Alex Marquez spent Friday testing parts for the factory Ducati team, then got back to the business of winning races on Saturday. Polesitter Marco Bezzecchi drifted backwards to a fifth-place finish and Pedro Acosta got close but never close enough to attempt a pass. Then a mistake by Acosta left Marquez, who long ago sealed second place in the MotoGP World Championship, free to cruise to his second Sprint win of the season.
Francesco Bagnaia’s luckless 2025 season lurched toward a merciful end on Saturday. After failing to make the top 10 on Friday, he was forced to go through Q1. After a bright start to the day, when he had finished second in FP2, he had put together a first sector on his final Q1 run that was just 0.004 seconds off of second place and a transfer spot into Q2. Then the bike quit. Bagnaia was 16th on the grid and finished the sprint 14th.
Factory Honda riders Luca Marini and Joan Mir crashed out of the Sprint together. In the past, when a Honda rider crashed, HRC used to send an employee on a scooter to the crash site with an elastic cover to hide internals that the damage might have revealed. While the RC213V is better than it was, there were no Honda employees trying to cover the wrecked machines in Valencia.
Valencia wasn’t just a MotoGP race opportunity for Nicolo Bulega, who is subbing for his second race weekend for the injured World Champion Marc Marquez. The Ducati Superbike World Championship star also was thrown into the MotoGP testing and development role he will perform next year in addition to racing WorldSBK. He and Alex Marquez rode on Friday with aerodynamic devices that the Desmosedici GP25 riders had tried during the season, as Ducati wanted more feedback on how those devices performed. While Alex Marquez’s GP24 was switched back to the normal pinched tail configuration on Saturday, Bulega’s machines still had the “tea tray” wing/fin device on their tail sections during practice on Saturday morning.
MotoGP’s engineers continue down the road of aerodynamic development, and with lap times as tight as they are in the premier class, even incremental improvements are worth pursuing, it seems. Ducati’s convoluted tail section illustrated above would theoretically create additional downforce at the rear. Aprilia and Honda are looking for the same result with wings mounted behind the rider’s legs. Ducati, KTM and Yamaha have not gone for the seat wings yet, perhaps because the potential gains are so small. A CFD analysis of a MotoGP racebike reveals that the area behind the rider’s legs is an aerodynamic mess, and wings work best in clean air.
The seat wing device on the Aprilia RS-GP is mounted at a high angle of attack – note the angle of the seat wing compared to the wings on the nose of the fairing. This suggests that it is working in dirty air to maximize the downforce it can generate. It also suggests that it is most effective in applying downforce during braking, when the rider is either dangling the inside leg or is sticking their inside knee away from the bike. In that moment, the wing is exposed to cleaner airflow and the top speed-sapping drag from a wing at a high angle of attack is not a concern, as the rider is trying to slow the bike down.
Honda’s excellent weekend in Moto3 continued on Saturday. Honda took the top three positions in the morning practice and was 1-2 in qualifying. It was a good Saturday for the Fernandez family, too, with Adrian Fernandez on the Moto3 pole and Raul Fernandez finishing fourth in the MotoGP Sprint, the first Aprilia rider across the finish line.
