MotoGP: Italian GP (EN).

Round number seven of the MotoGP World Championship. As an Italian, this weekend has a different flavour, a decisively special one. We are among the hills of Tuscany, where the crowd is incredibly warm, the atmosphere is even hotter, and the bikes reach top speeds well over 360 km/h.

We are at Mugello for the MotoGP Italian GP at Mugello, with a packed crowd, many racing bikes on a winding track, Italian flags, and 'Gran Premio d’Italia' text on one of the most fascinating and iconic circuits on the entire World Championship calendar: the Italian Grand Prix.

As with every racing weekend, let's analyse the "Tops & Flops" of the weekend, starting from the sprint race all the way to Sunday's race.

MotoGP: Italian GP - Saturday.

Sprint.

Top.

Aprilia. I could have celebrated only Raul Fernandez, who wins the sprint and proves to be competitive when the bike allows him to be and he remembers that he is a very fast rider.

However, it would have been truly ungenerous toward the magnificent Saturday that Aprilia, as a manufacturer, put on display. In qualifying, the Noale bikes lock out the front row with Bezzecchi, Fernandez, and Martin—a historic first time for the Venetian brand. In the sprint, they lock down the result, finishing in first place with Fernandez, second with Martin, and fourth with Bezzecchi, who was forced to limit the damage after a botched start.

For Sunday as well, the three RS-GPs will launch from the front row: with a good start, we could truly witness an all-Aprilia podium.

Ducati. Although the Borgo Panigale manufacturer is no longer the dominant beast of past years, they still place a solid five bikes in the top ten during qualifying. The only one missing from the roll call is Pirro, who is racing as a replacement for the injured Alex Marquez (victim of a horrible crash in Barcelona); if the Spaniard had been in the game, he surely would have brought his Desmosedici into the top ten as well.

In the Sprint, four Ducatis finish in the top ten, partly due to Morbidelli's retirement. The excellent result of Di Giannantonio stands out, third on the podium with a great pace. However, there is a big asterisk: the other Ducatis in the top ten (Marc Marquez, Aldeguer, and Bagnaia) conceded a whopping 10 seconds in just 11 laps. A massive pace gap for a MotoGP that, until the previous weekend, had accustomed us to infinitesimal gaps.

Pedro Acosta. An incredible talent, currently wasted in a manufacturer that is not proving to be competitive for the world championship. The Spaniard does what he can with the material at his disposal, but the KTM is decisively too tight for him. Market rumours now place him as a near certainty at Ducati starting next year, right alongside Marc Márquez. Before thinking about the future, though, there is a 2026 season to finish, which promises to still be very long.

Cal Crutchlow. For those who might not know who he is, Cal is a rider with an incredible handle, but unfortunately targeted by too many injuries throughout his career. In his golden era in MotoGP, from 2011 to 2020, he went very fast and achieved beautiful results. Today, six years after his retirement as a full-time rider and on the threshold of 40 years old, he gets back on the saddle of beasts that have nothing to do anymore with the bikes he used to ride. Yet he did it: he rode clean and finished the Sprint. Truly immense.

Flop.

Ai Ogura. The off-key note of an otherwise dominant weekend for Aprilia. On Friday, he fails to hit the top ten, remaining excluded along with his teammate. On Saturday, he is forced to go through Q1: while Fernandez manages to make the cut and fly into Q2, Ogura stays out and finds himself launching from the thirteenth grid slot. A weekend that, by that point, is already heavily compromised.

In the sprint, the Japanese rider does not have the pace and finishes in eighth place, detached by a full ten seconds from Fernandez, who had even placed on the front row in qualifying.

Unfortunately, Ogura makes life complicated for himself right from Friday in this 2026 season due to his lack of consistency in direct access to Q2. In modern MotoGP, this is a massive limitation: starting thirteenth means cutting yourself out of the fight for the victory. And the most painful note is that, under his seat this year, he has a bike that allows him to win.

Diogo Moreira. With a qualifying performance like that—eighth position on the grid with a Honda—and a launch at the start that immediately projected him into third place, it would seem absurd to include him among those who failed. Yet I am forced to do so, given that right from the first lap, Diogo started moving backward like a crab. Lap after lap, it became evident that he did not have the pace, ending up acting as a bottleneck for riders of the calibre of Di Giannantonio and Bezzecchi. Crossing the finish line in tenth position after being third, losing two positions compared to where the Brazilian had started, still shapes up as a negative race, even considering his rookie status. In view of Sunday, there is still quite a bit of work to do on race pace.

Yamaha. Getting worse and worse. The best astride the M1 was Alex Rins, who conceded a full 17 seconds in just 11 laps. Behind him, Quartararo took 20, Miller 22, and Razgatlioglu 25. Doing the math, we are at nearly two seconds of a gap per lap: an eternity. It is a dramatic moment for Yamaha, whichever way you look at it.

KTM. An anonymous Saturday, a faithful mirror of their entire 2026 season. There is not much to add: apart from Acosta, who is capable of inventing something magical with that bike, the others achieve nothing worth writing about.

MotoGP: Italian GP - Sunday.

Gara.

Top.

Aprilia. These RS-GPs are simply playing with the rest of the MotoGP field. For half the race, Bezzecchi and Martin remain calculatingly behind Bagnaia, who seemed to have the right pace to stay in front and control the race. In the opening laps, it appeared that the Aprilia bikes, equipped with the medium tyres, struggled more compared to the Ducati of the two-time world champion. But when they decided to get serious halfway through the race, both Bezzecchi and Martin overtook Bagnaia and broke away, setting an unsustainable rhythm for anyone.

Behind them, meanwhile, the third Aprilia was flying: that of Ai Ogura. The Japanese rider launches well, establishes himself in the top ten, and from the mid-race point onwards begins to rack up heavy overtakes, putting first Aldeguer, then Marc Márquez, and finally Acosta behind him, all the way to grabbing fourth place. With four laps to go, the podium seemed out of reach, with Bagnaia two seconds away. Ogura's race looked finished there; instead, in the last two passages, he rides a second faster than Pecco, catches him, and goes all-in with an attack at the final corner. Unfortunately, he runs wide, missing a third place that would have been historic, but his remains a masterclass performance after Saturday's flop.

And then there is Raul Fernandez. He starts well but goes wide into turn 1, finding himself fifteenth at the end of the first lap. From that moment on, he executes a furious comeback up to eighth place. A real shame, because today he easily had the pace to stay with Martin and Bezzecchi. Unfortunately, the Trackhouse satellite team almost never manages to experience a linear weekend with both riders.

Bagnaia. This time I am putting only him, because he was the only truly competitive Ducati on this Sunday. The Italian was the only one capable of gritting his teeth and trying to keep the pace of the Aprilia bikes for as long as he could. In the end, he had to surrender to their superior rhythm, even finding himself defending with his fingernails a third place that seemed safely locked away until two laps from the end. He extracted the maximum from the package available; in any case, it is always beautiful to see Pecco on the podium at the Italian Grand Prix.

Acosta. In this Sunday race, all the technical limitations of the KTM emerged. It was a bike that went fast in the corners—or rather, it was Acosta making it corner fast—only to constantly yield ground to both Marquez and Aldeguer in the fast sections. Watching that fight was almost nerve-wracking: Pedro did everything to get ahead of Marc in the twisty parts, where he even seemed to have a minimal margin, but this year the KTM simply has no engine. Consequently, the rider from Murcia systematically saw himself blown away on the straight by whoever was following him. He finishes sixth at the culmination of a race that must have been incredibly frustrating.

Diogo Moreira. If in the sprint he had moved backward like a crab, in Sunday's race the magic of the start did not repeat itself, but a solid proof of maturity arrived instead. He launches decently and manages a race of substance right in the middle of the fight for the top ten. In the end, he claws tenth position, resulting in the best Honda under the chequered flag. A great sign: he confirmed Saturday's good placement and capitalised to the maximum on the great work done throughout the entire weekend.

Flop.

Yamaha. Pitch black for the Japanese manufacturer. It does not matter which circuit they find themselves on; the script is always the same: constantly at the back. Even Rins, author of an excellent flash by grabbing Q2 in qualifying, failed to capitalise, ending up on the ground in Sunday's race. All the other Yamaha riders are desolately slow, and certainly not because they are poor riders but because the current bike is a true disaster. If Pirro hadn't been there to close out the standings, Quartararo would have been the last of the full-time riders, with Razgatlioglu third-to-last and Miller fourth-to-last. So much for those who claimed that the big and only problem with the M1 was the inline four-cylinder engine: here the problem is structural and concerns the entire bike.

Viñales & Bastianini. I haven't spoken about Viñales among my flops yet, because as a fan it really hurts. Yet I cannot exclude from those who failed a rider of Maverick's calibre, who in the past with Suzuki, Yamaha, and Aprilia fought stably for victories, podiums, and world championships, while today on the KTM he can never even break into the top ten, constantly navigating in the final positions. I completely understand that he has been fighting with his own body for two years now—since the bad crash in Germany in 2025—but seeing him gather so little every time he takes to the track is truly discouraging.

For Bastianini, the argument is completely different, but the result unfortunately does not change. Enea was going rather fast this weekend, but he managed to crash both Saturday and Sunday in exactly the same corner, throwing into the garbage two probable positive placements that would have done a world of good for morale.

Small reflections.

This was our analysis of the "Tops & Flops" of the Italian Grand Prix, a weekend that decreed a rather clear Aprilia dominance, a Ducati unexpectedly in trouble with the bike package, and a Yamaha that, with every weekend that passes, sinks into an increasingly evident crisis of slowness.

See you next week in Hungary, at Balaton Park: a twisty, slow, very hot, and physically exhausting circuit.

M.