It is an interesting and challenging year for MotoGP manufacturers. With the start of the 850cc era less than a year away, there is little time to build and prepare a competitive MotoGP machine under the new technical rules for the 2027 season. At the same time, there is the last season of the 1000cc MotoGP rules to contest, and bikes to prepare.
This is the dilemma the MotoGP factories face. If they want to win in 2027, they have to dedicate engineering time to building the best 850 possible. But they can’t give up on 2026 when the field is so tight. Ideally, they would have double their normal resources to run two complete projects. But that’s impossible: nobody is doubling their budget.
So factories are having to balance between the two projects. Use the resources they have – money, engineers, mechanics, riders – as efficiently as possible to try to succeed in both 2026 and 2027.
How are they going about that? I spoke to Sebastian Risse, Technical Director of KTM’s MotoGP project at the Sepang test. We spoke about how to choose which priorities to focus on, but also how Risse expects the 850cc MotoGP bikes to be different to the current 1000cc machines, how that will change racing, and how you go about developing a MotoGP machine when you don’t know exactly how the Pirelli tires are going to be behave.
