Valencia Friday pace suggests MotoGP 2025 has one last sting in the tail

The idea is that the best rider wins the championship in any given year in MotoGP. Organisers hope beyond hope that this battle will go all the way to the final round, to keep the news cycle enthralling and fans coming back for more.

That certainly hasn’t happened in MotoGP. The best rider absolutely did win. Marc Marquez was above and beyond his competition this season on the factory Ducati. All pre-season predictions of the 32-year-old romping to his seventh premier class crown were fulfilled, and then some.

When he won the title in Japan at the beginning of October, in emotional scenes, it was a major moment in MotoGP history. MotoGP shot itself in the foot, however, by having a race scheduled for just a few days afterwards. Then it was dealt a pretty bad hand when Marquez suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in a collision with Marco Bezzecchi on the opening lap of the Indonesian Grand Prix.

The news cycle went from career-defining title to season-ending injury in the blink of an eye. Now, MotoGP can’t help that. Injury is a part of motorcycle racing that little can be done about. But MotoGP also had a hard job on its hands keeping people enthusiastic about the 2025 season the moment Marquez was crowned champion.

The Spaniard setting more records would have been something to help with engagement, but even that would have worn off after a while. As we begin the Valencia finale, we’ve had no Marquez to keep the casual fans interested, a reasonably boring run of races since his injury, and several winners who don’t have followings big enough yet to garner much attention.

After the enthralling sprint in Portugal, the grand prix fell so flat that the reality of a record 22-round calendar really sank in. The truth is, little value has been provided by these final five rounds. Several riders were asked about this on Thursday in Valencia, all of them giving reasonably generic answers to the effect of: 'it depends on how successful you are as to whether or not 2025 has been too long'.

MotoGP then posted to its social media channels on Thursday evening an ‘apology’ for taking up so much time from fans’ this year, and for ruining the edge of sofa seats. It was a clunky attempt at drumming up interest in a final round with little to play for that came across as a desperate attempt to ignore facts.

Sports where playoff formats exist ensure engagement to the end. But that doesn’t really work in motorsport, as NASCAR has proven time and again with its inauthentic winner-takes-all title showdown, which effectively devalues the previous 35 races.

And, thus, MotoGP is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Not that its title showdowns over the last few years have done all that much to get pulses racing. As someone who has to deal in analytics as part of my profession, you can trust me when I say that Pecco Bagnaia vs Jorge Martin wasn’t the blockbuster MotoGP desperately tried to dress it up as.

With one round to go in 2025, there is the matter of third in the championship to sew up, which looks well on its way to going Marco Bezzecchi’s way. Honda is just nine points away from ascending the concessions rankings, while Pedro Acosta’s chase for a maiden MotoGP victory is in danger of stretching to two full seasons. Yamaha’s V4 is back on the grid, while the ever-deepening mystery of Pecco Bagnaia continues.

But Friday’s running at Ricardo Tormo has at least teed up the potential for another three-way KTM-Aprilia-Ducati battle come Sunday, the outcome of which have some significance going into 2026.

Can Pedro Acosta really dare to dream at the Valencia GP?

The last time MotoGP bikes took to the Ricardo Tormo Circuit, Pedro Acosta was making his debut in the post-season test. The fanfare around Marc Marquez’s Ducati debut somewhat took the spotlight off the then-teenager’s first laps on the KTM.

Two years later, following the hiatus in 2024 due to the deadly flooding in the region, Acosta returns to Valencia knowing now that “I don’t have to look down to disengage the devices” on his bike.

He also returns to Valencia without the MotoGP victory that seemed assured would have come his way by now after those very early races of his rookie campaign last year. He has 20 podiums to his credit spread across grands prix and sprints. In 2024, his own mistakes denied him victory chances.

But this year, now more mature, KTM hasn’t given him a bike good enough. He didn’t start scoring podiums until the second half of the campaign. And for all of the speed he has dragged out of that package, tyre preservation continues to stumble him.

Of all of the recent tracks, Valencia - he admitted on Friday, after topping the day - suits the RC16 better. The more stop-start, tight nature of the track doesn’t expose the bike’s weakness in long, fast corners, as somewhere like Portimao or Phillip Island did. One-lap speed has not been in doubt, and that continued to be the case on Friday.

Race pace also hasn’t been an issue. Looking at the analysis in the table below, it’s very much looking like a toss-up between Acosta, Bezzecchi and Alex Marquez, as it was in Portugal. But tyre life remains the biggest concern for Acosta.

“The problem when you have Turn 3, Turn 8, Turn 9, Turn 13, Turn 14, everything in one minute, and it’s where you destroy the tyres,” he told the media, including Crash.net, on Friday. “Our bike doesn’t turn so much. We try to turn on the rear, you overheat the tyres, and then it’s a snowball that you cannot control. For this, I was trying to be smooth, don’t go too sideways, don’t push a lot, be like in race mode. And, even like this, we are struggling. For this, we have to get better tomorrow.”

KTM has good past form in Valencia. It’s first podium in MotoGP came at the venue with Pol Espargaro in a rain-lashed grand prix. In 2023, both Jack Miller and Brad Binder looked on course for victories before crashing.

Acosta tried both the soft and the medium rear options in Practice, and is average pace on both runs was impressive. During that medium tyre stint, he set two identical 1m29.790s laps in a row. The speed is there, as is the consistency, but tyre life continues to be the big question mark that hangs over him.

Given Ricardo Tormo’s tight nature, qualifying will be key. But Acosta has made critical mistakes already this season when he couldn’t match strong race pace with a good time attack effort: Hungary springs to mind as maybe the biggest miss.

Time attack form has not been an issue for Aprilia or Marco Bezzecchi this year. He was Acosta’s closest challenger on Friday, and even crashed trying grab a look at what the KTM was doing. That fall didn’t dent Bezzecchi’s confidence, crucially, with the ’25 RS-GP needing some work to improve its braking performance between sessions today.

While pace analysis always must be taken with a pinch of salt, Bezzecchi appears to have one-lap speed, strong race pace, and tyre longevity, as he put 16 laps on a soft rear instead of 10, with the Aprilia rider still in the high 1m30s on his last tour on that medium rear.

“I crashed when I was behind, because I was in front for a couple of laps,” Bezzecchi said. “But then I heard his bike and I wanted to see him. But I made a mistake because I released the brake a bit too early in T4, and T4 is always super tricky not ot say any bad words [about]. But I understood quite soon that I was going to crash. So, because of this, when I started again I was able to not make this mistake again. Pedro looks super-fast.”

Bezzecchi has a 35-point lead over Pecco Bagnaia in the chase for third in the standings, and is all but guaranteed to secure that on Saturday in the sprint. More importantly, another victory - preferably akin to his Portimao domination - would go a long way in cementing Aprilia’s status as a title contender for 2026.

A win for Acosta wouldn’t do the same, as far as KTM is concerned, but it would help further prove a point that has become blindingly obvious as this season has gone on: the Austrian manufacturer needs Acosta more than he needs it…

Alex Marquez begins 2026 preparations as Bagnaia faces meek P3 surrender

There is little doubt that Ducati will be a title contender again next year, regardless of the problems it has had this year with the GP25. But work towards that has already started, with the brand giving Alex Marquez a 2025-spec fairing to try on Friday.

The Gresini rider’s run to three grand prix victories and runner-up spot in the standings has earned him a factory bike for next season. For Ducati, this decision will provide one of two things: a guaranteed tailgunner for Marc Marquez week in, week out, or categorical proof that its current factory offering is only good enough for one rider.

It’s a small update, but one that has polarised the Ducati camp this year. Marc Marquez has stuck with it, Bagnaia and Fabio Di Giannantonio have largely ran with the 2024 version. The idea behind trying it this weekend was to free his time up in Tuesday’s post-race test for evaluating other things.

“I’m trying a few things because I’m more relaxed,” he said. “I don’t fight for anything now in the championship, so I can try a few things and I’m enjoying. Trying things is something that I like. So, tomorrow we will need to focus on one package. We need to decide which one, and then we will try to extract. But I am enjoying a lot, and for that reason, I’m trying things because I’m open to try and I have really clear things to try and not lose the way.”

The feedback on it was that “it’s different”. Marc Marquez has largely said there was never much difference between both fairings, but he just preferred the newer one. One thing it did do for Alex Marquez was stop him from focusing fully on race preparation this weekend.

He was fourth overall, second of the Ducatis behind VR46’s Franco Morbidelli, who has put himself into the podium hunt at this early stage. But Marquez did do a reasonably lengthy run on the medium tyre and averaged 1m30.698s.

All signs, then, point towards him making a bigger step on Saturday towards where he was a week ago in Portugal.

The same can’t be said of Pecco Bagnaia, who is in serious danger of finishing fifth in a dismal season for the double world champion, with Acosta just three points behind him. He was 14th at the end of Practice and into Q1 for Saturday morning. Pace-wise, there wasn’t much to write home about there. He termed Friday a “standard day in 2025” where he was “struggling from the start, and we just tried a direction that wasn’t the correct one”.

Such is the duality of Pecco Bagnaia, there isn’t really anything to suggest that he won’t come through from Q1 to fight for pole on Saturday morning, just as he did in Malaysia. Equally, there is nothing to suggest that will happen either.

With Alex Marquez testing factory parts now ahead of his works bike step next year, and Bagnaia still no closer to being the rider he used to be, the outcome of the Valencia Grand Prix and next Tuesday’s test could very well shift the balance within the Italian marque even more.