Aprilia’s British MotoGP pole position masks ongoing race deficiencies

MotoGP’s 10th round of the season following a second three-week break this summer was a celebration of the series’ 75-year history.

To pay homage, all 11 MotoGP teams fielded special retro liveries for Sunday’s 20-lap grand prix, with the designs unveiled to a packed Silverstone pitlane on the Thursday ahead of the event.

Enea Bastianini took his 2003 throwback-liveried factory Ducati to his first grand prix win of the season after beating Pramac’s Jorge Martin late on. Winning the sprint the day before, Bastianini took a maximum of 37 points to kickstart the second half of his final Ducati season ahead of a KTM switch in 2025 as a firm dark horse title contender.

In doing so, he helped team-mate Francesco Bagnaia limit the damage to Martin in the standings, with a crash in the sprint and a struggle to third in the main race leaving the double world champion only three points behind heading to Austria.

Ducati locked out the podium for the seventh race in a row, setting a new record, while Desmosedicis occupied the top five spots in the grand prix classification.

Elsewhere, Aleix Espargaro scored pole for Aprilia but his race performances highlighted key issues for the Noale marque, while qualifying tactics caused a stir on Saturday morning.

Below are our five key takeaways from the 2024 British GP.

Bastianini kickstarts his title hopes

Enea Bastianini put in arguably his most complete weekend of the 2024 season since the opening round in Qatar in March.

Since it became clear he was surplus to requirements at Ducati coming into the Italian GP, Bastianini has been on fine form. He snatched second in the grand prix at Mugello from Jorge Martin on the last lap; came from 10th to third in the Dutch GP and was a solid fourth in Germany.

Always showing strong pace in the second half of races, qualifying has been a key weakness for Bastianini in 2024. Identifying that on Thursday at Silverstone as the area he needs to get on top of, he managed third on Saturday morning, later admitting that he prioritised getting a lap time out of his first tyre to avoid any yellow flag disruption in run two.

Starting on the front row ultimately kept the #23 in play in those early laps where he isn’t so explosive. He passed Martin on lap six of the sprint to claim his first Saturday win, and did the same in the grand prix on the penultimate tour after Martin ran wide at Turn 3 before easing away to the chequered flag by 1.931s.

Bastianini’s ability to gently drive out of corners was likened by Aleix Espargaro to Dani Pedrosa on the 31-time grand prix winner’s best days, while Marc Marquez praised his Ducati stablemate’s “efficient” style.

It’s a trait that led him to four wins in 2022 as he battled late into the campaign for the title with Gresini. And able to better exploit his riding style on a GP24 with a friendlier engine braking characteristic missing on last year’s model, Bastianini is posing himself as a major threat.

While he doesn’t consider himself a title contender yet given the pace he feels team-mate Francesco Bagnaia and Pramac’s Martin have in hand over him, a 49-point deficit isn’t much - especially when you consider Bagnaia enjoyed a 48-point swing between the French and German GPs.

Bagnaia falters as Martin brushes off Germany error

A run of four grand prix wins for Bagnaia ahead of the summer break suggested all momentum was with the double world champion in the title chase, not least with chief rival Martin crashing out of the lead of the German GP.

Leading by 10 points coming to Silverstone, Bagnaia was in strong form throughout practice and would have put in a good fight for pole had a sponsor sticker not worked itself loose on his visor and obscured his vision as he started his last flying lap.

Trouble disengaging his ride height device in the first few corners of the sprint put him on the back foot, but his pace was race-winning worthy and he’d just set the fastest lap when he crashed out of fourth on the fifth tour. It marked his fifth non-score of the season.

He admitted this was due to his own mistake, but it gifted Martin nine points back on Bagnaia to narrow his championship lead to one. Things looked good in the first half of the grand prix as the factory Ducati rider led, before ultimately ending up a distant third behind Bastianini and Martin.

Martin retook the points lead by three, with Bastianini’s strong form limiting the damage for Bagnaia. He explained after the race that he lacked support from the Michelin front tyre, which stopped him turning on the front as he normally would and led to him using up his rear tyre more to compensate.

A moment on the front at Luffield cleared the way for Bastianini to overtake him for second on lap 14, and from then self-preservation kicked in for Bagnaia after what happened in the sprint.

Martin made several errors of his own late on, but feels without them there was still nothing stopping Bastianini. He referred to his British GP weekend as not perfect, but at least not as bad as the German GP.

That’s a bit of a problem for Bagnaia, as it shows Martin’s mental resolve hasn’t been chipped into much by his Sachsenring stumble. In a weekend in which Bagnaia needed to inflict more damage to weaken Martin’s resolve, he’s found himself chasing again in the standings.

Aprilia pole masks ongoing race deficiencies

Aprilia has a strong claim to have run the best retro livery of the grid on Sunday at Silverstone, as it decked its RS-GPs in the ‘Perla Nera’ colours Max Biaggi took to 250cc title success between 1994 and 1996.

And having won last year’s British GP with Aleix Espargaro, pole for the Spaniard with an incredible lap record pointed towards another big weekend for the Noale brand.

Third in the sprint was a solid return for Espargaro has he elected to go against the grain and run the hard front tyre as a test for the grand prix. That proved to be a prescient move as it turned out to be “the solution” to Espargaro coming away with a best of sixth on Sunday having run inside the podium battle early on.

Sitting as high as third at one stage, Espargaro’s pace began to drop at mid-distance as he fell a second adrift of the leading duo. And it only got worse from there, the 35-year-old clinging onto sixth by just over two tenths over Gresini’s Alex Marquez.

Where traction used to be a strength of the RS-GP, relative to the Ducatis in 2024 the Aprilia has struggled in this area and it led to Espargaro killing his medium rear in the British GP.

“Like Barcelona, it’s really difficult to have an explanation,” he noted, referencing a similar drop in form across race distance to the Ducatis.

“But in terms of managing the rear tyre, there was nothing I could do. It was very frustrating to see one [Ducati] and another one overtake me, going away and nothing I could really do. I tried my best with the electronics, going up and down on the TC [traction control] but there was nothing more I could do.”

Team-mate Maverick Vinales said it was “difficult to accept” his 13th-place finish as he too suffered from severe tyre degradation - though conceded that the traction issues he’d battled on Saturday were gone.

To compound Aprilia’s misfortune, both Trackhouse riders tangled at Brooklands on lap one when Raul Fernandez lost the front of his RS-GP under braking and his bike wiped out team-mate Miguel Oliveira.

After such a strong start to 2024, Aprilia isn’t making the progress expected. Vinales has called for Aprilia to take stock and find a solution. Ducati has clearly extended its advantage over the rest of the field this year, so reining it in won’t be easy.

But Aprilia must also try to develop its current bike with three of its riders set to leave with a lot of its secrets for rival marques in 2025, with Espargaro joining Honda as a test rider, Vinales signing for KTM to race and Oliveira likely taking a Yamaha at Pramac.

Marquez still facing uphill battle across race weekends on the Ducati

Marc Marquez’s performances on the GP23 at Gresini so far this year have been such that it’s easy to forget the British GP was just his 10th round on the bike. Sunday podiums in four races and five further sprint rostrums have kept him in the title picture.

But each race is a new experience for Marquez and his crew. That was evident on a scrappy Friday at Silverstone, in which Marquez felt he was “very far” from the leaders in 10th at the end of second practice.

Things improved for qualifying, though his desire for a tow (more on that later) hindered him and left him seventh. Running fourth in the sprint, he crashed at Vale in the closing stages after braking on the white line on entry to the corner.

A set-up change in warm-up turned things around, with Marquez able to fight for the podium in the first half of the grand prix before ending up fourth - something he called “a great surprise”.

While he admits he was “in delay” all weekend in terms of finding his pace, he is now conceding that the 2024 Ducati is a step ahead of the GP23 “at some tracks” - with Silverstone being one of those. And even when he can get to the level he needs to fight for podiums, it’s “on the limit” relative to his factory Ducati counterparts.

Now 62 points behind Martin in the championship, Marquez’s prospects of muscling into that battle are looking tougher as the second half of the season gets underway.

Qualifying tactics in the spotlight again as rider opinion split

The issue of riders waiting for tows in qualifying is a long standing one in MotoGP, and at Silverstone the debate over it was ignited again after a messy Q2 session.

Numerous riders found their laps scuppered by slow riders, while the usual gamesmanship of some waiting for others to latch onto the back of them was alive and well.

World champion Bagnaia called it “ridiculous” in parc ferme after Q2, while Pedro Acosta noted: “We are not stupid, we know where we disturb [others], and where we don’t. It is many races already with this - I think we need to stop.”

Marc Marquez is one of the main offenders when it comes to this tactic and it backfired on him at Silverstone, as he found himself stuck behind a slower Marco Bezzecchi and had a lap that started off strong scuppered.

The eight-time world champion says MotoGP “will always be like this” in qualifying without a format change - though the suggestion of a one-by-one Superpole format used in World Superbikes in years gone by and currently at some British Superbikes events was not met favourably by Marquez, who called it “boring”.

In Moto2 and Moto3, riders have to follow a guideline of minimum sector times in qualifying. This was implemented in a bid to cut out dangerous situations, particularly in Moto3, of masses of riders waiting for tows on track.

Aleix Espargaro revealed at Silverstone that a similar idea has been discussed before in the safety commission, but unanimous agreement has never been reached.

Ultimately, until a firm rule is put in place to police this outside of what the stewards deem as ‘irresponsible riding’ - which is usually a clear incident of impeding, as was the case between Martin and Raul Fernandez at Assen - riders will continue as they did at Silverstone in Q2.

For the time being, more of them should perhaps mirror the strategy Espargaro deployed to secure pole…