With MotoGP’s long-awaited 2027 rulebook announced only a few days before the French Grand Prix weekend, the new regulations were always going to be a key topic of conversation at Le Mans as key figures took the opportunity to speak to the media and explain some of the more complicated details of the series’ most radical revamp in 15 years.
At a remarkable press conference on Friday, series sporting director Carlos Ezpeleta, FIM president Jorge Viegras, International Race Team Association president Herve Poncheral, and CEO of series promoter Dorna’s Carmelo Ezpeleta all took the chance to respond to questions and provided clarification on some of the information released earlier in the week.
Perhaps the headline news to take away from the regulations is about what their primary purpose is. That – it seems – is to slow down the bikes in the most direct of ways, by cutting their top speeds while potentially not seeing all that much of a change in laptimes compared to what some were expecting.
That makes sense, because while the main focus of the regulations is to make the racing safer, that can all be achieved by making sure bikes arrive at the point of most jeopardy – corner entry – a little bit slower.
Those corner entries have become increasingly fraught since the explosion of aerodynamics and ride height devices, so reducing the impact of one of those and banning the other – in addition to limiting power – should mean that more margin for error is possible without radical change.
“For what the manufacturers are telling us, we can expect differences from around one to two seconds depending on the circuit,” said Carlos Ezpeleta.
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“That’s what they’re telling us. Of course, performance and safety are always inversely proportional to a certain extent, and we are expecting a performance drop, but a bigger one in top speeds at a number of circuits.”
A relatively interesting concept that has been debated since the announcement of the new rules but is not really covered by them is the prospect that the current technical requirements will effectively be frozen for the year 2026, which is the last year of the current rules. That would allow the manufacturers to focus on the new 850cc engines while also giving them an opportunity to save money.
It’s a reasonable notion, and it was last carried out during the COVID pandemic when engineers’ movement was severely restricted. Furthermore, Carlos Ezpeleta stated that, given MotoGP’s existing concession structure, at least some of the teams are considering it, even though it would require the unanimous approval of the current five factories.