Aprilia's Jorge Martin explains Q2 near-miss at Japanese GP
Jorge Martin says his feeling was disrupted by two factors at the Japanese MotoGP on Friday.
MotoGP championship leader Jorge Martin dealt with an inconsistent feeling aboard his Aprilia RS-GP on the opening day of running at Motegi.
Martin’s 2026 season has been one of consistent inconsistency in general. The highs have rarely been very high and the lows have rarely been too low. Bar the six-crash weekend in Catalunya, Martin has been stable in the podium fight or at least the top-five throughout the season.
While it’s not quite been 2024’s relentless run of podiums, Martin’s 2026 MotoGP form has been consistent enough to land him a 12-point lead over Marc Marquez after 15 rounds.
But the small fluctuations have nonetheless been ever-present this year and, while the last round in Austria was on the positive side of that, the opposite is true of Japan after day one.
Martin was eighth-fastest in Practice at Motegi, far from a disaster but also far from ideal for the championship leader, who had both the aforementioned Marquez and Marco Bezzecchi ahead of him on the time sheets.
And this was despite feeling “super-good” in FP1, Martin’s feeling going away as conditions changed for Practice towards the evening and further still as he switched from the medium-compound rear tyre to the soft for the late time attacks.
“In the morning I felt super-good, but then in the evening with the same bike I started to have some issues,” said Jorge Martin after Practice in Japan.
“It seems like the condition changed a bit from the morning to the evening.
“We work a lot, we try to be fast with the medium [compound rear tyre] – not as I wanted, but then we move to the soft, then the balance of the bike changed a bit. So, even if I was fast I was missing a bit of speed.
“When we went into time attack I had some– we need to put everything together, there are some issues we need to understand.
“For sure, the base of last season is not working a lot for us, so it's always like starting from zero on Friday. But overall the target was to go in Q2 and we achieved that, so let's try to do another step tomorrow.”
Martin was 0.4 seconds off the top time of Alex Marquez but also 0.2 seconds slower than his Aprilia Racing team-mate Marco Bezzecchi.
The area of time loss was clear for Martin, but he saw the positives in having Bezzecchi as a reference.
“So sector three it seems he's [Bezzecchi] a bit more competitive,” Martin said.
“But I don't feel super-strong; I feel I'm not riding with flow in that section and I'm losing not only with Marco but with the rest of the riders.
“So, there are some points where he is faster, some points where I am faster.
“It's good to have Marco close because we can understand how to be more competitive. I think it will be tough as always, but we are working to improve.”
Alex joined the Crash.net team in August of 2024 having covered consumer and racing motorcycle news at Visordown for two years.
