The longer the race, the better MotoGP second-year rising star Ai Ogura gets.
So much better, in fact, that two big milestones beckon for the Japanese rider, who debuted in the premier class as a Moto2 world champion last season.
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One is a maiden MotoGP podium, which – were it not for cruel luck – he’d already have.
And two is a factory contract for Yamaha, which Ogura has in his keeping, but is yet to be announced as the negotiations between the MSMA – the collective representing MotoGP’s five manufacturers – and MSEG, the sport’s promoters, to run the series from 2027 onwards remain in a holding pattern over the distribution of revenue.
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Based on the evidence of four rounds of 2026 to date, the former is a matter of time.
The latter is a consequence of the pace that has seen Yamaha step in to steal a prized asset away from Aprilia, a signature that sticks the knife in further to Honda, which was part of Ogura’s past right until he was on the cusp of a MotoGP graduation two years ago.
Over four rounds from Thailand to Brazil to Texas to Jerez, Aprilia’s RS-GP machine has consistently become MotoGP’s weapon of choice, Italian Marco Bezzecchi using it to build an impressive championship lead.
The other constant? Ogura’s late-race pace, where the 25-year-old has routinely become MotoGP’s man to watch as the lap counter winds down.
Calling Ogura’s calling card a finishing kick is to undersell it.
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THE LATE-RACE TRICK OGURA’S RIVALS CAN’T MATCH
Rewind to the most recent Grand Prix at Jerez, and an analysis of Ogura’s lap times once the bikes become lighter on fuel and lose feel with wearing tyres paints a formidable, yet familiar, picture.
From 11th on the grid, Ogura advanced to eighth at the halfway mark of the 25-lap race, 8.6secs behind leader Alex Marquez (Ducati). In the second half, nobody – not Marquez, nor series leader Bezzecchi – was faster over the last 10 laps.
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Three seconds behind Trackhouse Aprilia teammate Raul Fernandez and four seconds behind Honda’s Johann Zarco with 10 laps left, and with everyone hanging on battling fading tyres and fatigue, Ogura unleashed, passing both rivals to advance to a fifth-place finish for the third time in four Grands Prix.
Bezzecchi’s factory Aprilia teammate Jorge Martin – the 2024 MotoGP champion on an identical bike – was 4.5secs to the good of Ogura at the halfway mark, and finished one place and only six-tenths of a second ahead in fourth when the chequered flag dropped.
Across the season, Ogura has a net gain of 10 places from where he starts Grands Prix to where he finishes them, all achieved in the second halves of races. As the tyre grip fades and the bike begins to move around more, Ogura quickly finds the new limit lap by lap, adjusts his style, and dances as close to the edge of adhesion as he dares, and without overstepping it.
“We can be super, super, happy about the late race pace,” Ogura, famously hard on himself in his post-race debriefs, said in Spain.
“From the start until the mid-part of the race, we struggled quite a lot. I lost so much time on [KTM’s Enea] Bastianini but, after the feeling was there, I started to catch the riders in front of me.
“We have to improve the first part – it seems when everybody has good tyre performance they can use this extra advantage, but I’m struggling with that. I need to understand why, but at the same time it’s good in the second part of the race when everybody struggles and I’m not struggling so much.
“Especially the last four or five laps, I could see everyone struggling, even in [corner] entry. In turn eight, I had so much grip compared to the others. P5 is … OK.”
Just ‘OK’ is an understatement. It’s also becoming expected of a rider just 22 Grands Prix into his MotoGP career.
In Thailand’s season-opener, Ogura started eighth, was 11th on lap 13 of 26, then surged to fifth by the chequered flag, losing just three seconds to race-winner Bezzecchi in the second half of the race even as he was fighting through the pack.
In Brazil, Ogura – seventh and 5.5secs adrift of leader Bezzecchi at the halfway stage, again jumped to fifth by the flag, Bezzecchi – with clear track ahead of him – just three seconds faster over the final 11 laps.
And then came Texas, where Ogura ran his race in typical style until fate left the usually stoic Japanese in tears.
ANGUISH IN AUSTIN AS PODIUM SQUANDERED
Ogura wasn’t going to win the third Grand Prix of the year at the Circuit of the Americas. But for the second half of the race, he was faster than the rider who did – Bezzecchi again – and on track for his big breakthrough.
From 10th on the grid for the 20-lap race, Ogura bided his time, then uncoiled like a cobra. He set the fastest lap of the race on lap nine, then gained 1.4secs over Bezzecchi in four laps as he scythed past rider after rider to climb to fourth. “He passed me and I kept pushing for three corners, but when I looked again, I didn’t see him anymore,” Alex Marquez marvelled.
Then, disaster.
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Ogura’s engine software erroneously noted a problem, and immediately put his bike into ‘protection mode’, Ogura forced to limp back to the pits and retire.
Aprilia Racing CEO Massimo Rivola was gutted – “it made my blood run cold,” the Italian said – and Ogura, usually a constant of a calm on a grid of mostly high emotion elsewhere, sat silently and wept.
“At the end of sector one I started to see a [dashboard] warning, and after that the bike wasn’t really going anymore,” he said, the words trailing off as he looked for a silver lining.
“Our pace would have been enough to get a podium finish. I was making so much time in the braking, in general grip was less compared to yesterday [in the sprint race] so for me that helps a lot. The bike gave me a lot of confidence. That was probably the first time I matched the pace with the rider who won the race, so the best performance so far.”
Trackhouse Aprilia team principal Davide Brivio, who led the push behind the scenes in 2024 to bring Ogura to MotoGP, was keen to focus on the future.
“Ai was doing a fantastic race … he did the fastest lap of the race, was recovering from P10 at the start and I think we could have gotten onto the podium … it was there,” he said.
“There was a problem on the engine and the bike stopped … we are so disappointed. Everything was going to be perfect. The race was fantastic, Ai was very fast and I feel the good days are coming.”
OGURA’S BIG RISK AS YAMAHA POUNCES
It seems inevitable after the leap that Ogura has made this season that better days than Austin are on their way, and fast.
But to Aprilia’s and no doubt Brivio’s chagrin, they’ll be happening elsewhere.
With MotoGP on a four-week break between Texas and Jerez after the Qatar Grand Prix was rescheduled to November because of the ongoing instability in the Middle East, Ogura’s name became the latest in the silly season of rider movements that have been agreed but not announced when news emerged that he’d be moving to Yamaha for 2027 as a factory teammate to Martin, the all-new line-up replacing the Honda-bound Fabio Quartararo and the Frenchman’s teammate Alex Rins.
It was news that was believed to be more correlation than causation after his Austin DNF, and a surprise that, in some ways, is in keeping with Ogura’s atypical past.
Backed by Honda from his earliest days on the ladder to the world championship, Ogura was earmarked for MotoGP promotion with Honda as far back as 2022, after he’d finished runner-up in the Moto2 class, but elected to stay in the intermediate category instead. Winning the Moto2 title with three victories and eight podiums in 2024 made a graduation a given, but he elected to sign for Aprilia and work with Brivio, a renowned talent-spotter who gave race-winners Maverick Vinales, Rins and 2020 world champion Joan Mir their MotoGP debuts when he was in charge at Suzuki, instead.
Asked at his introductory press conference at the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix if his rejection of Honda was based on the underperforming Honda RC213V, which had struggled through Marc Marquez’s repeated injury-enforced absences from 2020-24, Ogura simply said “yes”, and moved on. No more words were required.
Now, nearly two years later, Ogura’s career path has taken an unexpected turn with the news he’ll trade in MotoGP’s current best bike for its worst, Yamaha struggling mightily as it debuts its all-new V4-engined 1000cc YZR machine this season ahead of MotoGP’s regulatory change to 850cc machinery from 2027.
Dig beneath the apparent madness of such a big call, and you’ll find a method to it.
Yamaha, for so many years a title contender with its former inline-four engine and most recently world champion with Quartararo in 2021, is leaving no stone unturned as it pins everything on the 2027 regulation reboot to bridge the chasm that has emerged with the European factories, Ducati and Aprilia in particular, since 2022.
The allure of employing a Japanese rider on a Japanese bike should that reboot bear fruit was too good of an opportunity for Ogura and Yamaha alike. As teammate to Martin, Ogura gives Yamaha an established, in age if not in MotoGP tenure, counter to the more emotional, fiery, injury-prone Martin.
“It’s a bit disappointing, but everyone makes their own decisions,” Brivio told Sky Italia at Jerez, a race weekend where Ogura batted off one enquiry after another that asked him to confirm his Yamaha deal.
“When we signed him, we took into account the possibility that after two years, he might want a factory team. That’s part of the deal. Now we’ll try to find a solution.”
By the time Ogura first throws his leg over a Yamaha in November’s all-important post-season test at Valencia, it’s likely he’ll be a MotoGP podium finisher – plural – based on how rapid he’s already been this year.
Aprilia has set itself as the bike to beat in 2026, and while it’s easy to plot a path for Bezzecchi to win the world championship – and perhaps nearest rival Martin, if you squint hard enough – that appears a bridge too far for Ogura, who has only managed to qualify inside the top six once all season.
But a victory? It’s in play. Ogura’s late-race pace – first a curiosity, now a constant – makes that entirely plausible.
If he ever gets qualifying right and the opening laps more under his control, there’s mounting evidence to suggest we know what happens next.
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