Testing is ‘dreaming’, racing is ‘reality’ — are Honda and Yamaha really catching up?

“We have better opportunities than last year, for sure,” said Zarco, who was also Honda’s fastest rider in 2024, because he could use more corner speed than the others. “This result gives us big hope for the next races.”

Honda might have done even better, because factory rider Joan Mir was several tenths faster than Zarco, had already got the better of Bezzecchi and was only four-tenths behind the sensational Ai Ogura (Aprilia) when he fell shortly after half-distance. Yes, Mir crashes out of a lot of races, but last year he usually crashed while trying to get into the points, not chasing fifth place.

Honda has improved the RC213V in pretty much every area, especially its electronics and downforce aerodynamics, which has improved grip, always the crucial aspect of performance.

“We have to be super-happy,” said 2020 MotoGP champ Mir. “The amount of struggle we’ve been through these past years hasn’t been easy, but we never give up and we continue working even when people don’t believe in us. Now we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel but we still have work to do.

“This bike allows me to push to the front and I’m starting to ride how I like to ride: braking super-hard, going in with brakes and corner speed.

“We now have enough pace to enjoy racing, this is the most important thing. I’m happy for my team and I’m especially happy for myself, because being successful in the first part of my career and then being in this situation in the last years hasn’t been easy to manage, as you can imagine.

“Now I feel the tyres more, the connection with the engine is better and the bike turns and stops in a slightly better way.”

Honda’s power deficit

There remains one area where Honda has a big problem: straight-line speed. This surprises anyone who knows their MotoGP history – ever since Honda arrived in the premier class in the sixties it’s always had some of the strongest engines in the championship.

“We have the slowest bike. The engine and the top speed are not there at all”

Not anymore. At Buriram the RC213V was easily the slowest motorcycles on the grid, 4.3mph (7km/h) down on the fastest bike, Bagnaia’s 208mph (334.9km/h) Ducati, which was a fraction quicker than the best KTM. To get an idea what that feels like for the rider on the slower machine – stand still and have someone walk past you at a brisk pace. And then imagine trying to make up that deficit in the corners.

Good straight-line performance isn’t only important because it wins time on the straights, it also gives riders much better opportunities to overtake, which is now more difficult than ever and more important than ever, because when you’re stuck behind another bike your front tyre will overheat.

Honda’s engine problem isn’t only peak power, it’s also torque delivery, which is so important to avoid time-wasting wheelspin when the rider gets on the throttle.

“Where we lose is the corner exit, because we have the slowest bike,” Mir continued. “I’ve said many times this year that we have fewer weak points, but the ones we do have are very big. The engine and the top speed are not there at all. In the race I was losing a lot of time to other riders and I could not defend my position.

“The engine is our biggest issue, so we need to focus on that. If we can improve the engine we can be very optimistic – solid top eight and top five. Now we have to take a lot of risks to be there, because we don’t have acceleration grip, so we have to risk in braking and going into corners.”

Mir doesn’t know when Honda will deliver its next engine upgrade – this year Honda and Yamaha are allowed ten engines per rider, with as many upgrades as they want within that number, while Ducati, KTM and Aprilia get eight engines with no upgrades.

Honda’s lack of top speed probably also has something to do with the RC213V’s downforce aero, which is so bulbous that the bike looks heavily pregnant.

Mir’s team-mate Luca Marini is confident that Honda’s latest improvements are only the start.

“More will come,” he says. “We need to keep focused and keep working in the same way because we worked very deeply in all the details and we’ve brought out a very good potential from the package we have now. Looking where we were the last time we raced in Thailand [last October] we have to be satisfied.”

What’s impressive is that Honda has made big steps forward by working fully in-house, rather than signing a gang of Italian MotoGP engineers, which KTM and Yamaha have done in recent years. Yes, HRC has a new MotoGP technical director in former Aprilia engineer Romano Albesiano, but it’s too soon for his influence to have had any real effect on the RC213V.

Yamaha’s reality

Yamaha meanwhile seems like a combined Japanese/Italian project, with many former Ducati engineers in its garages, headed by tech boss Max Bartolini and aero chief Marco Nicotra. Yamaha also has a big engineering base in Italy, with its own aero and tyre-analysis departments, while Honda’s engineering still comes out of HRC HQ at Asaka.

Yamaha has taken a step forward, but not enough to match the hype of the opening pre-season tests at Sepang, where Fabio Quartararo was only two-tenths from the top. That performance was a mirage, because a flowing, grippy track favoured the Frenchman and the M1.

Like Pramac Yamaha rider Miguel Oliveira says, “In pre-season testing there’s a lot of dreaming – it’s at the first race that reality comes in”.

Yamaha’s Buriram reality was Quartararo’s fighting seventh place in the sprint, between the KTMs of Pedro Acosta and Brad Binder, and Jack Miller’s 11th place in the grand prix, the former Honda, Ducati and KTM rider bravely struggling to the finish with a loose fairing.

Quartararo’s sprint time suggested that Yamaha has indeed improved for 2025 but not much – this time he finished 1.046 seconds closer to the winner than he did in last October’s Thai sprint.

Miller’s speed during the weekend came as a surprise to many, the Aussie out-qualifying the Frenchman, missing the front row by a tenth of a second. Quartararo’s best sprint lap was 0.015 seconds faster than Miller’s but it was the other way around on Sunday, with Miller’s best lap 0.564 seconds better.

Quartararo is delighted to have another super-fast rider aboard an M1 for the first time in almost four years.

“In qualifying Jack disconnected the brain a little more than me!” he grinned. “Braking into Turn 4 he totally switched off, because a big amount of the lap time is there. I really like having someone like Jack that pushes the bike to that extra limit.”

This is one of the advantages of Yamaha digging deep into its budget to put four bikes on the grid once again.

Miller cheerfully admitted he does disconnect his brain, especially in qualifying, when the only way you’re going to get close to the front of the grid is by riding way past your usual limit.

“In Q1 and Q2 I don’t think there are many guys that don’t switch off their brains,” he said. “If I tried to throw a bike at a corner at 300 kays [185mph] and I had my brain switched on it would be telling me to stop! That’s what you’ve got to do.”

Most of all Miller was delighted to have been released from the chatter/vibration hell that destroyed his 2024 season with KTM’s RC16, which still doesn’t work with Michelin’s latest rear slick.

“The rear tyre isn’t trying to fall out of the bike every time I go into a corner,” he added, “I’m getting zero vibration – it’s very nice – that’s why I’ve got a smile on my face every time I get off the bike. I’ve not been competitive for quite a time, so it’s nice to be back towards the pointy end.”

Miller was ahead of his fellow M1 rider and chasing fifth-placed Franky Morbidelli when he crashed out of the sprint. He was trying to go faster than his front tyre wanted to go, because the tyre had gone over-pressure, reducing grip.

“I was ignoring all the warning signs and she let go,” he explained. “After you reach peak temperature and pressure you go from a good tyre to one that goes away.”

But it’s obvious that he loves the inline-four Yamaha and so far he’s more competitive than he was last year on the V4 RC16.

“I definitely feel like I can put the bike where I want it and let it slide.”

Hard luck in Thailand for Yamaha riders

If Yamaha’s Buriram performance – especially Quartararo’s – seemed worse than expected after the post-Sepang hype, there was a good reason for it.

The Thai track and weather are a vicious combination, especially for tyres, so Michelin provides special rears and fronts for this event.

Quartararo has always made much of his lap time with super-late braking, so he had to use Michelin’s hardest option front, which features the heat-resistant casing. This tyre’s casing is super-stiff, so it can handle big braking loads, but it’s not malleable enough to grip the track at high lean angles, which is what you need to make the bike turn.

While all the fastest riders used the soft front, for its cornering advantages, it wasn’t an option for Yamaha’s fastest riders, who all used the hard, even in the GP, while the top seven finishers ran the soft.

“We need to increase our power a lot. Even with less downforce than the others we are slow on the straights”

“The soft front collapses on the brakes,” Quartararo explained on Sunday. “But with the hard front I couldn’t lean the bike on the first lap and the bike was sliding, so I lost a lot of positions and unfortunately I wasn’t able to make a great race with a great pace. Our bike makes the lap time with the front [tyre] and we weren’t really able to do that.”

On the first lap the 2021 world champion went backwards, from tenth on the grid to 18th, then laboriously inched his way forward to finish 15th, for the last championship point. Miller’s ride to 11th, holding the fairing on with his left hand, was an act of minor heroism.

So, has the M1 actually improved for 2025?

“Last year our biggest problem was that our engine was super-slow,” added Quartararo. “I wouldn’t say our engine is super-fast now, but it’s less of a problem. We still need to increase our power a lot, because even with less [downforce] aero than the others we are still slow on the straights.”

Thus the M1 still suffers from MotoGP’s horsepower/downforce equation. Downforce aerodynamics basically convert horsepower and drag into grip, so because the inline-four M1 doesn’t make as much power as its V4s rivals, Yamaha engineers can’t create as much downforce as they’d like. This is what you might call a lose-lose situation: less power and less grip.

The Buriram speed trap had the Yamaha averaging 205.3mph (330.6km/h) in the main race, fractionally faster than both Aprilia’s RS-GP and Honda’s RC213V.

Quartararo hopes to have another engine upgrade to evaluate in the post-Spanish GP tests at the end of next month.

Meanwhile Yamaha riders will just have to hope that the moving on from the hard-casing front — which may not be used for the rest of the season — will change things.

“I’m looking forward to being back on the normal front casing,” Quartararo concluded.

Even now there can be little doubt that there’s not a lot more performance to eke out of the M1, which is exactly why Yamaha is working like crazy to get its all-new V4 ready.