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Written by Nina Rogerson
The 2023 season of MotoGP starts in just under 3 weeks and with changes to the championship that mark a new era of the sport, it’s set to be an exciting year for two-wheeled racing.
From changes to the weekends structure, to riders switching manufacturers, we’ve rounded up the most noticeable changes for 2023 in preparation for the first round of the season.
Image via MotoGP.com
The introduction of Sprint Races.
The biggest change for 2023 is most definitely the introduction of sprint races to all 21 rounds of the championship. It was announced in August 2022 with an exceptional press conference that MotoGP would follow the format that World Superbikes have followed since 2019 and introduce sprint races.
Sprint races will take place on Saturday afternoons of every grand prix weekend. The qualifying session that we’re so used to seeing will happen earlier in the day and will decide the grid for the sprint.
In order to accommodate the new sprint races, our usual weekend format has been altered slightly. This means that both of our Friday free practice sessions will be extended to ensure that track time remains the same and FP3 will now act as a 30-minute session on Saturday morning that replaces FP4. So, the times from FP3 will not count towards qualifying and will act purely as time for the teams and riders to focus on bike set up.
Qualifying will happen as normal with the times set in FP1 and FP2 determining who goes straight through to Q2 and who must go through Q1 first. The results from qualifying will then determine the starting grid for both the Saturday sprint race and our feature race on Sunday. So regardless of who wins the sprint race, if you qualify pole position during Q2 on Saturday, you will start from pole for the feature race on Sunday.
The sprint races on Saturday will be half the distance of the feature race. So, if the feature race is 24 laps, then the sprint race will be 12. There will also be championship points on offer during the Saturday sprints, but riders will score half the number of points they normally would in a feature race.
Seven riders are switching manufacturers.
2023 sees the start of seven of our premier class stars riding for different manufacturers than in their 2022 campaign.
Alex Marquez makes the move from the Honda which he’s ridden for all three of his years in MotoGP so far and jumps onto a Ducati GP22 with the Gresini team. The Sepang test proved to be a promising start to the new Ducati rider’s campaign as he was the fastest new bike debutant.
Image via MotoGP.com
Joan Mir was left looking for a 2023 ride after his former team Suzuki made the shock announcement that they’d be withdrawing from the championship. Mir will be taking up the second bike at Repsol Honda to partner 8-time world champion Marc Marquez. This is said to be one of the most highly anticipated MotoGP moves in recent history with Mir and Marquez both having world champion titles to their names.
Mir’s former Suzuki teammate Alex Rins was also left looking for a 2023 ride and will also be joining the Honda camp in the LCR Honda Castrol colours. Rins said he and the team had a “good base” on the bike after the Sepang test, but he knows that the Portimão test this weekend will be very important.
Jack Miller moves from Ducati, where he’s had five successful years, and makes his KTM debut this year with the factory team. With 21 podiums in four years, including 3 wins, he offers a great deal of talent and experience to the Austrian factory. The strong line-up of Miller and teammate Brad Binder will be an interesting one to watch.
2022 rookie, Raul Fernandez, had a tough debut season with Tech3 KTM but he’ll be looking forward to starting 2023 with the RNF Aprilia team. During the Sepang test he admitted that it was the first time he’d enjoyed riding a bike since his 2021 Moto2 season so this new beginning for him looks promising.
Alongside Raul Fernandez, Miguel Oliveira switches from the KTM Factory team to the RNF Aprilia team for 2023. It was a smooth transition for Oliveira at the Valencia test back in November where he finished P4, and he’ll be hoping the Aprilia is what he needs to add to his trophy collection this year.
Pol Espargaro has spent the last two years with the Repsol Honda team, but he reunites with an old flame for 2023 when he makes the move back to KTM to ride for the GASGAS Factory Racing Tech3 team. Espargaro will be finding this transition smoother than the rest of the new bike debutants as he already is familiar with a lot of the team from his years at KTM previously.
Alongside our seven new bike debutants, we also have Enea Bastianni who is moving from the Gresini Ducati team up to the Factory Ducati team after a successful 2022 campaign. Although he’s not switching manufacturers, there is a lot of pressure in moving up to the team that won the triple crown last year.
We also have a rookie rider this year in Augusto Fernandez who will be making his MotoGP debut alongside Pol Espargaro in the GASGAS Factory Racing Tech3 team. He’ll be floating on confidence after winning the 2022 Moto2 championship and will be hoping to make a seamless transition into MotoGP.
The new Engine Control Unit.
2023 sees the start of a new era for MotoGP as the championship prepares for more sustainable fuels which will be rolled out in 2024. The new ECU (Engine Control Unit) will be used by all the new bikes on the grid this year as the sport pushes for maximum efficiency and sustainability.
The factories have requested that the older ECU will continue to be used by the older bike models in order to control costs for the factories and the Independent Teams on the older model bikes as they would be expected to foot the bill.
There will be no technical or performance advantages to the new ECU in 2023 so there’s not a worry about there being a performance disparity between factory teams and independent teams. It just means that there will be data gathered from the factory bikes running the new ECU to ensure that the new unit will deliver better performance next season for the new sustainable era.
Image via MotoGP.com
No factory will benefit from concessions.
Due to the success of Aprilia riders Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Vinales, who managed to rack up 9 podiums between them last year, there will be no Concessions for the first time since their introduction in 2016.
Concessions are in place to help factories if they go through a significant period of underperforming. Essentially, teams have access to advantages such as the availability of nine engines as opposed to seven, the right not to seal their engine specification before the season gets underway, they have six wildcard rides throughout the season whilst the other factories have only three and they have access to more testing days as well as letting their factory riders test in non-official testing days.
For the last two years Aprilia have been the only factory in the championship that have benefitted from Concessions after KTM’s stellar 2020 campaign led them to wave goodbye to the benefits.
Image via MotoGP.com
The compulsory tyre pressure monitoring system
Image via MotoGP.com
Tyre pressure was brought into the spotlight in the middle of last season when it was revealed that some riders had frequently failed to meet the minimum tyre pressure limit set by Michelin.
The series have proposed a new set of enforcements that essentially means that for the first three races of the season, all bikes will run with standardised tyre pressure sensors. The results from these sensors will then be analysed after each race before rule enforcement will come into play at the fourth round of the season.
If riders are found to be under the minimum limit (1.88 bar) then they will lose any lap times set below the limit in practice and qualifying. Additionally, if a rider is found to have been under the tyre pressure limit for more than half their race laps, they will be disqualified from the results.
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