One year after sitting last in the MotoGP world championship standings after the German Grand Prix, Aprilia’s Jorge Martin leads the title chase after the Sachsenring round last Sunday, but insists he’s still not the favourite in a wide-open campaign where five riders sit within one win of first place at the halfway stage.
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Elsewhere, the messy divorce between Maverick Vinales and KTM hit a new low in Germany, while the Austrian brand’s attempts to investigate its engine woes have hit a roadblock, with rival manufacturers refusing to give approval as per the sport’s rule book.
There’s that and more in MotoGP Pit Talk, your news wrap of the stories behind the headlines at the mid-point of the 2026 season, with a three-week break ahead of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone from August 7-9.
MARTIN DOWNPLAYS SERIES LEAD AS FIVE-WAY TITLE FIGHT LOOMS
Jorge Martin feels a resurgent Marc Marquez should be considered the favourite for this year’s world title, despite the Aprilia rider extending his lead atop the standings to 14 points after finishing fifth in the German Grand Prix last Sunday.
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Last year, Martin – in his first year with Aprilia after crossing from Ducati after he won the 2024 world title – hadn’t scored a single point in the first 11 rounds of the season, missing the opening three rounds of the season after a pair of pre-season accidents, then crashing in Qatar and suffering broken ribs and a punctured lung.
Martin’s consistency in 2026 as his rivals have lurched from highs to lows – the 28-year-old has won just one of the opening 11 Grands Prix (in France in round five) – sees him atop the standings at the halfway stage, but with the lowest points total (208) since MotoGP introduced sprint races in 2023; previously, Francesco Bagnaia’s 2023 points tally at the season’s mid-point (260) was the lowest score halfway through a campaign, which the Ducati rider led by 50 points at the time.
After 11 rounds this season, Aprilia’s Ai Ogura (14 points behind Martin), Marquez (18), Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi (22) and Ducati’s Fabio Di Giannantonio (24) are all within the 25 points awarded to the winner of each Grand Prix; all five riders have won at least one Grand Prix in the opening 11 rounds.
Marquez, who was 102 points off the series lead after the Italian Grand Prix in late May, won at the Sachsenring for the 10th time on Sunday to secure his third victory in the past four Grands Prix as he embarks on what would be a record comeback to defend his 2025 title.
After Sunday’s race, Martin – who was the last-placed Aprilia in the race as he was at the previous round in the Netherlands – reflected on his changing fortunes year-on-year, and was quick to shut down talk of title favouritism.
“Last season I was last in the championship at this point, and now I’m in the lead so it has been a big comeback,” he said.
“But there still is a lot of races to go. There are a lot of races that I love, tracks I really enjoy riding on, so it will be a big challenge to fight with riders until the end.
“I’m not the favourite … obviously at the moment, Marc [Marquez], at the level he’s reaching, he’s the favourite. At the moment he’s on a much better level than us, but I think when I am on 100 per cent with the bike, I can be fighting with Marc. Now, we are far away from that, but … we just need to get a bit more speed to fight to the end.
“The challenge is to beat the best rider in history, so to be able to be fighting with him is already amazing.”
Martin was third behind Trackhouse Aprilia teammates Ogura and Raul Fernandez at Assen in round 10, then finished behind his Aprilia stablemates again in Germany, Ogura climbing to second in the standings after his second-place finish, and Fernandez finishing third.
The Spaniard, who feels he’s been playing catch-up after missing pre-season testing with injury, says he doesn’t yet feel close to extracting his best out of a RS-GP machine that has won six of the 11 Grands Prix this year, comfortably Aprilia’s best in MotoGP.
“I feel a limit from my bike, there’s something we are not understanding well because I can see the other Aprilias are much faster than me,” Martin said.
“I have trust in myself and I have confidence in myself and in my team, the work we are doing, but for sure there is something that we are missing.”
Pressed on what Ogura and Fernandez are doing to have his measure over the past two rounds, Martin couldn’t identify one particular shortcoming.
“It’s difficult to say, they are able to do everything a bit better, they turn better and they put more power on the ground,” he said.
“I think it’s more about finding a set-up or a balance that is better. At the moment we don’t have it, so we have to analyse … we have good data from the first part of the season to analyse well what was working, and we have to go back to that.”
‘ALL I GET IS CRITICISM’: VINALES UNLOADS ON KTM AFTER SACHSENRING MISERY
The increasingly-fractured relationship between Maverick Vinales and KTM played out in public over the German Grand Prix weekend, which came exactly one year after the Spanish rider suffered a shoulder injury he’s not yet recovered from.
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Vinales, 31, dislocated and fractured his left shoulder in a qualifying crash at the Sachsenring on July 12 last year, and competed in just four of the final 12 rounds as his recovery from injury lingered.
After a compromised start to the 2026 season, Vinales had further surgery after the Grand Prix of the Americas in March to remove a displaced screw from his 2025 operation, and missed three more rounds.
With just 10 points from the opening 11 rounds, the 10-time Grand Prix winner sits last in the standings of the 22 full-time riders in the championship. His German GP weekend was miserable, qualifying 20th, only ahead of Honda’s 40-year-old injury stand-in Cal Crutchlow, and he finished last in Saturday’s 15-lap sprint.
In Sunday’s 30-lap Grand Prix, Vinales retired with four laps to go from last place, saying a lack of fitness made it impossible to continue.
Vinales’ future has become clouded in recent times, with KTM’s factory team announcing an all-new line-up of Alex Marquez and Fabio Di Giannantonio for the first year of MotoGP’s 850cc regulation revolution in 2027, replacing the Ducati-bound Pedro Acosta and South African stalwart Brad Binder, who is without a seat for next season.
Vinales’s Tech3 KTM team looks set to sign ousted Honda rider Luca Marini, with team boss Guenther Steiner seeking to employ a young rider – likely one of Moto2 front-runners Manuel Gonzalez or his Dynavolt Intact GP teammate, Australia’s Senna Agius – for the second seat.
After KTM motorsport director Pit Beirer indicated in Germany that “everything is open” for Vinales to continue next season, the Spaniard was resigned to his fate.
“I know I’m already out of MotoGP, so I’d like to close this chapter and focus on getting back to my best after the summer break,” he said, per GPone.com.
“Right now I need some support from the team, but all I get is criticism,” he added after Sunday’s race.
“It’s really hard to keep going … sometimes they’re happy to see me, but other times it’s like I’m a stranger. I don’t have any strength on the bike, I couldn’t help but slide out at every turn. I don’t even know if it’s fixable.
“I expected to be doing much better, but the doctor who operated on me told me I won’t be fully recovered until Indonesia (in October). That’s no good for me.”
Tech3 boss Steiner, speaking to motorsport.com in Germany, distanced himself from the Vinales/KTM friction – “I’m not involved in his contract, it’s a KTM contract” – and referenced Marini directly after a recent meeting with the Honda rider as he attempts to round out his line-up for 2027.
With the recent spate of long-rumoured rider changes being confirmed since the Czech Grand Prix in June – Acosta to Ducati, Bagnaia to Aprilia and Martin to Yamaha being the headliners – Steiner’s team is the only one of MotoGP’s 11 squads with two unconfirmed seats for next year.
“I’ve spoken with several riders, because you’re not just choosing someone to ride a motorcycle … you’re choosing a person who needs to become part of the team and fit in with the group,” Steiner said.
“I didn’t know Luca [Marini] before, and he really made a good impression on me. He has a lot of experience and might be able to help us improve. But, to be clear, we haven’t made a final decision on what we’re going to do.”
KTM ENGINE PLEA FALLS ON DEAF EARS
KTM’s bid to investigate a series of recent engine failures has hit a roadblock, with the unanimous approval of its four rival manufacturers required to circumvent MotoGP’s engine homologation rules on safety grounds not forthcoming after the German Grand Prix.
KTM’s bikes have struggled with repeated technical issues this season, the most dramatic coming in May’s Catalan Grand Prix where race-leader Pedro Acosta’s bike suddenly slowed on the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya’s back straight, with Ducati’s Alex Marquez ploughing into the back of him and breaking his collarbone and suffering a fractured vertebrae in his neck in a violent accident that red-flagged the race.
MotoGP’s engine freeze rules prohibit KTM from being able to open up its engines to investigate the potential problem without approval from all of Ducati, Aprilia, Honda and Yamaha; over the Sachsenring weekend, Autosport reported that, after several meetings initiated by KTM, only Aprilia was open to the Austrian brand’s request.
Speaking to Sky Italia, KTM motorsport director Pit Beirer said: “I want to thank [Aprilia technical director] Fabiano Sterlacchini and [Aprilia CEO] Massimo Rivola of Aprilia, who are helping us.
“The situation is not easy, there is something wrong inside our engines. We know there’s still this risk with some parts… there is a problem, and we have to solve it. We must use the summer break for this.”
There is recent precedent for a manufacturer being able to ‘open’ their engines for safety reasons; in 2020, Yamaha sought and received approval to change their engines after investigations pinpointed a problem with valves provided by an outside supplier. The current KTM situation is different, as the company is yet to identify what the issue is before it can work on a solution to fix it.
At the halfway stage of the season, KTM factory riders Acosta and Binder have already used six of the eight engines each rider is permitted for the entire season. Using a ninth engine would trigger penalties, including a pit-lane start and/or long lap.
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