MotoGP's CEO Has Words For Riders Complaining About The Series' New Format

The 2027 MotoGP season is shaping up to be...wild. Not only are we getting all-new regulations in terms of motorcycles, which include massive changes to aerodynamics, electronic aids, and even the engines, all of which were aimed at slowing the bikes down—which doesn't seem to have worked—but we're also getting weekend format changes, too.

In total, a MotoGP weekend is going to look and sound super different next year, but not everyone is happy about the raft of changes coming into play. One vocal rider in the paddock is newly-minted Ducati man, Pedro Acosta, who's been extremely forthcoming in his belief that the race weekend format changes, specifically the addition of a sprint race to every race weekend, as well as dual qualifying, is set to make the sport a whole lot more dangerous for those risking it all. And Acosta was talking about it over the weekend, telling reporters that the format switchup will "shorten careers," i.e., putting riders more at risk for injury.

And it's easy to see why, as you're aiming at pushing these riders to chase that edge more times than they already do.

MotoGP's CEO Carlos Ezpeleta doesn't see it that way. In fact, Ezpeleta basically said that the riders, including Acosta, don't actually understand what's going on. I'm not sure that's what's actually going on.

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The crux of the disconnect is that there's gonna be sprint races every single weekend now, which Acosta breaks down for Crash.net, saying, "We already have many sessions that we have to risk everything, like PR, qualifying, sprint, and main race, already four. And we have 22 [times] two [races], because we have every weekend a sprint race."

His argument, and it's easy to see, is that you now have more times each rider is pushing to the absolute limit. And in a sport like MotoGP, pushing faster and faster, and harder and harder, leads to more times finding the edge and past it, which leads to riders heading to the hospital and further surgeries and more replacement riders. Basically, a sprint race every weekend is going to lead to more high-speed crashes and riders injuring themselves due to pushing themselves.

Acosta highlighted this, adding, "I understand this [new] format if we have [only] half of the sprint races. But the problem is that we have many races already. If you check all the list of the riders, there are not many that don't have an injury during the whole season."

The younger Ezpeleta, a man who's never raced himself, sees it differently.

Speaking to Crash.net after Acosta's comments went wide, Carlos told the outlet, "We were approached by the teams in Misano about a revised schedule. Basically, just to put some context, under the new 2027 regulations, the manufacturers had already asked for a number of changes, which were aimed at reducing the amount of track time. And that opened the question as to whether the current format is the best. The proposal came from the teams themselves, and there were a number of iterations in which the target was to maintain, or not to increase the level of risk versus today, and get a better output for the fans, media partners, and everybody else."

That, however, didn't address Acosta's comments, so Ezpeleta added, "We probably do have to do a better job on the comms side and getting the teams, us, and everyone together on a better understanding. You see some of the riders yesterday in the comms probably not fully understanding the limitation on the tyres and the limitation on the time attacks, which is probably for us to take on the chin, and know that we have to improve that. But we don't feel at all that we're jeopardising the riders' safety, because again, they're already doing [the same amount of time attacks]."

Ezpeleta points out that the new Michelin tires with different allotments for a race weekend, along with the supposedly slower machines, will rein in riders from going all out every chance they get. That, however, would only be true if the bikes were actually slower or if Michelin made a worse compound. But in testing so far, both of those aren't true, with the tire compounds lasting just as long as the Pirellis, and the 850cc bikes being faster than the current 1000cc motorcycles. Ezpeleta's points then hinge on a reality that hasn't proven true, which makes Acosta's concerns, well, concerning.