Somehow Viñales managed to ride around these issues, like he does when all the stars align for him. This was Viñales at his best – a pleasure to watch as he swooped around Losail, totally at one with his RC16.
So how come Viñales didn’t get the bad vibrations which once again haunted Acosta and Brad Binder?
The Spaniard – aiming to become the first rider to win a MotoGP race with four different brands, following his wins with Suzuki, Yamaha and Aprilia – did what Acosta did last year. He listened to his motorcycle and had that conversation: adjusting the way he rode to minimise the problem.
Zarco (No5) once again worked miracles on the Honda
LCR
“I changed the way I entered corners, forcing the front more than the rear and keeping my corner speed,” he said. Easier said than done, of course.
Until then, KTM had been all at sea in the desert. When you lose your way, you have to try anything and everything, so KTM had its four riders using four different set-ups, with Acosta reverting to his 2024 RC16
“It’s better to make a back-check and then start to build again,” said Acosta. “It’s like when you build a big house. If the foundation isn’t hard, it doesn’t matter how strong the house, it will bend, so we need to take down the house and make new foundations.”
That’s the old “you can’t create until first you destroy” mantra and it made perfect sense, until Acosta finished Sunday’s race 12 seconds behind Viñales.
Was Viñales’ brilliant ride just a desert mirage?
However, KTM should learn lots from this. Like Viñales said, “It’s good to fight at the front to understand where to improve”.
Also, Acosta, Binder and Enea Bastianini now know what the RC16 can do. The only rider within any manufacturer line-up that’s allowed to complain is the fastest rider — the one who is pushing the bike to its limit — so the others need to watch what Viñales did and examine his data.
And yet… was Viñales’ brilliant ride just a desert mirage, like his 2024 COTA victory? Last year he seemed to cruise to victory at COTA — just like he seemed to cruise to second at Losail — and then he went the rest of the season without even climbing the podium.
MotoGP’s tyre-pressure rule is a huge pain for everyone. This time the standard 16-second penalty dropped Viñales to 14th, a fraction of a second behind fellow RC16 rider Binder. Remember when Binder was KTM’s shining light? That was a long time ago, before he was undone by the current rear slick.
Morbidelli led a grand prix for the first time since 2021 and took his second podium of the year
VR46
Obviously, Viñales’ Tech 3 crew hadn’t expected him to run up front, in cooler air. They therefore set his tyre pressure to run in the heat of the pack. Maybe Dorna should equip every team with a crystal ball and the problem would be solved? Or perhaps each team needs to employ a MotoGP Mystic Meg to divine the race?
If only KTM had brought to Qatar the cracked wheel rim that exonerated Acosta from a tyre-pressure penalty at Mandalika last year…
Viñales’ sanction promoted Bagnaia to second. The former world champion was happy with the result but “very angry” with his Saturday, when he crashed during his crucial final time attack in qualifying, which left him on the fourth row of the grid.
“I messed up, no, I f***ed up is better, in qualifying,” said the honest-to-a-fault Italian. “I over-pushed into Corner 4, arrived a bit too fast and when I tried to let the bike in I lost the front after losing a bit the rear. It was my mistake.”
This is what happened so often to Bagnaia last year, like when he crashed out of the second grand prix at Misano, and it’s what he’s complained about this year too.
“As soon as you’re not pushing that hard on the [front] brake and your bike is more in line, it’s easier to lose the front,” he said at Misano last September.
In fact Bagnaia’s Misano 2024 and Losail 2025 crashes were slightly different but both were caused by the usual rear tyre pushing the front tyre — in other words the rear gripping so well that it takes so much load off the front that the front loses grip.
Martin is back in hospital with lung and rib injuries
Martin/Instagram
Losail is such a tyre-management race that the extra heat Bagnaia put into his rear tyre in the early laps, coming through from 11th at the start to second by lap five, left him short of rubber in the closing stages, when he was a second a lap slower than Márquez. Maybe if he had qualified on the front row we would’ve seen a first 2025 duel with his team-mate. But maybe not.
Bagnaia also lost time with Morbidelli, who some criticised for fighting so hard with his faster VR46 colleague. Sure, Bagnaia was quicker but this is racing, not follow my leader. Real racers don’t give up position for anyone. Remember Laguna Seca 2008, when Casey Stoner was so much faster than Valentino Rossi?
Johann Zarco rode a hero’s race, crossing the finish line in fifth place, 6.66 seconds behind Márquez and less than two-tenths behind Morbidelli, who was promoted to third by the Viñales penalty. Zarco did everything he could to pounce on Morbidelli during the last lap, when he caught him by three-tenths. If he had managed to make that pass, he would’ve scored Honda’s first podium since Márquez’s third place at rainswept Motegi in 2023.
Spare a thought for Jorge Martin, who so far this year has spent more time in hospital than on racetracks. The number one’s nasty crash halfway through his first grand prix of 2025 gave him a punctured lung and 11 rib fractures. He will spend several days in hospital in Qatar and seems unlikely to be ready for the first European race at Jerez, Spain, on the weekend of 26-27 April.
There are few crueller sports…