On a COTA weekend that, who knows, may yet go down as the definitive onset of MotoGP’s Aprilia era, most riders had a session or two where they really, really excelled.

It made picking the standouts – or filling out the rest of the top 15 – quite difficult in this week’s rider rankings. The bottom part was a bit more straightforward.

Qualifying: 1st Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 4th

Things have been far too normal in this feature so far this year. Let’s get a little nuts.

Out of contract for 2027 as it stands and with his future clouded, Di Giannantonio has rediscovered his late-2023 form to start this season, emerging as Ducati’s most impressive rider so far by a non-negligible margin.

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He is still struggling to put together a weekend fully reflective of his pace, and here again was partly culpable in this – with Sunday’s poor start a mark against him (though he was obviously blameless in what happened in the sprint).

So why #1? Because it’s a lesser ‘mark against’ than for any other rider I entertained for first place, and because his performance here relative to usual COTA standard-bearer Marc Marquez (even accounting for Marquez’s limitations, of course) is the most solid evidence yet that this run of form is for real.

Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 1st Grand Prix: 2nd

Martin was in first place in this feature until the very last moment – and my decision to ‘demote’ him risks, I accept, being interpreted as evidence of anti-Martin bias.

For the avoidance of doubt, there is no such thing. This was an elite weekend, and if you count only the two races, Martin has stood out by far.

He and crew chief Daniele Romagnoli played an absolute blinder with the medium-rear pick on Saturday, and even without that longevity edge he was stunningly fast on Sunday, perhaps faster than race winner Marco Bezzecchi. On such a physical track, too, it is a remarkable achievement.

The near four-tenths gap to Bezzecchi in qualifying is what still gives me pause. It is the only missing piece – but it is missing. I suspect he’ll find it soon enough.

Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 8th Grand Prix: 3rd

Acosta did not enjoy the same obvious cushion over the rest of the KTM riders this weekend as at Buriram and Goiania. It was a bit more like 2025: superiority established through single-lap pace and then simply maintained rather than reinforced over race distances.

But do not take his consistent excellence for granted. It’s unlikely the KTM is anything but the third-best bike in MotoGP right now (with more of a case for it being fourth-best than even second-best), and yet here Acosta was, with two on-the-road podiums across the weekend.

I do not hold the tyre pressure penalty on Saturday against him, and though he made two major mistakes on Sunday (opening lap and the warm-up shunt, a session where he “keeps making a mess”), they realistically had no impact on his finishing position.

Letting Martin through was no mistake but a deliberate play to keep the same tyre pressure infringement from reoccurring.

Qualifying: 17th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 15th

I told you we were going to get weird. Except, in truth, Razgatlioglu could be even higher here.

Lost in Yamaha’s early work with its all-new V4 bike and MotoGP’s general reluctance to show anyone but the top five is that Razgatlioglu has been consistently exceeding expectations for the first races of his MotoGP switch.

He talks of “motivation” struggles and difficulty in adapting to the Michelin rear, but the actual performance on the timing screens is unimpeachable. For a track he last raced at in 2013 in Red Bull Rookies Cup, qualifying two tenths off Fabio Quartararo and beating his three Yamaha peers in the grand prix is frankly mega.

He could’ve gone two-for-two with the sprint, with the bike giving up just as he’d dropped behind Quartararo due to checking up for an unrelated battle up ahead.

Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 1st

As far as race-winning weekends go, this is an easy one to nitpick.

There’s the sprint crash, Bezzecchi himself admitting he was overexuberant in trying to push on in clean air and “unsettling the bike”.

There’s the impeding in qualifying triggering the grid penalty that could’ve been more costly.

There’s the opening-lap clash with Acosta, in which the bike was damaged and which, though triggered by an Acosta error, Bezzecchi probably should’ve been more proactive in avoiding.

Those all matter less than the fact he just keeps winning, propelled by a supreme handle on how to take the early lead, when to make the breakaway and how to manage the distance.

Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 3rd Grand Prix: 6th

A night-and-day turnaround from the Bastianini of earlier this season – not too dissimilar to his mid-2025 resurgence, which did stick for a few races.

Qualifying was the weak point again, and this time it really didn’t work out relative to what was possible – which Bastianini attributed to a lack of weight on the front leading to a wind-assisted instability on the back straight.

He was extremely potent in both races, scything through the pack in familiar Bastianini fashion – though made his life harder on Sunday by losing the rear on the opening lap and having his airbag inflated through contact with Zarco, who did come off worse.

Qualifying: 11th Sprint: 6th Grand Prix: DNF

Ogura is convinced – and so am I – that the unspecified technical issue on Sunday cost him his first podium. Had it not happened, though, we may have been instead talking about how a pair of FP2 crashes on Saturday morning cost him a first win.

He had been eye-poppingly fast out of the blocks on Friday, but got knocked off his stride on Saturday, particularly in the first sector, with that pair of cold-tyre falls in the morning session clearly a factor.

With more representative grid positions and better starts (which have been a recurring issue), Ogura would become a routine podium contender – and maybe more.

The normally stoic sophomore was seemingly reduced to tears by this DNF, but that hurt should be fleeting. A first podium seems a formality.

Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 5th Grand Prix: 9th

You would’ve been forgiven for barely noticing Marini this weekend, save for a strong Friday effort to make Q2 and then an impeding penalty in said Q2, but the end result is a points return that’s three times the combined COTA total of all other Honda riders.

The return to a conventional rear tyre casing (compared to the reinforced casings of Buriram and Goiania) made the bike, as per Marini, more compliant on corner entry, and he exploited this well enough while staying within the limit.

Two valuable race results, aided by attrition and penalties, made up a very Marini-style weekend.

Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 2nd Grand Prix: 10th

Again Bagnaia’s worst session of the weekend was also the most important one, which is obviously not ideal.

The most obvious culprit was a “finished” rear tyre which forced him into almost Moto2-like pace and triggered a succession of painful overtakes, the last one a round-the-outside mugging from Marini.

The rear tyre over-use – which Bagnaia links to having to use the rear too much to turn the bike – was already foreshadowed by a drop-off in the sprint.

But it had been a good sprint, and a good weekend overall outside of the grand prix disillusionment.

Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 4th Grand Prix: 7th

The younger Marquez is in pure damage limitation mode to start the season, though at a certain point soon it risks going from damage limitation with the hope of eventual frontrunning to “just the way things are”.

With the normal rear tyre casing not proving a panacea, he acknowledged at COTA that the new Ducati “affects quite a lot my natural riding style”.

That’s bitten him a few times already, including this weekend, so led to a more cautious approach for the races – and two valuable, if not particularly exciting, finishes.

Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 10th Grand Prix: 11th

After the pleasant surprise of Goiania, the Grand Prix of the Americas put Aldeguer through the wringer – starting with the very first session, in which he ran without painkillers and quickly realised that was not really viable.

What followed was a genuinely good qualifying – particularly Q1 – and two races that felt pretty box-tick, which isn’t at all a criticism.

Qualifying: 14th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 13th

A nice (tow-assisted) qualifying flattered Moreira’s overall performance level through the weekend, but also reflects a good level of execution relative to modest potential.

His grand prix prep wasn’t helped by an immediate sprint exit caused by what was described as a clutch issue. Nothing more than a learning weekend was on offer, and that’s what he got out of it.

Qualifying: 16th Sprint: 11th Grand Prix: 17th

Quartararo claimed the best part of his weekend was hanging out with motocross ace Jett Lawrence and other friends, and watching Jett’s brother Hunter in AMA Supercross. It’s the kind of thing that is “helping me disconnect a bit from the racing” over in MotoGP.

COTA has never looked like the Quartararo-est venue in MotoGP, and in that context recovering from his Q1 crash to lead the Yamahas on the grid and in the sprint was a solid effort on Saturday.

He ran out of tyre life on Sunday, dropping to third of the Yamahas, which isn’t a great return – but there was no result possible all weekend that would’ve made Quartararo feel this is worth his while.

Qualifying: 13th Sprint: 7th Grand Prix: 8th

Unlucky with yellow flags on Friday but also just not where he needed to be over a single lap – as reflected in a narrow Q1 exit, which is not at the level for where the Aprilia is right now.

But Fernandez sees a lack of overtaking potency as the big limitation instead, convinced that all of the other Aprilia riders are making the difference on corner exit and thus are able to negate any grid position disadvantage in a way he cannot.

Still, there was a conviction that, relative to a hopeless Brazilian GP, this was a “positive weekend” because “the feeling is back”.

Qualifying: 6th Sprint: 17th Grand Prix: 5th

Marquez wasn’t slow – the thing about him is he’s never slow – but he never looked fast enough to be able to make up for the shortcomings of his weekend.

The first sector looked like a persistent issue, which can be attributed to lingering physical limitations. But situational shortcomings were more relevant to the outcome here – a fast crash on Friday, “completely my mistake” borne out of muscle memory, being one, and the headline-grabbing sprint tangle with Di Giannantonio being the other.

In terms of the competitive picture, his biggest issue right now is pace over the opening laps – which proved particularly punishing with a long-lap penalty hanging over him. But even after he’d served that his pace was simply good rather than ‘magical’.

Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 14th Grand Prix: 16th

Miller started the weekend feeling on the back foot relative to the other Yamahas, but ended it on Sunday “happier today than I had been all year, essentially”.

This was because of a decent turn of late-race pace on Sunday, on a bike that hasn’t always been the most compliant on used tyres.

A qualifying defeat to Razgatlioglu (making it 2-1 in the Turk’s favour in the head-to-head) is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, but otherwise this was a step in the right direction relative to Goiania.

Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 9th Grand Prix: DNF

Zarco’s ongoing general unease with the bike was reflected here in his first qualifying defeat to a team-mate in nearly two years – admittedly a track record maintained against limited opposition.

His “missing speed” did not stop him from picking up an attrition-enabled point on Saturday, but building on it on Sunday was made impossible by what he called “a race contact” with Bastianini – as he tried to capitalise on an error by the KTM rider and got caught out by him returning to the racing line earlier than Zarco expected.

The race pace looked solid enough post-crash, and included the second-fastest lap of the race – a lap “that I don’t really know how it came but it came”.

Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 16th Grand Prix: 18th

The likelihood is high that we’re watching a MotoGP career wind down here, with even a track like this – one that Rins used to soar at – unable to give him any meaningful edge on this Yamaha package.

He was let down on Friday in that end-of-day ‘Q0’ phase by electronics issues on both bikes, with only the less-favoured one eventually firing up. But on Saturday he qualified last despite “giving my 100%”, then tucked the front running behind Miller.

Sunday – which had looked OK – fell apart with another electronics issue, visible quite clearly on the laptime sheets starting from the eighth lap. 

Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 12th Grand Prix: 12th

Completely outmatched by the two other fit KTM riders, Binder didn’t shy away from the harsh realities of this weekend – describing his pace as “super, super slow, unfortunately” and his results in the two races as “nowhere near good enough”.

Rear pushing the front was the big limitation through the weekend, particularly in the first two sectors. A hefty, early-onset chatter added to it in the grand prix.

Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 13th Grand Prix: 14th

The only positive from Morbidelli’s weekend is that he kept things tidy. He was 1.6s off the lead Ducati in Friday practice, 1.1s off the lead Ducati in Q1, 15 seconds back from the lead Ducati in the sprint and 18 seconds back in the main race.

Riding around with an “awful feeling” and “no grip whatsoever”, with the discomfort exacerbated on fresh rubber, he heads into MotoGP’s unplanned sprint break in disarray.

Qualifying: 5th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: DNF

Former Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone once floated the idea of a radical points system that awards only the top-three finishers.

Joan Mir rides like he’s been told personally by MotoGP boss Carmelo Ezpeleta that the same system has been secretly adopted in the premier class of grand prix racing.

Another rider in another situation would’ve got credit for the excellent underlying level of performance. Mir – who insisted after both race exits that he had “no regrets” about his risk-taking approach – cannot get this credit.