MotoGP tyre pressure penalties “kill any hope of surprise results”

Fabio di Giannantonio at Valencia 2023, Fabio Quartararo at Jerez 2024 and now Maverick Vinales at Qatar 2025.

All have lost hard earned top-three finishes, after celebrating with their teams and receiving trophies on the rostrum, due to post-race MotoGP tyre penalties.

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While teams have got better at ‘guesstimating’ the pre-race pressures they will need since the punishments were introduced in mid-2023, sudden changes in weather or - as on Sunday - a rider performing a major upset cannot be factored into the calculations.

We don’t know, because it’s not revealed, how close Vinales got to meeting the required 60% of race laps above the minimum pressure.

But the five laps the Tech3 KTM rider spent in clean air at the front of the field could well have caused the penalty.

“Teams have to look into a crystal ball”

“It's a nightmare, isn't it? To have that dreaded message that flashes up at the end of a race saying rider is under investigation. There was a bit of hope because Acosta escaped a penalty last year due to a leaking rim. But no, he got the penalty,” MotoGP editor Pete McLaren told the Crash.net MotoGP podcast.

“The fresh air Vinales found himself in while he was leading was probably the problem. So if you do a much better race than anyone expects you end up being punished for it in terms of the tyre pressure.

“What could Tech3 do? They couldn’t really have imagined after the season that has had that he would be leading.

“The teams have to look into a crystal ball and come up with a starting tyre pressure. They don't want to put it too high, because then their riders would have no chance in the race if they are behind another rider. But if they put it too low, and they are not following other riders, this is the kind of thing that cam happen.

“Presumably Maverick would have got a message on the dash saying - as we saw with Marc Marquez in Buriram - that he was in danger of not being above the 60% of race laps.

“That's not a MotoGP system, each team has their own system. It's up to the teams and the riders if they want to do that or not. But as Maverick said, he was just focused on looking ahead. He was racing for a win, incredibly, the last thing on his mind was looking at the dash.

“Just a real shame. We don’t know how much he was under, because it’s not revealed. And it brings us back to talk of should a rider be allowed an official warning, or joker, if they are very slightly under rather than a huge 16-second penalty which dropped him to 14th.

“Then of course Morbidelli was promoted to third, but missed out on the podium ceremony. It’s just a messy end to a race when you have these kind of penalties.”

Podcast host Jordan Moreland responded: “That's what gets me. The one thing I don't like is the fact that Maverick can go on the podium, and get his trophy. All the Tech 3 mechanics and the team are standing down there celebrating.

“But they know that there's a penalty potentially coming. It just takes the absolute sting out of it, doesn't it, Lewis?"

“It kills any hope of seeing surprise results”

Senior Crash.net journalist Lewis Duncan: “It kills any hope that we will ever have of seeing surprise results, under these current regulations. Because as Pete says, teams can't set up to think ‘I might be leading for all these laps’.

“KTM had a terrible Saturday. Pedro Acosta said it was horrendous, Brad Binder said it was the worst race of his life. There was no hope in hell. Even Pit Beirer said, top five was realistic but none of our riders should be thinking about winning the Grand Prix this weekend.

“So, they've set it up to think, ‘we're going to be in the pack, Maverick starts from sixth, he's going to be there or thereabouts as far as a top five.

“Maverick rode brilliantly. That's the reality of this. And for whatever reason the chatter issues that have been plaguing the KTM weren't there. I think that the race pace being a bit slower than expected and using the medium tyre probably helped kind of mask things.

“But we then have a rider who has done really well, the team hasn't been able to account for it and they get penalised for it.

“First of all, this regulation shouldn't need to exist in the first place. Michelin should just have made a better front tyre.

“This was never really an issue before. OK there's been more aerodynamics added over the past few years that has put more pressure on the front tyre. But they've had several years now to make a fix to that and they haven't.

“We then had a new tyre that was tested for half an hour at the Misano test last year. And then they decided we can't race it this year because we haven't had enough testing time on it!”

“Penalties are not proportionate”

McLaren said: “It’s the worst-case scenario, changing a result after the chequered flag. There are always going to be some situations, some technical rules, where it’s unavoidable.

“But it does make you wonder with all the real-time information on the bikes now, could they modify the rule so that a cut-off point for tyre pressure is made halfway through a grand prix?

“Then they could potentially serve an in-race penalty, or receive an official warning from Race Direction that they will be penalised unless they can raise the pressure, by following someone, in the second half of the race.

“If nothing else the result could be known much sooner after the finish.

“At the moment it just feels like a rule that’s been designed by a committee. It’s a compromise that nobody seems completely happy with.

“If nothing else, I think a graded system of penalties would be better, depending on the size of the low pressure infringement.”

Duncan added: “We've seen with accidents and things like that, long laps have been handed out for the next event. Start doing that.

“The current 16-second penalty, 8 for a Sprint, is also not proportional. Say that was a crazy race, for whatever reason, with massive gaps, then Maverick wouldn’t have dropped as many places. Is that fair?

“We saw at Jerez in the Sprint race last year that Fabio Quartararo went from 3rd to 5th because it was such a weird race. Has someone that drops from 2nd to 10th for example, done something more severe than someone who only drops from 3rd to 5th because of the gaps?

“It’s not proportional. It doesn’t work. It’s something they can’t really control. So I think they need something that is a negative consequence for the next Grand Prix.”

McLaren concluded: “And just imagine, Zarco was only 0.173s behind Morbidelli in Qatar. If he’d held on to that fourth place, it would have been Zarco promoted to third by the Vinales penalty - but we would never have seen him on the podium.”