The handing down of yet another light sanction to VR46 Ducati rider Franco Morbidelli after the MotoGP sprint race at the Catalan Grand Prix has once again highlighted the deficiencies of the current rules.
Morbidelli and Gresini Racing’s Fermin Aldeguer, both of whom have also already been penalised this season for causing another racer to crash, were given long lap penalties for Sunday’s main race after taking out the Aprilia duo of Jorge Martin and Marco Bezzecchi in the space of a few seconds, in unrelated incidents.
Morbidelli had committed a similar act at the Italian Grand Prix in June when he collided with Maverick Vinales, while Aldeguer knocked off Miguel Oliveira in the second round of the season in Argentina back in April, forcing the Portuguese rider to miss several rounds and indirectly precipitating the end of his premier class career.
That means that when the pair once again caused two rivals to crash in the sprint at Barcelona, it seemed like a fairly locked-in escalation of their previous behaviour and one that would result in a more severe penalty.
Both Aprilias taken out in consecutive laps 🤯💥
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) September 6, 2025
Sprint's over for @Aldeguer54 & Bezzecchi #CatalanGP 🏁 pic.twitter.com/yzLwINNj5e
However, despite acknowledging that both had committed a second offence, when the FIM MotoGP Stewards issued their sanction, the same punishment was issued as prior - a single trip to the long lap loop on Sunday.
In theory, there’s a logical reason for that, even if it’s one that might not necessarily be apparent. While the status of a repeat offence is taken into consideration, incidents are nonetheless largely judged on their own individual merits, meaning that mitigating circumstances are often more important in the final penalty than past behaviour.
Taken in isolation, both the crashes of Morbidelli and Aldeguer on Saturday were definitely towards the lower end of the judicial spectrum. Both made mistakes during regular overtakes, rather than having engaged in wild lunges like Morbidelli’s on Vinales back at Mugello. Both perpetrators crashed out while attempting the move, unlike their previous incidents where they were able to continue.
Even more importantly, incidents of a specific type are treated as completely isolated from each other, meaning that Morbidelli’s two previous grid place drops for riding slowly on the racing line during practice at both Buriram and Silverstone aren’t taken into consideration at all when handing down this latest penalty.
The system also doesn’t consider actions from a previous year, with riders essentially going into a new season with a clean slate. That means that Morbidelli’s double long lap penalty at Silverstone last year for taking out Marco Bezzecchi on the opening lap is no longer a factor.
But with Morbidelli receiving four punishments so far this year for breaching the series’ safety rules, it seems fair to suggest that the lax nature of the sanctions regime is failing in its fundamental purpose of deterring dangerous behaviour on track.
Ironically, though, this tends to be a factor only in the premier class, with stewards much more willing to hand out increasingly punitive sanctions in Moto2 and Moto3. That was demonstrated on Saturday afternoon, where five riders on the middleweight class grid (including reigning Moto3 world champion David Alonso and erstwhile title contender Barry Baltus) were given nine-place grid penalties for the second offence of riding slowly during qualifying.
There’s one obvious solution to the problem: bringing back the penalty points system that MotoGP scrapped following the controversial 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix, when Valentino Rossi was sent to the back of the grid at the final race of the year after he kicked out at Marc Marquez and caused his Honda rival to fall.
Such a system, if implemented in 2025, would likely mean that Morbidelli would by now be facing a race ban, the sort of sanction that has in the past focused the minds of other racers and turned them into safer riders.
Likely to require a complicated political process to be put into place and unlikely to meet the approval of the series’ stakeholders any time soon, there’s a more immediate solution in the interim that the stewards panel headed up by former racer Simon Crafar should be looking to implement.
All that would require is scrapping the current strategy of treating only incidents of the same class together, and instead moving to a new formula where repeat offences of any nature count as aggravating circumstances when it comes to sentencing.
Had today’s incident been Morbidelli’s fourth of the year rather than his second, then more stringent sanction would have been available to the stewards - and perhaps this time the message would have sunk in a little quicker to him.
