Enea Bastianini loses almost 30 seconds in four months between Thai MotoGP Sprint races

Enea Bastianini won last year’s MotoGP Thai Sprint in dominant, precise fashion, but his first race on the KTM  – the 2025 edition of the Sprint in Buriram – was a performance almost entirely opposite.

Bastianini won last year’s Sprint in 19 minutes and 31.131 seconds, enough to beat Jorge Martin by 1.357 seconds and Francesco Bagnaia by 2.372 seconds.

He did it with an average lap time (discounting the first lap from a standing start) of 1:29.956, an average faster than the fastest lap of every rider in the 2025 Thai Sprint bar Marc Marquez, who did a 1:29.911 on his way to victory in the first MotoGP race of this year.

Additionally, Bastianini’s first eight flying laps of the 2024 Sprint were in the 1:29s, and his slowest lap was the final lap: a 1:30.362.

That slowest lap was only 0.672 seconds slower than his best lap of the 2024 Sprint, and the Italian did lap five, six, and seven all within one-hundredth-of-a-second of each other last October.

It all points to  exceptional consistency, a clear indicator of a rider perfectly comfortable with his bike. Bastianini, after all, contested his fourth season of MotoGP with Ducati last year.

In comparison, the Italian is racing with KTM for the first time in his career in 2025 (bar his rookie Moto3 season in 2014).

While last year’s Thai Grand Prix happened at the end of the season (on 25-27 October), this year’s Buriram round is opening the season, and the Sprint was the first race of the year.

It was therefore also Bastianini’s first race on the KTM – the first chance to see how he is really adapting to the RC16. The preseason was dire, the practice sessions in Thailand this weekend similarly so, but maybe in the race the experienced, race-winning Bastianini would be able to figure something out.

However, the numbers tell a different story.

Bastianini’s race time in this year’s Sprint was 19 minutes and 58.953 seconds, 27.822 seconds slower than his winning time of only four months ago. In percentage terms, that’s a 2.38 per cent increase in race time.

Now, you can explain some of it with heat, absolutely – even Marc Marquez’s winning time in the 2025 Sprint was almost four seconds slower than Bastianini last year at 19:35.005, and he’s made the step up in machinery from the Ducati GP23 to the GP25.

But even looking at riders whose technical packages have changed very little from last year to this, the comparison shines poorly on Bastianini.

Francesco Bagnaia  – who is racing at least with the same engine, chassis, and fairing this weekend as he did last October – was 4.925 seconds slower this year than last (0.42 per cent increase); and Brad Binder, whose KTM RC16 is also very similar this year to last, was 4.410 seconds slower in March 2025 than October 2024 (0.37 per cent increase).

So, in comparison to those two riders, who both have relative technical consistency between the 2024 and 2025 Thai Grand Prix weekends, Bastianini has lost, in terms of pure race time, over five-times as much time in the past four months.

Looking at the lap times, too, Bastianini last year did eight of the 13 laps in the 1:29s, whereas this year he didn’t even do a 1:30. Also, the difference between his best and worst laps this year was 2.079 seconds, a 1.402-second increase over last year’s range.

The Tech3 KTM average lap time this year was a 1:31.940, almost two seconds slower than his average time of October 2024.

Perhaps the biggest indicator of both Bastianini’s decline in on-track performance over the winter and the difficulties he is encountering in adapting to the KTM in 2025 is that his fastest lap of the 2025 Sprint – a 1:31.252 set on lap two – was 0.890 seconds slower than his slowest lap (the aforementioned 1:30.362) from last year.

Bastianini himself has been open about his struggles in adapting to the KTM, admitting that his approach is wrong and that his riding style doesn’t suit the RC16 during testing.

This was also true after the Thai Sprint, in which  he reiterated that he is “not comfortable on the bike”.

“I’ve tried to learn from other riders what they make different to me; where I’m stronger and where not, in which corners,” Bastianini said after the Sprint.

“But I think we need to continue working hard because at the moment I’m not comfortable on the bike, I committed many mistakes – especially during the middle of the race I did some mistakes and I lost a lot of time.

“Tomorrow will be another test for me.”

He added that he was struggling most on corner entry because of a pushing sensation coming from the rear.

“In entry every time it’s difficult to release the brake with the KTM because the rear pushes, and after this push it’s difficult to turn,” he explained.

“But I don’t know if also I need to change more the bike, because braking straight this bike is very good, braking straight you can brake very hard, and when you are another rider you can overtake them very easily, like what I saw last year with Brad [Binder] in every straight.

“But for the rest it’s very difficult to turn and in the second part of braking. I have to understand better that situation.”