With the 2027 MotoGP rider market frozen pending an agreement between the sport’s promoters and manufacturers to run the series for the next five seasons, a likely surprise defection from MotoGP’s best bike to its worst has set tongues wagging, and could have consequences for Australia’s Jack Miller.
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Elsewhere, a championship-winning team principal feels the arrival of Spanish young gun Pedro Acosta at Ducati next season could reinvigorate Marc Marquez’s career rather than hasten its end, while a former F1 heavy-hitter has been in awe of MotoGP riders since entering the world championship officially as a team owner at the beginning of this season.
There’s that and more in MotoGP Pit Talk, your news wrap of the stories behind the headlines ahead of the next round at Jerez in Spain from April 24-26.
Marquez takes out Diggia in opening lap | 00:23
OGURA’S SHOCK YAMAHA MOVE COULD IMPACT MILLER
With just five riders – Johann Zarco and Diogo Moreira at Honda, Toprak Razgatlioglu at Yamaha, Fermin Aldeguer at Ducati and championship leader Marco Bezzecchi at Aprilia – set in stone for next year’s first season of MotoGP’s 850cc regulation revolution, Yamaha look to have made a big splash for 2027 by luring Ai Ogura away from Aprilia, where the second-year Japanese rider currently plies his trade for the customer Trackhouse Racing team.
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Ogura, 25, debuted in MotoGP last year after winning the 2024 Moto2 title, and has been a consistent presence in the opening three rounds of 2026. Ogura sits seventh in the standings after the Grand Prix of the Americas, where a late-race engine failure cost him a likely podium, which would have been the first for a Japanese rider in 21 years.
On Sunday (AEST), reports out of Europe indicated Ogura, a Honda protégé before arriving in MotoGP with Aprilia, has signed with the factory Yamaha team for 2027 as a new teammate to 2024 MotoGP world champion Jorge Martin, whose name was linked with Aprilia in the pre-season but has yet to be formally announced.
Since Bezzecchi re-signed with Aprilia during pre-season testing in Malaysia, the rider market – which exploded with unconfirmed signings of such big names as Fabio Quartararo (Yamaha to Honda), Martin (Aprilia to Yamaha), Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati to Aprilia) and Acosta (KTM to Ducati) – has largely gone silent as the Motorcycle Sports Manufacturers’ Association (MSMA), which represents MotoGP’s five brands (Ducati, Yamaha, Honda, KTM and Aprilia), continues to negotiate with MotoGP’s promoters MSEG (MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group) for a five-year deal to the end of the 2031 season.
The MSMA is holding firm over demands for a percentage-based share of the overall revenue of the series, while MSEG – formerly known as Dorna – is keen to continue a fixed annual payment of “around 8 million Euros” (A$13.25 million), per Autosport. As such, the teams have agreed to hold off on announcing 2027 rider contracts until the impasse is revolved.
Ogura moving to Yamaha from Aprilia – trading the bike that has won the past five Grands Prix dating back to last season for a machine that has managed a single top-10 finish (sixth for Quartararo in the Brazil sprint race) between its four riders this season – is bold, but in keeping with the Japanese rider’s atypical career path.
Ogura won the Moto2 title in his fourth full season in the class, and debuted in MotoGP as a relatively late-blooming 24-year-old, older than the riders considered the best of the “next generation” in Acosta (already in his third season at age 21), Aldeguer (also 21, in his second year) and Ogura’s successor as Moto2 champion, Brazilian rookie Moreira (21).
The switch to 850cc machinery, along with a reduction of aerodynamic aids, ride-height devices and the introduction of Pirelli tyres, is thought to be Yamaha’s best bet to bridge the gap that has widened between the Japanese manufacturer and the rest of the pack in recent years.
Since Quartararo, the 2021 MotoGP world champion, won the 2022 German Grand Prix, Yamaha hasn’t won for 75 Grands Prix, a period where every other manufacturer has won at least once.
PIT TALK PODCAST: The 2027 MotoGP rider market silly season is in full swing … but waits on one crucial announcement to unlock an impasse. Who is moving where, and why? Listen to Pit Talk below.
“[Ogura’s] somewhat unexpected move closes the door on other candidates for the second [Yamaha] M1 seat, including [Honda’s] Luca Marini,” wrote Autosport’s Oriol Puigdemont.
“Yamaha has already informed the Marini camp of its decision to sign Ogura. Just days earlier, [Moto2 rider] Dani Holgado had thanked Yamaha for its interest but confirmed his decision to join Gresini Racing, where he will race a Ducati.”
Ogura’s signature means that Razgatlioglu, the three-time World Superbikes champion who is three rounds into his debut MotoGP season with Pramac Yamaha, will stay with Yamaha’s second team for 2027; it had been thought that the Turkish rider could graduate to the factory Yamaha team alongside the incoming Martin.
Ogura joining Yamaha’s top-line team almost certainly spells the end of the premier-class career of six-time MotoGP race winner Alex Rins, while Miller – on a one-year deal as Razgatlioglu’s teammate at Pramac but retained for 2026 largely for his development skills with Yamaha’s new V4 engine project and as a bridge to shepherd Yamaha into the 850cc era – will be under renewed pressure to retain his seat despite his value behind the scenes, with Pramac’s 21-year-old Moto2 rider Izan Guevara waiting in the wings.
After the MSMA and MSEG met at the most recent round in Texas, paddock sources have indicated an announcement confirming the 2027-31 deal could come as soon as Jerez in a fortnight for the Spanish Grand Prix, opening the door for a raft of rider contracts to be finally announced.
‘SPECIAL’ ACOSTA WILL REJUVENATE MARQUEZ, SAYS FORMER TEAM BOSS
Livio Suppo, the Italian who presided over Australian Casey Stoner’s 2007 world championship with Ducati before tasting more success with Stoner and Marc Marquez at Honda, feels the arrival of Acosta into Ducati’s factory team next year will help to extend Marquez’s career rather than usher the seven-time premier-class champion to the exit door.
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Suppo, 62, now works as a consultant to the Italtrans Moto2 team, and likened the partnership of the 33-year-old Marquez and his younger compatriot by 12 years as similar to when Yamaha boldly partnered Valentino Rossi with rookie Jorge Lorenzo, eight years Rossi’s junior, in 2008.
“Jorge extended [Rossi’s] career, he won two more championships,” Suppo told GPone.com.
“It would be a motivator for a strong rider like Marquez, who is clearly a top-tier rider as Valentino was. Having a young super-fast rider alongside you rejuvenates you, because it brings out that fighting spirit that perhaps you’ve lost over the years. I don’t see how Marc could get upset about something like that, quite the opposite.”
Suppo said Acosta – still yet to win a Grand Prix in his third season, but who took the first sprint race of 2026 in a head-to-head fight with Marquez in Thailand and sits third in the world championship standings – has already proven himself to be “special”, even after a 2025 season where his motivation and results suffered in the first part of the year as he attempted to move from KTM, which was beset with off-track financial difficulties.
“In my opinion … he suffered a lot from that distraction when he tried to break free from KTM early on,” Suppo said of Acosta.
“That cost him a lot psychologically, in the sense that when a rider’s mind is elsewhere, he struggles to perform at his best. He has clearly managed to put that thought out of his mind.
“If you look at Pedro’s career, it’s clear he’s one of the special ones. He’s one of those who clearly have something extra. He arrived in MotoGP with a bike that wasn’t very competitive … 30 years ago, the rider alone could make a huge difference, look at Valentino. In this championship, like it or not, the bikes have a greater impact on overall performance than they did 20 years ago. But he’s had a season start worthy of applause.”
Marquez, after winning his seventh premier-class title last year and then suffering a right shoulder injury that required surgery and ruled him out of the final five rounds, has just one sprint win across six starts in 2026 to sit fifth in the championship, 36 points behind Bezzecchi; Marquez has never been further adrift of the series leader after the opening three rounds of a season in which he went on to win the world title.
STEINER IMPRESSED WITH ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ RIDERS AS HONDA RUMOURS SWIRL
Formula 1 cult figure turned MotoGP team boss Guenther Steiner has described MotoGP riders as a “different breed”, the Italian getting his feet wet in his new role as owner of the Tech3 team this season.
Steiner, 61, first worked in F1 from 2001 with Jaguar, and his worldwide profile exploded in his time as a no-nonsense team principal of the Haas F1 team from 2014-23, which coincided with the rapid growth of the sport and the Netflix ‘Drive to Survive’ series that was the entry point for an enormous percentage of F1’s evolving fan base.
Steiner left Haas after the 2023 season, and was the head of a consortium that purchased the Tech3 MotoGP team from founder Herve Poncharal in September 2025, his first race in charge coming at this year’s season-opener in Buriram.
“For me MotoGP is new, but I find it one of the most exciting, if not the most exciting, sport in the world,” Steiner told motogp.com.
“When you get involved, it is always surprising how competitive this sport is, how much the rider has influence on the racing here. It’s something unbelievable, how up and down it can be … it depends on the rider.
“You need to be different to do what they are doing. We all think we know how to ride a motorbike, but when you look at what they are doing, it’s not riding a motorbike … this is riding an awesome machine at a very high level.
“For me, as a human being, it’s impossible. I can see how much risk they need to take – they fall down, stand up and run back to get on the bike again. You need to be a special breed to do this.”
Tech3 has been linked with a move from KTM to Honda machinery for the 2027 regulation reboot, which would swell Honda’s representation on the grid to six bikes – matching Ducati – while leaving the Austrian manufacturer with just two machines for next year, one of which is likely to be ridden by Ducati’s 2025 world championship runner-up, Alex Marquez.
“I’m more than happy for the moment, but I still need to learn a lot,” Steiner said of his first three races in charge.
“The first six months are just about getting to know the people and know the business. What I enjoy most is when we go racing and having good moments in racing. We just have to work hard to get better. It’s a team effort, and we need to do that.
“The main emphasis at the moment … I love going racing but the guys [in the team] can do what without me … is more to set up the team for the future, what are we doing in ’27 onwards. The most important is to set a role for the future.”
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