Marco Bezzecchi’s early-season wastefulness in the MotoGP sprint format has come back to haunt him after a horror past four rounds, with the Aprilia rider’s inability to score big points in the sport’s half-distance Saturday races almost wholly explaining his slide down the standings from an early-season position of dominance.
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Elsewhere, Ai Ogura’s “strange” riding style has demanded Aprilia rethink how to approach races with the rising second-year Japanese star, while Aprilia’s top brass has nominated reigning world champion Marc Marquez as the favourite to win an eighth premier-class crown, despite the Ducati rider not leading the standings after any of the 11 rounds contested this season.
There’s that and more in MotoGP Pit Talk, your news wrap of the stories behind the headlines as MotoGP remains on its mid-season break before the resumption of action at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone from August 7-9.
SPRINT WOES COME BACK TO BITE BATTERED BEZZECCHI
With MotoGP reaching the mid-point of the season with just 24 points separating the top five in the standings – the closest title chase in the ‘modern era’ since 2002 – Marco Bezzecchi’s paltry sprint race points total has emerged as an issue, with the Italian by far the worst of that quintet of riders likely to figure in the championship run-in.
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After 11 rounds, Bezzecchi has won a grid-best four Grands Prix and led the title chase at the conclusion of eight race weekends, but is yet to win a single sprint race, something six other riders have managed.
Bezzecchi’s Aprilia teammate Jorge Martin leads the championship with 208 points at the halfway stage and has won two sprints, with Trackhouse Aprilia rider Ai Ogura 14 points adrift in second.
Ducati’s Marc Marquez (third, 18 points from first), Bezzecchi (22 points in arrears) and Ducati’s Fabio Di Giannantonio (24 behind) all sit within a single race win of top spot, the 2026 season usurping 2020 – where 28 points covered the top five – as the tightest title fight since in the past 25 years with half the season remaining.
Bezzecchi won the first three Grands Prix of the season but crashed out of sprints in Thailand and Texas, and has slid to fourth in the standings after not scoring a Grand Prix point for four rounds, wiped out by teammate Martin in Hungary, banned in Czechia after a confrontation with a trackside marshal, crashing out early in the Netherlands, and then breaking his collarbone in a qualifying crash in Germany.
From the five likely title protagonists, Bezzecchi has scored fewer than half of the points in sprints managed by Marquez, and is just eighth in a sprints-only points table for 2026.
Sprint race points, 2026 (top 10)
73: Marc Marquez (Ducati)
63: Jorge Martin (Aprilia)
59: Raul Fernandez (Aprilia)
56: Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati)
50: Fabio Di Giannantonio (Ducati)
46: Ai Ogura (Aprilia)
43: Pedro Acosta (KTM)
33: Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia)
20: Alex Marquez (Ducati)
14: Enea Bastianini (KTM)
Only four full-time riders – KTM’s Maverick Vinales (who has missed three sprints with injury), along with Yamaha trio Alex Rins, Toprak Razgatlioglu and Australia’s Jack Miller – have failed to score a sprint point this season, while Marc Marquez’s 2026 prowess in the short-format races that debuted in the 2023 season has been in keeping with what’s become another of the Spaniard’s strong points.
Marquez’s sprint win last time out at the Sachsenring was his fourth this year and 19th overall, one more than Martin and five more than Bagnaia, the only riders to win double-figure sprints in the past four seasons.
OGURA’S SLIDING STYLE OPENING EYES
Ai Ogura’s crew chief Giovanni Mattarollo has detailed how Aprilia has had to understand rather than change the 25-year-old’s signature rising style, which has propelled the 2024 Moto2 champion into unlikely title contention after just 29 MotoGP starts.
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Ogura’s rookie year last season showed flashes of speed – he finished fifth on his MotoGP debut in Thailand – but dwindled to a 16th-place championship finish as injuries and inexperience played their part.
This season, Ogura has surged towards the summit of the standings by employing devastating late-race pace on a regular basis, his atypical approach seeing him steadily build speed on tyres well past their best towards the end of races while his rivals are typically managing tyre wear and hanging on until the finish.
Ogura earned his first MotoGP podium when he stormed through the pack to finish third in Le Mans in round five, took his maiden pole and best Grand Prix result (second) in Czechia in round nine, then immediately topped that when he took victory next time out in Assen to become the first Japanese rider to win a premier-class Grand Prix in 22 years.
Of the five riders crammed together atop the standings after 11 rounds, Ogura has gained the most places from where he’s started in Grands Prix on average.
Average positions gained/lost, top 5 in standings (Grands Prix only)
+4.5 Ogura: average qualifying result 8.4, average Grand Prix finish 3.9
+3 Martin: average qualifying result 6.5, average Grand Prix finish 3.5
+2.1 Bezzecchi: average qualifying result 3.8, average Grand Prix finish 1.7
-0.4 M. Marquez: average qualifying result 3.3, average Grand Prix finish 3.7
-1 Di Giannantonio: average qualifying result 3.6, average Grand Prix finish 4.6
Trackhouse Aprilia teammate Raul Fernandez describes Ogura’s approach as “not European style”, which Mattarollo expanded upon in an interview with motogp.com.
“It’s the slide and the throttle management, these are the two things that you see clearly from the others that are different,” the engineer said.
“This, at the beginning for us, was strange, it was out of the window, and it took a bit for us to understand we need to use this difference instead of ‘no, this is wrong, do as the others’.
“He likes to slide on the [corner] entry, and he plays a lot with that … due to that, not just the [bike] setting but also the electronics, is quite different compared to the other Aprilia guys. This affects all the rest of the riding – the exit from the corner, the managing of the throttle, and how to manage the tyres.
“He doesn’t need the same grip level on the rear to be fast. Riders like ‘Bez’ [Marco Bezzecchi] or Raul, they reach a point and then they stay there. Ai starts from [below] and can finish [above], it’s just a different approach.”
Ogura’s arrival so rapidly as a title contender this year has been one of the surprises of the season, and he’s leveraged that form into signing a full-factory contract to join Jorge Martin at the main Yamaha team next season for the first year of the sport’s brand-new 850cc regulation set.
While that’s for the future, Ogura conquering a steep learning curve to compete with vastly more experienced riders leaves few boxes to tick, Mattarollo feels.
“It’s not easy to find a weak point … maybe one is that if he does a crash, he’s not the kind of rider who’s jumping immediately on the bike and back to being fast,” he said.
“This is something that he’s working [on] and getting better, but still a lacking point we need to improve.”
‘HAS THE ADVANTAGE’: APRILIA BOSS PEGS MARQUEZ AS FAVOURITE
Aprilia CEO Massimo Rivola has installed reigning world champion Marc Marquez as the 2026 title favourite despite the 33-year-old Spaniard sitting third in the title chase after 11 rounds, and with the Ducati star still far from 100 per cent fitness after a gruelling past 10 months.
Marquez shut down his 2025 season with four rounds remaining after needing surgery on his right collarbone after a first-lap crash in Indonesia last October, and then missed this year’s Catalan Grand Prix in May after he crashed in the sprint race in France and broke his right foot, choosing to undergo a subsequent operation on his right shoulder to remove a screw that had become bent and was impacting his radial nerve, meaning he would intermittently lose feeling in his right arm while riding.
Cautious on his return to the grid in Italy for round seven, Marquez fell to 102 points behind then-series leader Marco Bezzecchi after Mugello, but has scored a grid-best 119 points in the past four rounds and won three Grands Prix to roar back into the championship picture.
Reflecting on the first half of 2026 in an interview with Sky Italia, Rivola says Marquez’s pedigree and recent form has made him wary, despite Aprilia having the best season in its MotoGP history to date.
“I’ve always said from the beginning [that] we don’t look at the standings, even less so now,” Rivola said.
“We know we have very strong riders, both us and our satellite team [Trackhouse]. We know the bike is very competitive, so I’ve always thought this would be a world championship that would be up for grabs until the very last race.
“We know there’s a guy named Marc Marquez who clearly has the advantage in all the predictions … he’s the favourite, but we’ll never give up.”
“It’s fantastic to be part of the game, it’s fantastic to be part of an all-Italian challenge for a title of this calibre.
“I think we’ll fight until the very last race.”
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