MotoGP’s mega 12-rider shake-up explained… and verdict on every move for 2025
It’s a storyline set in motion so long ago that we’ve almost forgotten the ramifications of it. And it’s one we’ll first see the effect of in a week’s time.
The 2025 rider market silly season – a fuse lit by Pedro Acosta’s inevitable ascension into a senior seat at KTM to replace Jack Miller, and one that exploded when Marc Marquez signed to become Francesco Bagnaia’s new partner at the factory Ducati team – kicked off back in early June around the time of the Italian Grand Prix, and finally stopped when Miller was handed a career lifeline with the new Pramac Yamaha alliance in September.
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With next year’s line-up set in stone with so much of this season remaining, this weekend’s final round in Barcelona has snuck up on the sport’s fans as the time where more than half the grid will say farewell to their current teams – or farewell full stop – on Sunday in Catalunya.
In all, 12 of the 22 regulars are set to be in new colours – or hanging up their racing leathers for good – when the grid reassembles in Barcelona next Tuesday for the traditional post-season one-day test, a hitout that acts as a first day of school for the 2025 season.
It’s easier to list those riders not moving teams to the ones who are – there’s fewer of them to start with – but not all goodbyes are created equal.
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A select few riders are unquestionably moving up, while a handful more are shifting sideways. Others may live to lament what they’re leaving, for myriad reasons. Others still are on their way out, reluctantly or otherwise.
Which of those aforementioned categories each rider fits into isn’t simply a case of studying the points table of where they’ve been this year compared to where they’re headed.
It’s an assessment based on expectation versus destination, where they’ve been and what they’ve done, and with consideration to the sport’s competitive order, which will be changed next year with Ducati’s presence on the grid shrinking from eight to six bikes, Yamaha doubling its data with a brand-new team, and a certain six-time MotoGP champion joining a double MotoGP champ chastened by – most likely – relinquishing his crown riding for the sport’s best team.
It’s an off-season of serious churn – for context, just seven riders switched teams or left the grid this time last year – so here’s who’ll be elsewhere after the Grand Prix of Barcelona has been run and won, and whether those moves are for better or worse.
MOVING UP
Marc Marquez (to factory Ducati team from Gresini Ducati)
Pedro Acosta (to factory KTM team from Tech3 GasGas)
Marquez left millions on the table and the comfort of the only manufacturer he’d known to switch from Honda to Ducati this year; that the 31-year-old has won three Grands Prix and has been a regular podium visitor on a year-old GP23 machine shows what a success that has been.
Arguably his greatest win in 2024? Convincing Ducati, once it had seen what he could do on an outdated bike, to partner him with Bagnaia next year for fear of losing him to another manufacturer altogether, a move that flipped the rider market upside down and had ripple effects for so many to come on this list.
If Ducati’s GP25 is an improvement on the ’24 that has won 15 of 19 Grands Prix and the same number of sprint races this year, Marquez might have premier-class title number seven in his pocket this time next November.
PIT TALK PODCAST: In the latest episode of ‘Pit Talk’, Renita Vermeulen and Matt Clayton preview this weekend’s season finale in Barcelona and look at every angle in the battle for the championship between Jorge Martin and Francesco Bagnaia with MotoGP world feed TV main commentator, Matt Birt.
Acosta’s move was way less intriguing and completely deserved; even if Miller had replicated his passable first season with KTM from 2023, it would have been madness to keep the 20-year-old in KTM’s second-tier Tech3 GasGas set-up for any longer than his rookie year, one where he’s a chance to finish fifth in the championship on a bike that has largely underwhelmed in 2024.
Acosta looks ready to win races now, and is ahead of the machinery he’s riding; it’s now up to KTM to make the RC16 a weapon the Spaniard can fight Ducati with for meaningful prizes in 2025.
MOVING SIDEWAYS
Jack Miller (to Pramac Yamaha from factory KTM)
Franco Morbidelli (to VR46 Ducati from Pramac Ducati)
Marco Bezzecchi (to factory Aprilia from VR46 Ducati)
Maverick Vinales (to Tech3 KTM from factory Aprilia)
Miller’s move from a factory KTM to Yamaha’s second team fits into this category?
In most cases it wouldn’t, but the Australian’s sophomore year for the Austrian squad was underwhelming even before he was usurped by Acosta and has only occasionally got better since, and a Yamaha project that needs his vast experience of other bikes and where there’s potential for swift upside is no worse than a sideways shift.
Renewing ties with Pramac Racing – who he rode a Ducati for from 2018-20 – is a big win for the 29-year-old after his most barren year since 2016, and while it’s only a one-year deal, any other options were outside of MotoGP given he was the 22nd and final rider signed for 2025.
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Morbidelli gets to stay on the Ducati GP24 but with another team after a disappointing year that started with injury after a horror pre-season testing fall in Portugal and has only fleetingly improved; the Italian sits ninth in the standings, but has scored fewer than half the points (161 to 368) of Enea Bastianini, the worst of the other three riders on the sport’s best bike. Were it not for the team owned and run by mentor and mate Valentino Rossi having a spare seat, Morbidelli might have been done.
Morbidelli takes the place of fellow Italian Bezzecchi at VR46, who didn’t kick on this year after finishing third overall in 2023, but had enough runs on the board to be signed as part of a brand-new Aprilia factory squad for 2025.
‘Bez’ effectively takes the seat of the mercurial Vinales, who looks set to become a trivia footnote for the 2024 season as the only rider not on a Ducati to win a Grand Prix (as he did in Texas in round three), but will finish the season outside of the top six before a sideways move to KTM – his fourth MotoGP manufacturer – for next season.
MOVING BACKWARDS
Jorge Martin (to factory Aprilia from Pramac Ducati)
Enea Bastianini (to Tech3 KTM from factory Ducati)
Miguel Oliveira (to Pramac Yamaha from Trackhouse Aprilia)
Martin was the biggest loser when Ducati went with Marquez as Bagnaia’s teammate for 2025, and his fury at being overlooked for a second time in two seasons saw him immediately sign with Aprilia, a backwards step on the grid for the rider who has led the world championship after all but three rounds this year, and is an overwhelming favourite to win the title in Barcelona this weekend.
Having a full factory ride – and a factory rider’s pay cheque – could arguably place Martin in another tier here, and while he’s almost certain to take the world champion’s number 1 with him to Ducati’s Italian rivals for Tuesday’s test, that world champion tag and more zeros in his bank account might lose its lustre when he inevitably drops down the pecking order in 2025, no matter how formidable his talent is.
Bastianini – also relinquishing a Ducati GP24 for inferior equipment at KTM – never really made the best of his two years alongside Bagnaia, with injuries ruining 2023 and occasional 2024 highs interspersed with weekends that weren’t on the same level as his teammate or Martin. He’ll be an asset for KTM, but his trophy cabinet next season will be more sparse.
Oliveira is a harder rider to categorise, given he’s moving to a new Pramac Yamaha set-up alongside Miller and has spent plenty of time off his Aprilia after breaking a wrist in Indonesia, right in the busiest part of the flyaways section of the season where the races came thick and fast.
Of the Portuguese rider’s 71 points this season, 19 came in two days at the Sachsenring in July where he finished second in the sprint and sixth in the Grand Prix, not the territory he’s liking to be occupying on a Yamaha in 2025.
MOVING OUT/MOVING IN
Aleix Espargaro (retiring from factory Aprilia to become Honda test rider)
Takaaki Nakagami (retiring from LCR Honda to become Honda test rider)
Augusto Fernandez (sacked by Tech3 GasGas, 2025 plans unconfirmed)
Ai Ogura (from Moto2 world champion to Trackhouse Aprilia)
Somkiat Chantra (from Moto2 to LCR Honda)
Fermin Aldeguer (from Moto2 to Gresini Ducati)
The 35-year-old Espargaro – MotoGP’s oldest rider – will make his 255th and final premier-class start for Aprilia this weekend in Barcelona at the circuit that’s a short blast from his hometown of Granollers, and on a weekend where he may defy his late-season slump at a track where he won in the sprint race in May, and the Grand Prix last year.
Fellow veteran Nakagami will join Espargaro as part of Honda’s testing team next year, the Japanese manufacturer loading up with riders to maximise the concessions enabling more testing for the sport’s worst-performing factory.
Fernandez, the 2022 Moto2 champion who beat Acosta to the intermediate-class crown, had a short and not particularly sweet MotoGP career with Tech3 GasGas; the 27-year-old is likely to sign on as a Yamaha test rider, and must be considered a chance to get back on the grid in the future given Miller and Oliveira enter their 30s next year.
Three riders out means three riders in, with Ogura the pick of the bunch for 2025 after signing for Aprilia rather than following a likely path to Honda as Nakagami’s successor, and then winning the Moto2 title with season of calm consistency rather than headline-grabbing results.
It would surprise few if the methodical Japanese gets the least publicity of next year’s rookies, but does the best job among the debutants.
Chantra will be the headline act of MotoGP’s first race of 2025 in his native Thailand next March, while Aldeguer – who knew he’d be on the MotoGP grid back in March – takes over Marc Marquez’s seat at Gresini Ducati as a 19-year-old, a monumental task that should temper expectations for his first test, especially as he comes into it after breaking his wrist just three weeks ago in Thailand.
