Five ways Aprilia's changed for its massive MotoGP season

Aprilia’s 2025 launch on Thursday projected a lot of confidence.

Understandably so as it has the reigning world champion Jorge Martin and his #1 on its bike - only four years on from a season in which it was scrabbling to find anyone (except Aleix Espargaro) willing to go near it.

Aprilia does not shy away from the pressure. As team principal Massimo Rivola said during the launch, a championship “must be our target”. Probably in 2026, not in 2025, but certainly at some point during this two-year contract Martin has signed.

And there are already plenty of signs of how Aprilia is changing both its processes and its attitude with that in mind.

THE LAUNCH VIBE

You wouldn’t have known from Thursday’s event that Aprilia still finished 420 points behind Ducati in the manufacturers’ championship last season.

It's a team you’d previously have expected to launch its new bikes by taking a sheet off them in the pitlane at a pre-season test. 

The big event in Sky Sports Italy’s studios was a huge contrast to that.

It felt like a launch of a team not just in MotoGP to participate, but to win a championship.

ITERATION AND AN AGGRESSIVE START

Aprilia has revealed it will have 10 2025-spec RS-GPs ready for the start of pre-season testing at Sepang in a fortnight, two each for both works riders Martin and Marco Bezzecchi, Trackhouse pair Ai Ogura and Raul Fernandez and test rider Lorenzo Savadori.

That’s by far the biggest material commitment it has ever made to starting a MotoGP season strongly. It’s not just that last year it was halfway through the racing season before Fernandez got the latest spec, there have been years when it has only just had enough of its latest kit during pre-season testing.

Though Aprilia has been steadily rising in recent years, this now feels like the start of a new era project with the end goal of fighting for the 2026 championship.

It seems at peace with a relatively slow start to the season as Martin and Bezzecchi adjust to their new bike, and because it knows it has ground to gain to Ducati.

Expect an iterative approach - rather than a major step winter step from the 2025 to the 2026 bike, the 2025 design will keep evolving through this year and morph into its successor, with Aprilia free to do this because it can put all its mid-season effort into development rather than building new bikes.

SPEAKING OF STARTS

To be champion, Aprilia also needs to sort out the starts. The RS-GP cannot be champion if it loses places every single time coming off the grid.

New technical boss Fabiano Sterlacchini - who has replaced the Honda-bound Romano Albesiano - is well aware of this, although he says in late-2024 it wasn’t just the launch that was the problem, but the way the bike arrived into the first corner - where riders disengage the starting device (the one that adjusts the ride height) by braking hard.

Sterlacchini comes from KTM, which is MotoGP’s best-starting bike. And he says Aprilia has already improved its starts in the off-season, and backs his technical department to get on even terms with rivals before even the halfway point of 2025.

He is “quite confident” that the bike will be at “a different level” in this regard within not too long at all.

“If the others are at 100, now we are 60, probably at the beginning [of the racing season] we’ll be around 80-85 - and the last 20-15 probably after four-to-six races,” he said of Aprilia’s start performance. 

VERSATILITY NOT FLEETING DOMINANCE

Aprilia’s rise to prominence in MotoGP was aided somewhat by specialisation. At its best, the RS-GP was absolutely untouchable at low-grip venues that required strong corner speeds. But when it came to braking in a straight line and punching out of the corners things were not so good

In 2024, though, the Aprilia RS-GP became a more rounded bike - which seemed to sacrifice a bit of its edge. So it looked better than expected at the likes of the Red Bull Ring - but didn’t dazzle at Barcelona like it used to. Relatively speaking anyway, Aleix Espargaro still got a sprint win there.

Maverick Vinales - now at KTM - said last season that he actually wanted Aprilia to continue with the 2023 bike in 2024, because he never liked the new one (even though he dominated with it at Austin).

But a more versatile bike is what you need to fight for a title - just ask Ducati, which used to have really strong and really weak tracks and is now just excellent everywhere.

“If in the past we were super good at some tracks, last year we were not as good as we were. But at the same time we were a bit better where we had been not so strong,” Rivola told The Race.

“I would say our weak point was more the race pace than single laptimes because on pure speed, in 20 races 14 times an Aprilia started on the front row. That means the bike is fast.”

Another issue to tackle is that this is a bike that, for three seasons now, ever since it’s got genuinely competitive, is consistently worse in the final third of the season.

Is it a less favourable run of track layouts - as that contains the Asian leg of the championship? Is it component wear and tear? Or is it the issue of heat at places such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia - because the Aprilia is notorious for handling heat badly and for pumping hot air into riders’ necks the way other bikes do not?

Thailand’s move to the season-opener slot gives us a chance to find out if all the work Aprilia has put into solving that over the winter - including on the bike's ergonomics - has paid off.

THE CHAMPION’S CHANGED TOO

Aprilia has already dodged a massive bullet. Martin’s title triumph makes a huge difference to his new team, and the #1 plate is only a small part of it.

Martin has repeatedly said that he took his 2023 title defeat very, very hard. That doesn’t reflect badly on him at all - it’s something unavoidable.

Now imagine if he narrowly lost again in 2024, this time after a season where he led the points for so long. After that defeat, he would’ve still had to dust himself off, trudge over to the Aprilia garage and get on a bike that - right now - just isn’t as good as the one he’s given up at Ducati.

It’s the kind of thing that could have ruined everything immediately and turned Jorge Martin at Aprilia into, say, Valentino Rossi at Ducati or Johann Zarco at KTM. Instantly doomed.

Would it have been? Aprilia and Martin, thankfully, do not have to find out. He’s playing with house money now."Whatever comes now is a present,” he said last year. "I won my title and I will live in peace the rest of my life."

And that certainly showed in his demeanour at the launch - comfortable that this year is highly unlikely to be a repeat of 2024 and a significantly more mature character after what he achieved last year and how he did it.

The role he’s already playing as an inspiring team leader has made a real mark on his bosses and he seems ready and replace friend and mentor as Espargaro Aprilia’s new talisman for an era in which it can actually expect success rather than probably being pleasantly surprised by it.