How important is the first round of a new MotoGP season, really?

Unless you are a fortunate soul who is not chronically online, the barrage of ‘it’s race week’ posts on Monday have been hard to miss. But it’s the first round of the new year, so I’ll turn a blind eye this time.

There is reason to be excited coming into this season, though. For the first time in a long time it feels like MotoGP really is getting back to its best. The best rider of the generation, Marc Marquez, steps up to the factory Ducati squad and looks in the best shape he has for a long time to mount a serious title challenge.

Ducati’s better-safe-than-sorry approach to its engine choice for 2024, as well as its plan to start the new campaign on what is mostly a GP24 aside, it still looks like the bike to beat. But the brewing intra-team rivalry between Marquez and Francesco Bagnaia has created a palpable sense of anticipation that - finally - we might actually get something resembling a proper team-mate on team-mate rivalry not really seen since Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi were team-anything-but-mates at Yamaha.

Adding to that is how this partnership will truly evaluate Bagnaia’s standing as a world champion at MotoGP level. As far as rivals for the title goes, several key top names have been absent or on worsening machinery in recent years.

Within the Ducati stable, there are interesting strands to keep tabs on, like Alex Marquez’s quest to become a MotoGP race winner; Franco Morbidelli’s hopes to rebuild his flagging career; and the test of an exciting new rookie in Fermin Aldeguer.

Elsewhere on the grid, reigning world champion Jorge Martin embarks on his first campaign with Aprilia. Missing all of the pre-season, and at least now the first round due to multiple injuries, he faces an uphill battle to be on fighting terms at the start of the campaign. But the pace of the RS-GP, particularly in team-mate Marco Bezzecchi’s hands, has been encouraging.

Yamaha and Honda are making progress towards being constant top 10 fixtures, while Pedro Acosta’s first MotoGP win seems like a matter of when not if even with the KTM not looking like being a championship bike.

So, the ‘it’s race week’ tweets at least warrant the enthusiasm their tweeters sent them with.

How the first round has affected MotoGP in the 21st Century

For the first time since 2003, a new season begins in South East Asia, with MotoGP electing to withdraw the curtain-raiser from the decidedly retirement home-esque atmosphere of Qatar to the barnstorming, bike-mad Thailand. Past Thai GPs have been hard to watch on television with the sound up very high given the sheer volume of the fans that flock to Buriram.

Marc Marquez goes into this year’s Thai GP as the overwhelming favourite to score victory, given what he displayed in pre-season testing at Buriram - both in terms of one-lap speed and his race simulation pace.

A victory for the factory Ducati rider would be a dream start for the Italian brand, who can finally brush the fact it lost eventual 2024 champion Martin to Aprilia to make the Marquez deal happen under the rug.

A Marquez victory in Thailand would also do nothing to quash his status as title favourite, while it will also pile the pressure on double world champion Francesco Bagnaia having come into the new year off the back of an underwhelming pre-season.

But how important, really, is the first round of a season? Does it actually tell us much about how a season will actually unfold?

Taking the modern MotoGP era, dating back to 2002, as the sample, there have been 23 season-openers. The very first was won by Valentino Rossi on Honda’s RC211V. It kicked off a new era for motorcycle grand prix racing and began Rossi’s march towards the second of his premier class crowns.

From 2002 to 2005, Rossi won the first race of the calendar and went on to win the title in those years. Impressively, he did this twice on Honda machinery and then twice for Yamaha. If you include the 2001 Japanese GP of the final 500cc season, Rossi won the opening round for five consecutive title years.

Loris Capirossi won the 2006 Spanish GP to kick off a whirlwind campaign, but the Ducati rider’s success at Jerez didn’t pave the way for a title. That honour went to Honda’s Nicky Hayden. While Rossi’s run of season-opening wins was ended, in many ways he did conclude 2006 as he started it - with a crash.

Casey Stoner stunned with victory in Qatar in 2007, his first in what was also his debut race for Ducati. The Australian dominated the campaign for the first of his two titles. Stoner won the following two Qatar GPs, but came up empty-handed at the end of each campaign. Rossi’s 2010 Qatar GP also didn’t signal the beginning of his eighth premier class title bid, with Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo lifting the crown at the end of the year as a mid-season leg break curtailed the veteran Italian’s charge.

In his first race with Honda, Stoner opened up his account for 2011 at the Qatar GP curtain raiser and cruised to title number two. Lorenzo continued the trend in 2012, winning the first round of the year and going on to claim his second MotoGP championship. He was winner again in Qatar in 2013, but that year’s title went to Honda rookie Marc Marquez.

Marquez kicked off 2014 with his only victory in Qatar in the premier class to date, which heralded the start of a run of 10 consecutive race wins and his second championship success.

Between 2015 and 2022, the opening round winners - Rossi in 2015, Lorenzo in 2016, Maverick Vinales in 2017 and 2021, Andrea Dovizioso in 2018 and 2019, Fabio Quartararo in 2020 and Enea Bastianini in 2022 - were not crowned champion at season’s end.

Francesco Bagnaia ended that drought in 2023, as he kicked off the season with victory in the Portuguese GP before beating Jorge Martin in the final round of the campaign to his second MotoGP crown. He couldn’t replicate that in 2024, however.

In the modern era, there is only a 39.13% chance that the winner of the opening round of a season goes on to become world champion. From decade to decade, that has statistically gotten even harder. In the 2000s, the opening round winner was champion five times. In the 2010s, that number shrunk to three and so far in the 2020s that figure stands at just one.

There are various factors that have contributed to that. The level of competition in the 2000s wasn’t as tight as it is now, from a machinery or a rider perspective. Calendar lengths also play a role in this: in 2002 there were 16 rounds. In 2024 there were 20, with a further 20 sprints tagged onto each race weekend too.

The grand prix/sprint points split is particularly noteworthy in the context of the coming campaign. Bagnaia, who won last year’s Qatar GP, scored 370 points on Sundays compared to eventual champion Martin’s 337. But Martin scored 171 in sprints compared to 128 for Bagnaia, with the gap between the pair in the final reckoning just 10 points.

The way to win championships now is different to how it was 20 years ago. While you still needed consistency in the early 2000s, winning grands prix don’t count for as much now if you don’t have strong sprint results to prop those Sunday points up. Bagnaia won a staggering 11 grands prix last year while Martin tallied up just three.

So, what happens at the Thai Grand Prix in 2025 certainly matters. But likely not as much as it would have done in the 2000s…