2024 MotoGP riders and teams

Which team is Marc Marquez riding for in 2024?

It doesn’t really matter who wins the title, who makes their debut or where anyone else moves, there’s only one name that really causes a stir in the MotoGP when he wakes up and decides change is needed: Marc Marquez.

The six–time World Champion is by far and away the biggest name in MotoGP – certainly now Valentino Rossi has decided it’s four-wheel time. And when he decided, after much rumour and speculation, that the time really was right to end his career-long association with Honda, it was the biggest news.

So Marquez will be on a Ducati next year, and it won’t even be the factory bike. No space at Ducati’s top table even for a 59-time race winner. Marquez will race at Gresini in 2024, alongside his younger brother Alex and that means he won’t even be on the new bike, riding year-old machinery instead. Such is the pull of the Ducati bike at the moment.

Who else is riding a Ducati?

Anyone who could arrange for it to happen really. Starting at the top, double World Champion Francesco ‘Pecco’ Bagnaia will remain with the factory Ducati team, alongside Enea Bastianini. While Bagnaia was clinching his second title on the trot, Bastianini had a troubled year, with injuries meaning he missed significant chunks and couldn’t build on his strong 2022, which had brought four victories and third in the championship. But the team has stayed true to the Italian, who did deliver a win in Malaysia after he’d put his injury issues behind him.

The other two 2024 spec bikes will go to Pramac, ridden by title runner-up Jorge Martin and new signing Franco Morbidelli. Martin was the absolute king of sprint races in 2023 and will be hoping to go one better for his first MotoGP crown in 2024. Morbidelli joins after being ditched by Yamaha after two-and-a-half unhappy seasons at the factory team. Hopefully a return to an independent team will help the popular Italian return to the form that saw him win three races in 2020 and clinch championship runner-up spot.

That leaves the VR46 team, also running 2023 bikes. With Luca Marini moving to Honda to replace Marquez, Valentino Rossi’s outfit signed Fabio Di Giannantonio as a replacement. There’s no denying this was welcome news in the paddock. Giannantonio was an incredibly popular (and emotional) victor when he took victory in Qatar just as it had looked like his time in MotoGP was over. It wasn’t enough to keep his seat at Gresini, but was to get a shot at 2024 with VR46. He’ll ride alongside Marco Bezzecchi. Bezzecchi is a product of Rossi’s junior programme and really came good in his second season in the top class, winning three races and finishing third, the first non-current Ducati in the standings.

Alright, what about Honda and Yamaha?

Ah, the bikes that nobody wants. These are still probably the biggest budgets in MotoGP, but it seems like neither of the traditional MotoGP big boys has any answer for Ducati. The noises coming out of testing for 2024 suggested that might continue too.

Yamaha is the simple one. Fabio Quartararo stays put, although no doubt beginning to wonder if he needs to do a Marquez and flee to an independent Ducati to stand any chance of another title. For ‘24 the second Yamaha will be in the hands of Alex Rins, the only man who managed to drag a win out of a Honda in 2023. Seventh in the championship with zero wins is a disaster for Yamaha, so it will demand more in 2024, and so will Rins and Quartararo.

But, it’s still better than Honda’s factory team. That languished down in ninth last year, a single podium all it had to show from the year and only just finishing above satellite team LCR. With Marquez running for the hills, new signing Marini will race alongside 2020 World Champion Joan Mir. Who knows whether either will be able to arrest Honda’s inexorable slide down the standings.

The other two Hondas (there are no independent teams running Yamahas) for LCR will be ridden by Johan Zarco – who leaves Pramac after being comprehensively outclassed by Martin in 2023 – and Takaaki Nakagami.

Who is riding for KTM and Aprilia?

The factory KTM team retains Brad Binder and Jack Miller. Neither won a Grand Prix in 2023, but Binder’s two sprint victories and string of podium finishes saw him the only non-Ducati to finish in the top five last year. Miller, signed after he lost his Ducati ride to Bastianini, will probably need to show a little more pace than his 11^th place and single podium last year. 

Tech3 will continue to race satellite KTMs under the GasGas banner in 2024, with the all-Spanish line-up of Pedro Acosta and Augusto Fernandez. Reigning Moto2 champion Acosta joins GasGas to replace Pol Espagaro, who leaves full-time MotoGP after a decade and moves to a test rider and wildcard role for KTM.

Aprilia can probably be said to have had a pretty good 2023. Aleix Espargaro took two GP wins and a sprint victory and Maverick Vinales added three podiums as they finished sixth and seventh in the riders’ standings. Being the only non-Ducati team to win more than one grand prix is something that the team will want to build strongly on and it has, logically, retained both riders for 2024.          

The biggest Aprilia news was the end of RNF after the crypto company-owned team was unceremoniously ejected from MotoGP following a number of ‘infractions’. The team’s place is being taken by… a NASCAR team. In one of perhaps the oddest moves we’ve seen for years, Trackhouse Racing, the team part-owned by Pitbull and which ran Shane Van Gisbergen and Kimi Raikkonen in selected NASCAR Cup Series races, will run Aprilia bikes in MotoGP in 2024. The team has taken on both Raul Fernandez and Miguel Oliveira, who both raced for RNF in 2023. 

2024 MotoGP riders and teams

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.