2026 JapaneseGP – Collective Dumbness and a Championship Heating Up Pretty Fine!
The JapaneseGP gave us the closest-ever championship after 16 rounds in MotoGP, but there was a lot of dumbness we witnessed that doesn’t suit the sport’s stature.
The final season of the 1000cc is setting up to be an era-defining championship. With just 2 points separating Jorge Martin and Marc Marquez, this is the closest ever MotoGP season after 16 rounds in history. Marc Marquez clawed 10 points back from Martin over the weekend as he went on to grab another double, this time at the 2026 JapaneseGP. However, as intriguing as the things were on the track, there was a lot of collective dumbness on show across the whole paddock, and it’s not just about those rear tyres.
The Resurfaced Motegi!
What we once beautifully called ‘Twin Ring Motegi ’ saw its first MotoGP race in 1999, two years after Honda built it, and since 2004 the circus has been returning to this lovely circuit every year. Known for being the toughest challenge for the brakes in the premier class, the track was resurfaced and, let’s say ‘due to logistics’ rather than ‘typical disregard for rider safety by the power that be’, there was no testing on the new surface ahead of this year’s GP.
However, kudos to Michelin, they were both smart and sensible enough to understand it could cause some unknown tyre degradation issues when the racing arrives. Maybe they had taken lessons from the infamous Phillip Island Bridgestone debacle in 2013. Their solution? To bring an extra tyre, an extension of the idea they used for hot and high-degradation tracks: a heat-resistant, harder carcass over the compound. But especially for Japan, as the temperatures were supposed to be low, Michelin gave this treatment to the soft compound and not the previously used medium one.
They told everyone that this tyre was an optional tyre for the weekend, leaving it up to the riders and the team to decide if they wanted to try it, which none of them did, but more on this later.
On the performance front, the new ‘billiard table smooth’ surface provided incredible grip, meaning lap records kept falling across the classes. In MotoGP, almost every session that mattered, the fastest lap records kept being made and then broken shortly after. The fastest lap record around the Mobility Resort Motegi now stands at a sensational 1.42.371 that took Jorge Martin to his 24th premier class pole. The sprint, too, was around 9 seconds faster than in 2025, while the GP was a staggering 37.8 seconds faster! Both, set by Marc Marquez.
Marc raced the soft rear during the sprint and that special tyre for the race. While we are not sure how the tyre was behaving for the sprint winner, we all saw how Martin’s rear soft was disintegrating in full HD and at 2500fps as he fought incredible chatter during the final laps of the Sprint. He would eventually lose P2 to Moreira due to a last-lap track limit penalty. While the LCR Honda rookie got his first-ever sprint podium, Martin lost 7 points to Marc Marquez.
The most prominent victim of this was Pecco Bagnaia, who had to pit in the last lap of the sprint because it had become impossible to ride the bike any longer. The visuals showed a rear tyre on the verge of splitting in half. And it was not that the medium rear from the standard allocation was doing any better; Miller was on that compound and had suffered severe blistering. This made Michelin take action, and the soft was removed from the allotment, and it was strongly suggested that everyone should use the special compound that the French tyre maker brought for the race, and to help the riders get a hang of it, the morning warm-up duration was increased to 20 minutes.
Everyone eventually went on to use the exact tyre they had been ignoring, like Liberty Media has been ignoring the literal war in the Middle East. This made almost everyone look dumb, but there is a proper rant on that later.
Marc Marquez, The Inevitable!
You throw a challenge at Marc Marquez, and it acts as a yellow sun, giving him more power, and the Spaniards ability to overcome challenges thrown at him far outshines and outlasts the rest of the grid combined. That said, this year the championship situation is more than just Marc Marquez coming from far behind and getting into the lead, but more like others respectfully waiting for him as he settles back into his rhythm.
His monumental grit, focus and singular focus took Marc Marquez to an extremely important double at the JapaneseGP; he has once again wiped out the lead completely, with just 2 points now from Martin. He has already won more races than anyone else this season and has incredible momentum against his rivals. If we do go to Qatar to race, it would only help his cause because there would be one more race weekend to help him reach towards an unprecedented achievement. If not, there are still five more races to cross the finish line before Martin.
Martin’s consistency!
There was a categorical change in the mindset for Martin between the end of the 2023 season and the beginning of 2024. That change, that fierce pace matched with that phenomenal consistency, saw him achieve an iconic championship win. It was a win that we tend to talk less about and have almost forgotten because of Marquez’s 2025 performance.
2025 was a disaster for Martin, and in 2026 he has again started to show that same solid consistency even though he is no way near as ferociously fast as he was on that Ducati GP24. Martin is, however, different from the rest of the ‘newer’ crop of MotoGP riders; he is known to wear his emotions on his sleeve, but he also has an aura of an undeterred faith in himself. To add to it, he is the exact kind of ‘delusional with otherworldly skills’ on a MotoGP motorcycle that could truly take the fight to Marc Marquez and match him punch by punch.
Martin knows that if he beats ‘the’ Marc Marquez to a championship when he was still way ahead of the rest of the grid, then he would achieve a stature that no other great of the sport could ever claim. If there ever was any rider who truly plays for legacy, then it has got to be Martin. Those who have been through the years from Moto3 to MotoGP would understand it well. Martin is going to be extremely strong at the coming races, and in his mind, he is again ‘Martin against the world’, meaning he is a challenge Marc would have to be at his absolute best to get ahead of. Interesting times ahead.
Marco Bezzecchi: it is almost over.
After choosing the medium rear in the sprint that never came to him, Marco Bezzecchi could only manage a P6 and then barely saved himself from Enea Bastianini, who was setting a pace during the final laps that could only be called mystic art. We had never had a 1.43 race lap at Motegi, and on lap 23 of a 24-lap race, the Tech3 KTM rider set the fastest ever race lap around the circuit that was a staggering 1.43.041, a whisker from a 1.42. Absolute insanity, that.
Coming back to Marco Bezzecchi, he is now 49 points behind Martin in the championship and the way the two ahead of him are going, the Italian does not look like being capable of bridging this gap now. If he does indeed cover this, it would be among the most historic runs in the sport, but he is being successfully outclassed by both Spaniards ahead of him. But he still has tracks coming up where he could be extremely competitive or even the one to beat, but it may only add more spice to the already intense championship fight. Every point he now takes (if) from both Martin and Marc Marquez would only make the championship more complex for Martin and MM.
It would be interesting to see with what mindset Bezzecchi comes to Mandalika, and if he decides to go all out, he may cause much damage to the precarious condition rivals ahead of him find themselves in. Hope he does.
That Honda and Chantra’s Redemption!
Yours truly have been following MotoGP for almost 20 years now and can say with certainty that the special livery HRC brought as an homage at the JapaneseGP to its 60 years in premier class racing is simply breathtakingly gorgeous. For the first time, a MotoGP bike has achieved an aesthetic equivalent of pure art. As they say, ‘Hang it in the Louvre!’ The way Honda has interpreted the iconic silver and red livery of the RC181 and then those spectacular jet-black rider leathers stopped people in their track to just look and look and look at this in pure awe and adoration. What a visual spectacle. Here’s hoping HRC runs this livery every year at Motegi from now on, if they cannot run this across the year, which they should.
Before the race start, Luca Marini, the factory Honda rider, has joked that he hoped they got into good positions so that the livery could have more airtime on the broadcast. Thankfully, the MotoGP TV direction did a rather great fan service during the race. Luca Marini had a decent race, finishing in P10. His number 10 RC213 looked stunning whenever it came on screen.
However, the most footage we got of that (again) stunning livery was of Somkiat Chantra, who was replacing Mir at Motegi. Chantra had outqualified Marini and had an absolutely smashing ride to P13, equalling his best finish from last year when he was a regular part of the Honda MotoGP camp. This is an incredible performance by Chantra; he looked every bit like the MotoGP rider most had hoped he should have been in the short time he got in the premier class. His outstanding ride and the way he rode the entire week at Motegi was a redemption arc, a redemption which was in small part for Chantra and for a larger part for us all who were maybe a bit too harsh and judgemental towards his MotoGP performances.
Chantra should and must have been proud of what he achieved in front of the biggest crowd that Motegi has ever seen for MotoGP and then in front of millions of fans streaming and watching across the world. Chantra was also a part of one of the most beautiful and human moments of the weekend as well. During the pre-race event on Sunday, the moment when Ogura came and sat on the track while Chantra was in the cart and both chatted away, laughing, reminded us of the great friendship the two have shared for years now as they grew up through the Honda Asia Racing environment. It was a rather brilliant moment between two great friends who now race in two separate championships at different parts of the world throughout the year.
A whole lot of Dumb!
That Chantra and Ogura moment was probably the only good thing about that outrageously dumb move to have a kart race just for the sake of the show when the main race was barely three hours away. Those who greenlit it must look themselves in the mirror and ask why they are where they are, because such shenanigans could have turned out to be an injured rider or two, and for something as weirdly childish, it doesn’t suit a sport that calls itself the best racing out there.
Marc Marquez had the best response to this dumb thing, as he sent a body double to take his place at the event that made no sense and had no right to have been organised at that time of the week. It would have been great entertainment on Thursday, but on Sunday it was just not done. The riders need to learn to speak up, and maybe someone can school them about unions and their importance, or such things will keep on happening far more frequently, to the loss of the sport.
This F1-fication of show over substance cannot survive in motorcycle racing because cars and motorcycles are vastly different cultures. Motorcycling will always need to be more natural, raw and unfiltered. The sooner the Liberty Media people understand this, the sooner they will be able to market this property in a way that organically and naturally complements it. Even the majority of new fans they plan to bring to this sport would be coming from the two-wheeler world. And two-wheelers, even the most advanced and performance-oriented, will always be far more accessible than their car counterparts.
And this community would ‘always’ find the raw, awe-inspiring, and yet relatable naturalness of the sport compelling and captivating. The future of MotoGP was never in North America, and it will never be in North America. They need to look at SE Asia and know that’s where they will get what they need and modify the ‘product’ accordingly.
The next on the dumb list was clearly the way the teams and the riders responded to the special tyre that Michelin brought as an option to deal with the unknowns that the resurfaced Motegi could and did present. The most surprising was Honda, who were the only people to have tested on the resurfaced track and yet even they did not try that tyre until it became a necessity. What were they testing then? If they did not even understand that there would be tyre degradation, then what was even the point?
The same is true with Ducati; normally you would assume the smarts of Gigi would have made them try the new special tyre first thing when the track dried out in FP1. And because Ducati and especially Marc didn’t try it, no one else did. Because the paddock tends to behave like sheep and then wonder why the one guy who isn’t afraid of being the wolf gobbles them all up, every-single-time.
But it seems that Ducati is legitimately spooked out of that heat-resistant hard carcass medium that Michelin brings to the hot races. Which again proves why increasingly putting all your eggs, even though they might be made of gold, still leaves you with an increased probability of tripping over and losing more than you could recover.
Ironically, the smartest people on the paddock were the Michelin guys by a fair margin, but they are the ones who are getting the most flak for all this mess.
The ways to dumb are varied and a lot, friends.
Cheers. Ride Safe.
