virage du raccordement

Aleix Espargaro leaving Aprilia to retire from MotoGP. Pedro Acosta promoted to factory KTM after one year with GasGas. Jorge Martin to Aprilia after 4 years with Pramac. Marc Marquez to factory Ducati after 11 seasons with Honda and one season with Gresini. Enea Bastianini out of Ducati after two seasons with them. And the list will only go on.

If for now, 5 riders are meant to stay with their current team in 2025, I can’t help but wonder if that number will manage to grow much more considering all the things at play and rumors floating right now.

Obviously I had to take a look at what happened in past seasons to see trends and see where 2025 could fit.

The hypotheses:

• To be awarded a category in a season, a rider had to have a full-time seat in a team at the beginning of the season. Wildcard rides and replacement rides don’t count here (same for the dates of the first and last MotoGP season).
• The comparison is made between the beginning of a season and the beginning of the previous season. This means that the changes from mid-season decisions only show up in the following season (example: Franco Morbidelli has been considered « promoted to factory » in 2022 despite the fact that the switch happened mid-2021).
• Seasons 2013 through 2024 have been considered in this study. This brought us a total of 62 riders.

The categories:

• new rider : the rookies,
• same team : self-explanatory,
• promoted to factory / demoted from factory : move from a satellite team to the factory of said satellite team or vice-versa (ex: Fabio Quartararo from Petronas to Yamaha in 2021),
• satellite teams switch : move from a satellite team to another satellite team of the same factory (ex: Fabio Di Giannantonio from Gresini to VR46 in 2024),
• new team in a new factory : a change of factory (ex: Luca Marini from VR46 to Honda in 2024),
• competing again : a rider coming back with a full-time seat after not having one at the beginning of the previous season (ex: Andrea Dovizioso in 2022).

season	new rider	same team	promoted to factory	demoted from factory	satellite teams switch	new factory	competing again	total
2024	1	15	0	0	1	5	0	22
2023	1	13	1	0	0	7	0	22
2022	5	15	1	0	1	1	1	24
2021	4	9	4	2	1	2	0	22
2020	3	17	0	0	0	1	1	22
2019	4	12	1	0	1	4	0	22
2018	5	16	0	0	0	3	0	24
2017	4	11	0	0	0	7	1	23
2016	1	14	0	0	2	4	0	21
2015	4	13	1	0	1	4	2	25
2014	4	14	0	0	0	5	0	23
2013	7	11	0	0	0	6	0	24
total	43	160	8	2	7	49	5	274
average	3.6	13.3	0.7	0.2	0.6	4.1	0.4	22.8

Chart of the repartition of riders explicited in the previous table

overall results

new riders

Not accounting for the occasional wildcard rides that might have happen before they got a real seat, MotoGP has welcomed 43 rookies over the span of the last 12 seasons.

The highest number of rookies was in 2013 with 7 new riders. We have seen a decrease in rookies in the recent years with only one in 2023 (Augusto Fernandez) and one in 2024 (Pedro Acosta).

Could someone like Ai Ogura or Joe Roberts (like the current rumors suggest) join Fermin and allow us to have a battle for the best rookie of the season in 2025? I suppose we shall wait and see.

11 riders only did one season in MotoGP (not counting Pedro Acosta who is in his rookie season in 2024 and already has a contract for 2025). This happened the most in 2013 where only 4 of the 7 2013 rookies had a full-time seat for the 2014 season.

staying with their team

as individuals

As stated above in this article, on average, over the 2013-2024 period, 13.3 riders started the season on the same team they had started the previous seasons. In terms of extremes :

• 17 riders started the 2020 season in the same team they started the 2019 season,
• Only 9 riders started the 2021 season in the same team they started the 2020 season with.

If we look at the riders with the longest tenure with the same team, we get the following table.

Rider	Team	Number of Consecutive Seasons with the same team	Dates
Marc Marquez	Repsol Honda	11	2013-2023
Aleix Espargaro	Aprilia	8	2017-2024
Andrea Dovizioso	Ducati	8	2013-2020
Valentino Rossi	Yamaha	8	2013-2020
Takaaki Nakagami	LCR Honda	7	2018-2024

As stated above, I only gathered data for the 2013-2024 seasons but if we look a little further, we can find additional riders who spent quite some time with the same team (without a break).

From 2013 to 2016, for 4 consecutive seasons, 5 of the factory seats were locked in by the same 5 riders : Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa with Repsol Honda, Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi with Yamaha and Andrea Dovizioso with Ducati.

In 2017, Jorge Lorenzo moved to Ducati, breaking the series. That said, all other 4 riders stayed with their team in 2017 and 2018 (then Dani retired at the end of the 2018 season). All these riders are now retired except for Marc who no longer rides for Honda.

The recent years have started to see a trend with some stability in regards to factory seats:

It is not quite the same thing and even though some of them had the chance to battle each other for titles (namely Fabio and Pecco in 2021 and 2022), it’s not exactly the same base (especially now that their bikes are not even close in terms of performances).

as teammates

The presence of the Honda & Yamaha teammates in the 2013-2016 group made me want to take a look at the pair of teammates who stayed together the longest in MotoGP (at least in recent history).

Riders	Factory	Number of Consecutive Seasons	Years
Dani Pedrosa / Marc Marquez	Honda	6	2013-2018
Jorge Lorenzo / Valentino Rossi	Yamaha	4*	2013-2016
Maverick Viñales / Valentino Rossi	Yamaha	4	2017-2020
Alex Rins / Joan Mir	Suzuki	4	2019-2022
Aleix Espargaro / Maverick Viñales	Aprilia	3.5**	mid 2021-2024

*Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi were also Yamaha teammates for 3 seasons between 2008 and 2010 (as everybody knows, it did not go well, but it did happen nevertheless).

**Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Viñales were also factory teammates at Suzuki in 2015 and 2016.

One could argue that Fabio Quartararo and Franco Morbidelli could almost be on this list because they were factory teammates for 2.5 years and before that, satellite team teammates for 2 years.

Actually, if we extend this list to satellite teams, we can find 3 pairs who spent 3 years together :

• Bradley Smith and Pol Espargaro with Tech3 (2014-2016),
• Takaaki Nakagami and Cal Crutchlow with LCR Honda (2018-2020),
• Jorge Martin and Johann Zarco with Pramac (2021-2023).

In 2025, none of the European factories will retain their 2024 duos of teammates (Aleix Espargaro is retiring, Pedro Acosta is moving up from GasGas to KTM, Marc Marquez is taking Enea Bastianini’s spot as Pecco Bagnaia’s teammate). On the Honda side, it seems very unlikely that Joan Mir will want to spend one more year on that machine. Yamaha already contract Fabio Quartararo for 2025 and Yamaha keeping Alex Rins would make sense in the current situation.

Satellite teams wise, some teams already know that they will lose their duo of teammates (Gresini, GasGas, Pramac) and rumors are floating about some others.

For comparison, 4 of the 2024 pairs of teammates were already teammates in 2023 including 3 factories (Aprilia, Ducati, KTM) and one satellite team (Trackhouse). This means all 4 Aprilia riders kept their exact seat from 2023 to 2024.

being promoted to factory

In every single season except for one, the norm is to have at most one rider being promoted to the factory team of the satellite team he worked with the previous season, if any. In this matter, 2021 stands as an anomaly with 4 riders being promoted to factory:

• Fabio Quartararo (Petronas -> Yamaha),
• Pecco Bagnaia (Pramac -> Ducati),
• Jack Miller (Pramac -> Ducati),
• Miguel Oliveira (Tech3 -> KTM).

From 2013 to 2024, 5 riders came back to a full-time seat after not having one at least in the previous season.

4 of them only came back for one single year: Marco Melandri (2015), Alex de Angelis (2015), Bradley Smith (2020) and Andrea Dovizioso (2022). The only rider who did more than one season after his comeback was Karel Abraham. He was in MotoGP from 2011 to 2015, did a season in Superbike in 2016 and then came back to MotoGP in 2017 for 3 seasons.

tables

If people are interested, I might consider locking the Google Sheet and making it accessible on reading mode to make it easier to look at.