Will COTA start chaos trigger MotoGP rule change?

The start of the 2025 MotoGP Americas Grand Prix was plunged into chaos due to changing weather conditions on the build-up to lights out.

Rainfall around half an hour before the MotoGP race was due to start prompted all but three riders to head to the grid on wet tyres.

Then, just seconds before the warm-up lap, Marc Marquez bolted from pole to pitlane to get his dry bike in the hope that enough people would follow him and trigger a delayed start.

This ultimately happened, which was fortunate for Marquez as he would have been forced to serve a ride-through penalty had the start not been delayed.

But some were left angry at being denied the opportunity to capitalise on their correct gamble, with Trackhouse team boss Davide Brivio furious about the delayed start after Ai Ogura elected to start on slicks.

While the rules surrounding starts had been changed following a similar situation in Argentina 2018, is another rethink needed?

“Understandably, there were some really angry people there,” Senior Journalist Lewis Duncan said on the latest Crash MotoGP Podcast.

“Ai Ogura, [Enea] Bastianini and Brad Binder had put slick tyres on and Davide Brivio was furious. He was absolutely livid that ‘we’d made the gamble here, why can’t we start the race? They didn’t’.

“He was absolutely livid with it and I’m sure there were a couple of others as well.

Read more: Marc Marquez's COTA grid gamble: Wrong reasons, right decision?

“This rule will obviously be revisited because none of what was put in the rulebook was followed, even to the point of the 10 riders thing because it doesn’t seem like there were 10 riders who left the grid.

“So, it’s a tricky one. You can argue that if they went out on wet tyres, it would have been too dangerous, so they did this on safety grounds.

“It’s so, so tricky to actually police, and this is an unprecedented situation.

“But I do think the stewards and the FIM have to look at this and clamp down on it and you just cannot leave the grid unless your bike is broken.

“So, you have to take the start and if that means you’re on the wrong tyres and you have to change after lap one and lose all your time, tough.

“That’s the decision you’ve made, you have to live with it. I don’t know why that wasn’t the rule in the first place.

“If you’re on wet tyres on a dry track, you can wobble around, you’re not going to be in danger.

“This will rumble on for a while and I think there will be a change to the regulations because it caused too much confusion.”

Podcast host and social media manager Jordan Moreland added: “The conditions were so fast in changing, [Pecco] Bagnaia talked about it after and he said he looked up at Turn 1 and on the grid they could see it was dry.

“The whole situation how it played out, I feel sorry for the three riders that went for slicks. It’s similar to the Jack Miller thing [from Argentina 2018], they’d got it spot on.”