Even before it dominated the Australian Grand Prix weekend in Marc Marquez’s absence, Aprilia’s MotoGP team had been on an upward trend.
At race after race in the second half of the 2025 season, Marco Bezzecchi’s Aprilia has been the bike giving Marquez a headache - or even beating him. And Raul Fernandez winning a grand prix for Aprilia’s satellite team Trackhouse was even more compelling evidence of how good the RS-GP has become.
But is it good enough to fight Marquez and Ducati for the 2026 MotoGP title?
Or have circumstances played into Aprilia’s hands and created an over-generous impression?
Here’s our verdict on its form and 2026 prospects.
It's not a Marquez-beater
Simon Patterson
There’s only one reason why I’m pretty confident right now that Aprilia (or any other manufacturer that isn’t Ducati, for that matter) won’t be a MotoGP title contender in 2026: the fact that Marc Marquez still exists.
The problem is, it doesn’t really matter how good your bike is right now, because when you’ve got a talent of his level, able to ride around the problems of whatever machine he’s on with ease, then it’s always going to be very difficult to look at anyone else as a realistic threat.
Sure, the RS-GP is a very good machine right now, maybe even (for the first time in half a decade) dethroning the Ducati as the best bike on the grid. And while Jorge Martin has had an injury-strewn season, he’s shown flashes of genius on the Aprilia as team-mate Bezzecchi has been stepping up to the plate as a more robust and complete racer than ever before.
But, as we’ve seen time and time again, often that’s just not enough when you’re fighting against Marc Marquez.
Yamaha used to be able to build a very good M1, and it had Jorge Lorenzo riding it. Ducati’s Desmosedici came good at the same time as Andrea Dovizioso, and made for a fantastic pairing. Yet, even then, neither were good enough to dethrone Marc Marquez when he was on form on a Honda that at the time was very much not the best bike.
For me, the definitive Marquez season will always be 2019, when he started the year on an impossible-to-ride RCV213V - and still ended every single race he finished in first or second place. It’s very hard to fight against an unstoppable force…
We need more evidence
Glenn Freeman
I think it's a bit soon to be declaring Aprilia a 2026 title threat. Everything is heading in the right direction, but we still need a wider sample set of consistent high performances before we get too excited.
Also, any talk of a Ducati capitulation is a bit over the top. Ducati's supposedly troubled GP25 still finished second at Phillip Island, in the hands of a slightly inconsistent rider and being run by a satellite team. It would be wrong to mistake Pecco Bagnaia's disastrous form for Ducati completely losing its way.
What we can realistically hope for in 2026 though is the chasing pack closing up. If Aprilia can keep up its current momentum, KTM continues to rebuild from its financial struggles last winter, Honda keeps chipping away and Yamaha produces a bike that doesn't look like its competing in the wrong class down the straights, we should hopefully get fewer Marc Marquez walkovers next year, and fewer Ducati lockouts of the leading positions than we'd become used to over the last couple of years.
Aprilia's answered nearly every question now
Matt Beer
What makes me so encouraged about Aprilia’s form right now is how its season has progressed. This hasn’t been a typical case of a decent start or isolated brilliant performance as certain favoured tracks, normally all followed by a late-season collapse in matters of both pace and reliability.
We’re deep into the October flyaways and Aprilia’s looking better than ever. It’s actually overcome big problems (remember how often Bezzecchi was flying off through the gravel complaining of braking instability six months ago?) rather than tripping over new ones.
It’s revived Bezzecchi’s career after his underwhelming 2024, and proved that it was worth keeping the faith in Fernandez. Given those achievements, you can only be excited for what Martin and Ai Ogura will do with this bike when they’re fit.
Yamaha, Honda and KTM have all shown strong trends of closing on Ducati at times this year, but with so many caveats and performance fluctuations. Only Aprilia’s actually consistently getting the job done. Take Marquez out of the equation and you’d surely argue that it has dethroned Ducati as the pace benchmark (which probably says more about what the rest of Ducati’s line-up is doing than about the 2025 bike).
No, it’s not 2026 title favourite yet. But it’s done enough to stop a Marquez/Ducati 2026 walkover being a total certainty.
