate toward the first of a series of combination turns that define the glory of Mugello.
First, left through Luco and then right through Poggio Seco. Another burst of gas and shift up toward Materassi and Borgo San Lorenzo, Mugello maintaining the tradition of naming corners after nearby towns rather than retired racers. Materassi, the left of Turn 4, is a place where you can try a pass, but it’s not a disaster if you can’t make it.
The Tuscan rollercoaster
All the while you are climbing up to skirt the hillside as you accelerate toward another glorious combination, this time the right of Casanova and then plunging down the hill to Savelli. They may have separate names, but to the riders, they are a single unit, Casanova-Savelli, and a perfect place to line up a pass. Close in through Casanova, and then chase toward Savelli, diving past on the inside.
If all goes to plan, of course. It is also easy to ask a little too much of the left side of the tire as you plunge down the hill, and wash out the front and meet an ignominious end in the gravel trap on the outside of Turn 7.
From here, you enter two of the most fittingly named corners on the calendar. Turns 8 and 9 are named Arrabbiata 1 and 2. Or The Fast And The Furious, and 2 Fast, 2 Furious. Like the pasta of the same name, they are hot, spicy, and need to be approached at speed. Through the two rights you are modulating throttle and rear brake to gain and lose speed and keep the bike tight through the turns.
Then it is down a gear and a dab of front brake to slow the bike for the right of Scarperia and the left of Palagio. Another dash of throttle and up a gear as you head toward Correntaio, the endless downhill right that turns back on itself. Another place to attempt a pass, and another place where it is ever so easy to lose the front and crash out. A place not to do it on a Ducati, given that you are directly in front of the wall of scarlet that is the Ducati grandstand.
Out of Correntaio and through the Biondettis, the chicane that leads onto a short straight before the final corner. Bucine has everything you want from a final corner. The right hander is long and wide, leading downhill, with different lines through it. You can try to pass on entry, but that is a risky endeavor. The alternative is to build speed through the last turn to carry it onto the front straight and toward start and finish.
Exit Bucine with enough of a speed advantage and you gain all the way along the straight. Throughout the race, you can use that as a launching pad to attack again on the straight or into San Donato. And on the last lap, the finish line is far enough down the straight to get your wheel ahead of the rider who entered Bucine ahead of you. The racing at Mugello is not over until the soprano sings.
Home advantage
A track this varied offers many different ways to win. So who should we expect? Under normal circumstances, you would say Pecco Bagnaia is the red hot favorite for victory at Mugello. Ducatis have won six of the last seven MotoGP races held here, the last three won by Bagnaia himself. The Italian loves the track, and excels here, and will immediately be in his element.
But that was before Gigi Dall’Igna and his intrepid band of engineers gave Bagnaia a Ducati GP25 with which to contest the MotoGP season. Throughout the preseason, and all the way through Saturday at Aragon, Bagnaia complained of a lack of front end feeling while braking for a corner. He couldn’t control the way the front locked and then released while trail braking into a corner, and that cost him entry speed. And that was his greatest weapon.
During the warm up for the Aragon GP race on Sunday morning, Bagnaia tried the 355mm brake discs, the largest that Brembo supply to the MotoGP paddock. Though the feeling of those discs is more aggressive, it gave him back the control he had been missing, he explained to us at the test on the Monday after Aragon. And that gave him back the confidence he had lost.
Was it the brake discs that made the difference, or was giving Bagnaia the 355mm discs just a way of adjusting the nut between the handlebars? In the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that if Bagnaia feels confident, he can go fast. And a fast Pecco Bagnaia is capable of winning at Mugello.
Making a point
His main rival will be his Ducati Lenovo teammate and current championship leader Marc Márquez. He has his record against him: a solitary win in 2014, the year that he won 10 in a row and was unstoppable for the first part of the season. But he has been close before, including missing out by just under two hundredths of a second in 2016 when he was literally pipped to the post by Jorge Lorenzo. And who can forget his battle with Andrea Dovizioso and Danilo Petrucci, when Petrucci took a memorable victory at the circuit.
There is good reason to believe that 2025 will be different, however. In 2024, aboard an obviously inferior Ducati GP23, he struggled to get past Enea Bastianini, finally managing to do so with six laps to go. But the lack of acceleration of the GP23 couldn’t withstand the onslaught from Bastianini’s Ducati GP24, and the factory Ducati rider got past him on the penultimate lap, going on to take second.
This year, Marc Márquez is not on a GP23, but a GP25 (though arguments continue about just how different the GP25 is from the GP24). The bike is good, and Marc Márquez is on a mission. And among the objectives in that mission is impressing on his Ducati Lenovo teammate that it is he who will be lifting the title at the end of 2025. So beating Bagnaia in his Mugello backyard is imperative.
The unknown quantity
The biggest obstacle to Marc Márquez winning in Mugello could well turn out to be his brother Alex. The Gresini Ducati rider has a relatively poor record at Mugello – ninth last year was his best result so far – but seasons past have been a terrible form guide for Alex Márquez so far in 2025.
The younger Márquez has a near monopoly on second place in MotoGP at the moment, having racked up seven second places and one win in the sprints, and four second places and a win in the Sunday GPs. We know how good the Ducati GP24 is around Mugello, and we know it is very good in 2025.
Who can challenge the Ducati hegemony? If you are looking for a wildcard, it has to be Yamaha, and especially Fabio Quartararo. The Frenchman should have won at Silverstone, but was let down by a failing ride-height device. He had a miserable weekend at Aragon, but that was very much true to form for him, having never managed a solid weekend at the Spanish track.
Mugello may well be different, however. The Monster Energy Yamaha rider has already won here once, in 2021. The 2025 version of the Yamaha M1 has enough power to hang in the slipstream, if not actually pull out of it and pass, but it is exceptional on the brakes and very strong in fast corners. And fast corners is something Mugello is not short of.
Quartararo might not be the only Yamaha causing trouble at the front. Jack Miller has shown decent pace here in the past, and Alex Rins was strong at Mugello on the Suzuki, speed which should be transferrable to the Yamaha. Both riders – actually, all three Yamaha riders not named Fabio Quartararo – are on notice that they need to up their results if they want to stay in MotoGP, and Mugello may be the place to turn some heads.
The other Italians?
Fast corners is something that suits the Aprilia as well, especially as there are only a couple of places where their weakest point – braking stability on corner entry – is a factor. Aleix Espargaro was on the podium here in 2022, and the 2025 RS-GP is arguably Aprilia’s best ever machine. It is a home race for Marco Bezzecchi, and his record is good here: a front row start in 2022, a fifth place after dropping out of the podium battle, and a podium in the sprint race of 2023. He suffered aboard the Ducati GP23 last year, but the Aprilia should suit the track much better.
Bezzecchi is once again joined by Lorenzo Savadori, who will continue the work of developing the Aprilia during race weekends, and rookie Ai Ogura returns from injury at the Trackhouse Racing team. The knee injury he sustained has healed, but he was having trouble bending his knee. That problem seems to be fixed now, but it may hamper his return at Mugello.
The two biggest question marks are how Honda and KTM will fare. Luca Marini is still absent from the Honda HRC Castrol team, and is being replaced by test rider Takaaki Nakagami. Joan Mir has a podium here, as does LCR Honda’s Johann Zarco, but those were on their former bikes, a Suzuki and a Ducati respectively. The Honda RC213V is very good on corner entry, and can maintain corner speed, but is still down on horsepower and acceleration. Perhaps the layout of Mugello will disguise that to an extent.
KTM has the top speed record at the Mugello circuit, but top speed is not everything. The Austrian manufacturer also has a podium here, though that was back in 2021 with Miguel Oliveira. The bike is perhaps least suited to the layout of all of the MotoGP manufacturers, though Pedro Acosta managed to eke out a sixth place at Silverstone, the most similar track to Mugello of the circuits raced at so far in 2025. KTM seem to be still trying to find their feet, especially at the fast and flowing circuits. They are an unknown quantity at Mugello.
What is known is that Mugello provides the perfect setting for a MotoGP race. Though the current bikes have taken some of the excitement out of the battles at the track, it is still a spectacular and very special location. The soul of MotoGP lies in the heart of Tuscany.
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