How Aprilia became Ducati’s nearest MotoGP challenger

In a MotoGP season dominated by Marc Marquez and Ducati, Aprilia has emerged as a consistent frontrunner, putting the red bikes under pressure on multiple occasions. 

In fact, it’s now been almost 30 months since a manufacturer other than Ducati or Aprilia has won a dry-weather race, whether a sprint or a grand prix. 

However, while Aprilia has been the only marque consistently preventing Ducati from sweeping MotoGP victories in recent years, 2025 has seen the Noale factory take another step forward, addressing the one area where it previously lacked – consistency.

Aprilia’s performance over the years

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In the past, the RS-GP’s peak performance was so high that it was almost unbeatable on certain circuits such as Barcelona. But its narrow performance window meant it lacked the versatility of its rivals – a weakness that allowed KTM to edge it out for second in the constructors’ standings in both 2023 and 2024.

In many ways, Aprilia over the past three years resembled Ducati in the late 2010s, when the Borgo Panigale had a bike that was a rocket on straights but not so quick in corners.

That, however, is beginning to change. As MotoGP nears the end of its current regulation cycle, Aprilia has evolved the RS-GP into a prototype capable of contending across all circuit types.

“Clearly, we were very fast on the flowing parts and it used to be quite a good characteristic of the Aprilia,” said the team’s CEO, Massimo Rivola. “But it also looks like we are 1760447219 more competitive at stop/go tracks. So on average, the bike is getting better and better.”

A major turning point came with the leadership change at the end of 2024, when Gigi Dall’Igna’s former right-hand man Fabiano Sterlacchini joined Aprilia as technical director after a three-year stint at KTM.

Under Sterlacchini, Aprilia has made massive strides with the RS-GP, with podium finishes in six of the last nine grands prix. It has also eliminated some long-standing issues with the bike, including its tendency to overheat under high ambient temperatures at certain tracks in Asia.

Although the exact technical steps behind the bike’s progress remain closely guarded, Aprilia’s growing consistency has clearly lifted confidence and belief throughout the project.

“In this kind of sport, part [of achieving success] is the technique and part is the motivation: how much you believe that everything is right. There isn’t always an equation and a simulation [to follow], you have to trust the result of your job,” Sterlacchini told Autosport. 

“If you have some ups and downs, sometimes after the downward phase, you can have an opportunity to have an up, but you won’t have it because you do not believe that you can have it. 

“Consistency is the first law, because if we are having a good performance in one race, theoretically it could also be [down] to a [specific] case and not because you are building [the bike further].”

For a team that has effectively operated as a one-rider outfit for much of the season due to Martin’s injuries, that consistency and self-belief have been invaluable to the factory.

In Martin’s absence, Aprilia has been able to count on other 2025 signing Marco Bezzecchi, who led the team to a fine victory in the British Grand Prix and was set to repeat that feat in Indonesia until a rare error on the opening lap.

Marco Bezzecchi, Aprilia Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

In Mandalika, Aprilia showed the kind of raw performance it hadn’t displayed since the 2024 Americas GP, with Bezzecchi taking pole by four tenths and recovering from eighth to win the sprint race.

But the trade-off of building a more rounded bike has been a slight loss of its previous strengths on tracks like Barcelona. 

In 2023, Aprilia scored a dominant 1-2 at the Catalan GP, marking a rare occasion where Ducati was completely outgunned by one of its rivals. In 2024, it lost some of that edge, though Aleix Espargaro still managed pole and a sprint win at his home race. By 2025, however, no Aprilia qualified or finished inside the top five.

According to Sterlacchini, that’s not because Aprilia has gone backwards in Barcelona but rather others have caught up faster.

“Sometimes performance is relative,” he said. “So if our bike is faster than the year before – and the bike is faster, this is an objective fact – the others are faster than you because they improved more. 

“From the outside, it is always easy to try to draw some conclusion in terms of ‘you did perform quite well at the track, and now no [you don’t]’. No, we improved the lap time, we are better, but unfortunately, the others did a better job than us. So we have to keep in account several factors to understand where we are. 

“What is important, because the competition is relative to the others, is how close we are to the top riders – and in probably around the [last] 10 [races], we are performing quite well, we are always in the top three to five.”

This year’s Catalan GP featured a straight fight between the Marquez brothers, with Gresini rider Alex Marquez eventually scoring a narrow victory on last year’s Ducati GP24. Enea Bastianini finished more than five seconds behind the duo on the Tech3 KTM, while the top Aprilia rider was Trackhouse’s Ai Ogura in sixth after Bezzecchi was wiped out in an early incident with Franco Morbidelli.

As to why Aprilia’s rivals have made bigger gains in Barcelona, Sterlacchini said: “They are working to try to improve [their bike], and sometimes they are focusing on the tracks where they believe they are weaker.

“I believe that Ducati, after the performance of Aprilia in 2023, focussed a lot on the three tracks that they have to choose for testing. They chose Barcelona and they did several tests, so I believe that they spent more time there. This is one of the factors but there could be several other factors.”

Fighting to be the ‘best of the rest’

Enea Bastianini, Red Bull KTM Tech 3, Marco Bezzecchi, Aprilia Racing

Photo by: Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP via Getty Images

Despite losing its inherent advantage in Barcelona, the overall trend at Aprilia is upward. It may be competing with half the riders, but the RS-GP remains strong enough to chase a historic second place in the constructors’ championship.

Its chief rival is KTM, which has enjoyed its own resurgence since it introduced a new aero package in Austria. However, the performance of the RC16 continues to fluctuate race by race, giving Aprilia a 28-point buffer in the standings with four rounds remaining.

“One of the focuses that we had at the beginning of the season was to finish in the top five in the riders’ championship, and to win this fight with KTM to be second immediately after Ducati. That is the reasonable target looking at the results of Aprilia in the last [few] years,” Sterlacchini said.

“We lost some points here and there for some mistakes but also for reasons that don’t depend on our job, like in Barcelona [where] we had two zeroes basically for no fault of Marco. 

“Luckily, we recovered some points in terms of manufacturers because Ogura did a really good race, but it’s part of the game and our target is to finish second in the manufacturers’ championship.”

As the Indonesian GP showed, the last piece of the puzzle for Aprilia is its rider line-up. With Martin and Ogura withdrawing due to injuries, it was already down to two riders before the start of the weekend. Bezzecchi’s opening-lap error left only Fernandez to carry the flag, and he could do no better than sixth after getting mired in a battle with Honda’s Luca Marini.

If Aprilia can get all its riders firing together, it could become a serious challenger to Ducati next season.

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– The Autosport.com Team