Márquez’s instant Ducati speed surprises no one in MotoGP

What does all of this mean for the 2024 MotoGP world championship? Will Márquez clear off and dominate like he did in 2019: 12 wins and six second places from 19 races? Maybe but probably not. MotoGP has changed since then – Márquez is on basically the same bike as seven other riders, including talents like Bagnaia, Jorge Martin, Marco Bezzecchi and Enea Bastianini. Next year may turn out to be another Ducati cup, but it may just be a Bologna battle royal.

All eight Ducati riders will spend much of the next two months before February’s opening pre-season tests at Sepang, Malaysia, examining each other’s data. In fact they’re already at it.

“I’ve already checked Marc’s data to see his style and it was really good from the start, so he was really fast, really quickly,” said factory Ducati rider Bastianini. “I also checked his time attack and it was really good – I think he’s the fastest Ducati in Turn 8 – he is really impressive in that corner!”

If Márquez’s speed wasn’t a surprise, what was the surprise of the day? Joan Mir seemed delighted with Honda’s 2024 RC213V!

The 2020 MotoGP champ had a disastrous first season with Repsol Honda: 24 crashes, multiple injuries and just one finish inside the top ten. And whatever new parts Honda brought to improve the RC213V didn’t help at all.

Finally, it seems like Honda may have turned the corner. Could Márquez have left too soon? Probably not but…

“I’m very happy,” said Mir. “This is the first time since I arrived here that I can feel a difference and something really works. The lap times are there. Every exit I was able to be strong.”

The new Honda is longer (which moves it towards the concept of the Ducati, Aprilia and now the KTM), lighter and has a better engine. Together these changes make the bike stop better, turn better and exit corners better, because the engine’s friendlier character finds grip where the old RC213V found none.

Like many riders, Mir didn’t risk a time attack – the weather was too cold and windy, so it wasn’t a day for heroics – but 13th fastest, less than eight-tenths off MotoGP’s so-called winter-testing king Maverick Viñales, was promising. New team-mate Luca Marini was tenth, a fraction faster. Like Márquez, he wasn’t allowed to talk about his day.

Viñales was happy with the 2024 Aprilia. He tried different swingarms and a different ‘tank’ and seat. “This helped me put more pressure into the tyres, which is good,” said Vinales. “But our priority is starts and the new bike improves this a lot.”

Team-mate Aleix Espargaró stopped testing early to visit hospital for further checks on the left leg he injured in the Qatar sprint. Meanwhile Aprilia tester Lorenzo Savadori spent another day testing the RS-GP carbon-fibre frame, but this is a long-term project — we may not even see the frame race in 2024.

A few weeks ago Bagnaia said he couldn’t ask for anything more from Ducati for 2024 but he’s got it anyway: the GP24 is better in corner entry and has a slightly more aggressive power delivery, something he requested. “The GP23 engine was too smooth!” he said, which isn’t something you usually hear from MotoGP riders.

Ducati has only made tiny changes here and there to the Desmosedici, after losing its way in the early stages of 2022 and 2023 because it altered the bike too much.

KTM, working with Red Bull Formula 1 engineers, had the wackiest new aerodynamics set-up, wearing confusion camouflage to hide the details. Basically it looks like KTM has added another ground-effect device higher up the RC16’s fairing, which should also give more downforce in a straight line, which may just ease the bike’s wheelspin issues.

Brad Binder ended the tests second fastest, a whisker behind Viñales and just ahead of Marco Bezzecchi, riding a GP23 for the first time. Team-mate Jack Miller was ninth, six-tenths slower than the fastest time. Both liked the new aero but the wind made it impossible to draw any real conclusions.

Yamaha began testing for 2024 following its worst season in two decades – not a single win and Quartararo a grim tenth overall.

The Frenchman seemed cautiously optimistic after the tests, during which Yamaha tried Aprilia-style front wings, a KTM-style seat wing, various other aero bits and pieces, a revised chassis and a minor engine update. Yamaha hopes that former Ferrari Formula 1 engineer Luca Marmorini’s next engine spec, due at Sepang, will give the M1 the straight-line performance it’s lacked for years.

“The new aero was really positive,” said Quartararo. “It gives me less wheelie but we need to work on making it help the bike turn better when we go to Sepang. Yamaha seems to have changed its mentality – they are trying to react faster, like the European factories.”

Quartararo, new team-mate Alex Rins and Honda riders Mir, Marini, Johann Zarco and Takaaki Nakagami will have the busiest years of their lives in 2024. Not only because the season is bigger than ever before – 22 rounds, 44 races – but because Dorna has revised the concessions system, with the hope of getting Honda and Yamaha back in the game, after being left for dead by the European manufacturers.

Manufacturers at the bottom of the constructors’ championship – Yamaha was fourth this year, Honda fifth – are allowed to do more testing, try as many engine upgrades as they like, have two aero updates instead of one, have more wild-card entries and so on. And they are allowed to go testing with their full-time riders, which the other factories aren’t.

This is all great news for Honda and Yamaha, but how exactly are their riders and crew going to cope with so many races and tests? They are going to be on the road pretty much all year round.

“My wife isn’t happy!” grinned Rins.

Moto2 champ and sole rookie Pedro Acosta was 18th, feeling his way into the wild world of MotoGP. Step by step…