Fernandez doesn’t want MotoGP mid-season bike change again

Trackhouse Racing’s Raul Fernandez has insisted he doesn’t want to go through a bike change in the middle of the season again in MotoGP.

Fernandez was the only rider within the Aprilia contingent to start the 2024 season with a year-old RS-GP, as the Noale-based brand could only build limited examples of its overhauled MotoGP contender.

It wasn’t until after the summer break at Silverstone that the Spaniard got his hands on the new version of the bike, although he did have to stick to the 2023-spec engine due to MotoGP’s homologation rules.

The 2024 Aprilia was radically different to its predecessor and, with no testing opportunities available outside of a one-day official test at Misano, Fernandez struggled to adapt to the new bike in the second half of the year.

So while Aprilia was praised for making sure its four riders had more or less the same equipment, the 24-year-old thinks the marque’s strategy to offer him the new bike from British GP onwards actually backfired.

“I don’t want to do this thing in the next [few] years or all my life,” he said. “I would like not to repeat this thing. 

“It’s really difficult to change all the bike in the middle of the season. If you change small details, [that is] okay. But the [new] bike is completely opposite [of the old one] so you need to change a lot of things and your riding style. 

“It doesn’t help us.”

Fernandez showed flashes of pace throughout the year, qualifying on the front row at Barcelona and the Sachsenring with the 2023 bike and earning himself a new two-year contract with Aprilia to remain at Trackhouse until the end of the 2026 season.

However, Sunday results left much to be desired, and a lack of consistency meant he finished one place and nine points behind team-mate Miguel Oliveira in the standings, despite the Portuguese rider missing five races due to injuries.

Asked to provide an assessment of his third season in the premier class, the former Moto2 runner-up said: “At the end, [it was] super difficult. 

“We didn’t improve. Maybe we tested a lot of things, but we didn’t have a lot of time for us. So we were more focussed on improving the [overall] project and trying to understand a lot of things. 

“I tried many, many things with the bike from last year, I changed a lot of things we tried. Yes, we understood a lot of things but in the end I couldn’t use [them]. So it’s the frustrating part.”

Asked why he wasn’t able to take advantage of the new developments from Aprilia, Fernandez gave a cryptic response, saying: “I tried and Aprilia analysed. I don’t know what they will decide for the future.”