The past 12 months have been a career rollercoaster for former Moto2 title contender Sergio Garcia.
He saw his 2024 championship bid fall apart in the course of just weeks, at a time when he was being mentioned in connection with 2025 MotoGP seats, and his form never recovered.
Subsequently sacked mid-season by his team earlier this year following injuries, he's now found a way back to the grid for next year - but has been left bruised by the impact of the highs and lows of 2024.
The 2022 Moto3 championship runner-up (behind Izan Guevara), Garcia graduated to the middleweight class in 2023 and had a solid rookie season, finishing the year 15th in the championship standings, by far the top rookie and with 84 points to Guevara's 20.
And that promise continued into 2024 as well, with two wins and three podiums in the opening eight rounds of the year very much catapulting him into title contention against MT Helmets MSi team-mate (and eventual champion) Ai Ogura.
However, that run of form came to a crashing halt at the midway point of the year. In the top 10 only twice in the final 10 races of the year, his campaign ended in disaster - and an injury before 2025 even started left him on the back foot from the off.
Missing the opening three rounds of the year through not just injury but a botched repair surgery that required a second operation, when he eventually returned in Qatar in mid-April he was nowhere near competitive.
He scored only three points in five races, and the MSi team wasn't exactly sentimental as it dropped its sometime championship contender in favour of Eric Fernandez (who in turn was replaced after four rounds by Unai Orradre) - something that Garcia now tells The Race was actually the best thing for him at the time.
"The relationship was so bad," the 22-year-old admitted on his return to Moto2 in Hungary deputising for the injured Senna Agius at the IntactGP team.
"I don't know why exactly, but the relationship was not good. At the end, they wanted to stop me from the bike, and I said OK because in that moment it was the best for me. It was really bad, giving a lot of pain to me."
The cause of that pain, it seems, was twofold. Part of the problems on the bike came from the introduction of a new Boscoscuro chassis midway through 2024, a frame that Garcia never clicked with and which meant he lost whatever progress they had made in the first half of the season.
"Last year, at the end," he explained, "I struggled a lot with the new chassis that Boscoscouro gave us. I think that we didn't adapt the bike as well as we needed to for this chassis and this swingarm.
"And yeah, I wanted to go up, to already be competitive, but this is the way we have to work in. When we will do it, for sure I will be the same, but for now we are working.
"The feeling with the bike at the start of the year was incredible. I could do the races as I liked, put the bike where I wanted it and pushing to the last corners. Then, s**t happened!
"I tried to understand it as well as I could, to be competitive, and in the last race in Catalunya I did sixth, which was quite good for us. But it wasn't the end of the year that I wanted."
That was compounded at the start of 2025 by injury. Crashing while testing at Jerez before the start of the season and undergoing surgery by MotoGP's go-to medic Dr Xavier Mir, the damage done to his right hand was worse than first expected and continued to cause problems long after it should have.
"It was difficult," Garcia added. "The bone was broken, but it was not broken normally. The first surgery didn't go well, and the doctor and I thought it had. Then the second scan showed that it was really bad. It was difficult, because I never knew when I could start the season.
"Then I started too late, I had problems with the team and the bike, and I stopped racing. Now I'm here because Intact gave me the chance to replace Senna. It was super difficult, but step by step I am going up and getting better."
Perhaps more than the injury, though, was the lost opportunity to graduate to MotoGP that took a psychological toll on Garcia. He was linked early on to the Trackhouse Aprilia seat that eventually went to Moto2 team-mate Ogura. It's perhaps proof that being Spanish is often a hindrance as you move through the ranks of grand prix racing because you're up against so many compatriots, with the opportunity pulled from under his feet in favour of seeing a Japanese rider instead promoted to the premier class.
"It did affect me," Garcia admitted. "It's difficult that I almost had the contract in MotoGP, and then they said ‘no, not possible this year'. It was difficult to understand, no?"
However, with that now put behind him - and with Garcia well aware that some big names have gone through similar scenarios on their rise to the top - he's now ready for the new challenge of 2026 and a seat in Moto2 at Gresini Racing that has a direct path to the premier class should he live up to expectations.
"This bad moment, I have to just learn everything from it," he said, "for another time it can happen to me. Just learn and be focused, work every day, and keep the goal that is to be competitive in Moto2 and go to win the championship.
"I'm super happy [with Gresini] because it's a big family, but also they have a lot of experience with MotoGP and Moto2. I think it could be a good opportunity, and I need to be calm. Being all the same season with the new team will be good, too.
"It's also important that they have the Ducatis in MotoGP, the best bike for the moment. It's a super good opportunity."
