In the process of earning three World Superbike championships, Toprak Razgatlioglu became recognized as a unique, even “generational“ talent. A rider able to take bikes that shouldn’t be on the top step of the podium to the world title.
Now he finds himself entering the pinnacle of motorcycle road racing, MotoGP. The recently finished Sepang three-day test revealed some significant hurdles he will face as he tries to find his way to the front this year. He is a teammate of Jack Miller on the Pramac Yamaha team.
Principally, it is the switch from the World Superbike Pirelli tires to the Michelin tires used in MotoGP. After three days of testing at Sepang, Razgatlioglu was disappointed to finish with the 19th quickest lap time – slowest of the Yamahas.
Yamaha is running an all-new bike this year based around a V4 engine, after using an inline-four engine configuration. The new bike has teething issues, of course, but Razgatlioglu is the only Yamaha rider who has never competed using Michelin tires.
He explained his difficulties as follows:
“The Pirelli [in World Superbike], when you feel the spin, it’s easy to manage. But when the Michelin spins, it doesn’t stop again.”
“You need to ride like a Moto2-style and open the gas very gentle, because this tyre is so sensitive. I’m trying to adapt to this, my team always say ‘ride smooth’, but to say is easy!”
“It’s so difficult to wait a lot to open the gas, because in Superbike I’m always using the rear tyre to turn. I was always using the rear tyre for sliding and pick up and good acceleration, but MotoGP is the opposite.”
His teammate Miller elaborated on the behavior of the Michelins:
“That’s the biggest thing with the Michelin, once you start to spin, it doesn’t stop until fifth gear or sixth gear. Like it continues spinning in a straight line.”
Miller went on to say the Ducati handles this tire issue best. It seems to be a combination of engine character (the V4 engine configuration should help Yamaha in this regard) and electronic traction control settings.
The 2026 MotoGP championship will have another practice session this weekend at the Chang International circuit in Thailand before the opening round at the same circuit the following weekend.
Razgatlioglu!!! “A rider able to take bikes that shouldn’t be on the top step of the podium to the world title.”
Spinning rear tire? Thats the Toprak excuse now. What a joke!
I couldn’t be more sick of this guy and, ironically, that is mostly due to the ridiculous hype train which he put himself on.
I was a big fan of Toprak’s until he decided he wanted to be a Motop star.
WTH?
How many WSB stars who fail in MotoGP will it take for the others to learn they just aren’t good enough for MotoGP?
I closely followed Toprak’s MotoGP progress during the off season and as I did I lost all respect for him and pretty much the little remaining respect I had for the entire organization/BS hype train machine(remember at the start of last season when, after he followed Pecco around for a podium, the Japanses rookie rider was heavily hyped to be the new star of MotoGP and remember the next time he made any headlines…no…because he didn’t. same hype train BS as Alex M’s stable mate the two times he finished well by following then said this “The old guys are done…It’s the young mans time now” geeze what an absolute arse) .
I saw way too many ridiculous headlines claiming Toprak was the next coming for MotoGp. All fake news, right from the start. Look at Toprak now. Performing even worse than I thought he’d be. I gave him credit for rear of the midpack…not nearly dead last to a test rider.
***I love how the Toprak headlines went from “Toprak, the God of WSB will be the new God of MotoGP” to very recently (now that most casual fans and observers are starting to cosume MotoGp content again for 2026 and the truth is in plain sight) went to “Toprak will be learning his new bike and will gradually improve in the coming season(s). Learning his new bike?!? I guess he never spent 100’s of hours testing it and all the while the headlines claiming he was an absolute killer and monster on the bike and will destroy the grid n 2026. Holy cow!!!! Well…he’s dead last aside from a test rider so yep…lot’s of room for improvement. Congrats Toprak! What a genius move to MotoGP. Was it wworth it?
So, Toprak, “A rider able to take bikes that shouldn’t be on the top step of the podium to the world title”, can’t do better than nearly dead last in MotoGp. Yamaha should immediately cut their losses and put him back in WSB so he can put their Yamaha WSB bike on the podium since that’s what he does apparently.
Gauranteed, the arrogance and ingnorrance that made Toprak decide to move to MotoGP will not allow Toprak to be satisfied to run dead last in MotoGP; practices, qualifying, races etc., so he’s done.
Toprak is now a laughing stock which he deserves as he brought it on himself.
Given that Michelin must be able to make grippy rubber, perhaps the useless MotoGP bikes (according to Mick) simply make too much power for a SBK rider to cope with?
That’s interesting. In all this time I had never heard of this very important tire issue. Sure you hear a lot about traction. Spin control is another matter. If Ducati found a better way to control spin, that would help explain the dominance they have been enjoying for the last several years.
The switch to Pirelli in 2027 could be a major game changer. Time will tell. They’ll still be four strokes and the 800 years were the most unpopular in history. But it might put an end to the Ducati show. A lot of people have gotten really tired of that.
wow, it seems most everyone, everywhere, in motogp has complained about wheel spin. its nothing new. ?
I guess I’m guilty of not following MotoGP very closely since they went retro for the street bikers in 2002. But this article states that the rear will continue to spin through gear changes. While thing like that are possible, it usually requires effort to so. If I bought a tire that spun up in second or third and continued to spin until I hit fifth or sixth, I would trash the tire as unsafe and make sure all my buds were warned to avoid it.
A rider comes from dominating WSB to really struggle at MotoGP because the rear tire won’t stop spinning? It surprises me that the teams haven’t been making a real fuss about that for the last several years. For me to have just heard about the severity of the problem just now kind of points to a real muzzle policy having been in place.
Whatever. I guess since the bike manufacturers being forbidden to really make their best bikes in 2002 made Michelin feel that they didn’t really need to make their best tires either. Just get the teams not to open up about just how bad the problem really is. What an awful race to the bottom world we live in. I wonder if the teams tested big bang firing orders like they did with the two strokes to get the things to grip. But then I guess Doohan abandoned the idea and continued to dominate. What did Ducati do that the other guys haven’t seemed to figure out?
Might I remind the gentleman that Moto3 bikes now lap faster than the old 500cc two-strokes ever did. That certainly signifies “better” to me. They lap about ten percent slower than the MotoGP bikes. Which means that the current top class is far “better” than the old 500cc bikes. After all, the FIM let 500cc bikes race with MotoGP the first year of the class. Other than an occasional good qualifying session, they were obviously underpowered compared to the 990cc bikes.
While Moto3 bikes have lapped a track faster than another recorded time set by a 500cc rider (I believe Alex Criville’s 1999 pole time at Jerez is what is being referenced) in unknown conditions, it is false to assert that Moto3 bikes are faster than 50cc GP bikes. Rossi’s last pole time on a 500 is a half-second to the good of Ajo’s time. Jerez is known to be a technical track, with a lower average speed among the circuits where GP is raced.
There is no doubt that the 4-stroke era bikes are faster. That has been true since the first race they were introduced.
@Mick, tire spin and forward drive has been a Yamaha problem for many years, going back to when they were winning. While it’s a problem for any motorcycle making in excess of 250-300hp, it’s a problem everyone else manages better than they do.