- Toprak Razgatlioglu says his Pramac Yamaha feels like “a rental bike” on soft tyres at Misano, a track where his years of World Superbike experience should have given him an edge.
- The three-time World Superbike champion sits near the bottom of the MotoGP standings in his rookie season, a jarring reversal for a rider who arrived expecting to contend immediately.
- Razgatlioglu admits the mental side of adapting has been harder than the physical one, describing a season where he sometimes forgets he signed up for a year of learning rather than winning.
Why Toprak Razgatlioglu Says His Own Yamaha Feels Like a Rental Bike
Toprak Razgatlioglu has spent his career being described as a natural, a rider whose talent looks effortless even when the results say otherwise. At Misano this weekend, the description he chose for his own motorcycle was blunter. “When I try the first soft tyre, I’m surprised because it looks like it’s not my bike,” he said Friday. “It looks like I’m riding a rental bike.” For a three-time World Superbike champion racing at a circuit he knows intimately, that admission cuts deeper than an ordinary complaint about setup.
A Champion Reduced to Guesswork
Razgatlioglu’s struggles at Misano followed a familiar pattern from his rookie MotoGP season: strong on medium tyres, lost on softs. He ended Friday practice half a second slower than Pramac teammate Jack Miller and qualified more than seven tenths behind Yamaha stablemate Alex Rins at the back of the field on Saturday morning, numbers that would have been unthinkable for him a year earlier on a Superbike.
“The bike is not stopping. When I’m not stopping, I’m not able to turn the corner, I’m just stopping more, and I’m riding like a superbike style because the bike is not stopping with the soft tyre,” he explained. “We are pushing the front, and also I’m not using the rear tyre. Normally with soft tyre you are always using the exit, but I’m not able to enter the corner. I’m just losing the line.” He described his own best lap of the session, set on worn medium rubber, as a mystery he could not explain even to himself. “Normally, when I put the soft tyre I’m expecting 1m31s. But in the end I see only 32.0. That is very strange. I don’t understand anything.”
Arriving as a Winner, Racing as a Rookie
Razgatlioglu’s move to Pramac Yamaha was the marquee signing of MotoGP’s 2026 rider market, a multi-season deal built on the assumption that a rider who had already won three World Superbike titles would bring immediate speed to a class he had never raced. Both rider and team tried to lower expectations before the season began, calling 2026 a transition year while MotoGP ran its final season on Michelin tyres before switching to more familiar Pirelli rubber in 2027. That label hasn’t made the reality any easier to sit with.
“I’m a winning rider,” Razgatlioglu said earlier this year, explaining the gap between what he expected and what he has experienced. “When I signed the MotoGP contract, I knew the first year for me would not be easy. I’m trying to stay strong, but sometimes it’s also not easy to understand the situation. This is a learning year, but sometimes you forget this. Always you are looking for good results; sometimes when you are not finding good results, automatically you are down.” After eleven rounds this season he sat 21st in the championship with just 12 points and a best finish of 11th at the Hungarian Grand Prix, a run of results that would have been a crisis for almost any other rider with his résumé.
Fighting the Mental Battle as Much as the Bike
What separates Razgatlioglu’s rookie season from an ordinary slump is how openly he discusses the psychological toll. “Physical fitness is very important, but the mental side is more important,” he said. “If your motivation is high, then everything is coming easier for you.” He has also been careful to draw a line between his results and his identity, insisting the frustration hasn’t changed who he is away from the paddock. “My character has never changed. I’m never going to be a superstar, I don’t like this. Outside of the track, I’m normal Toprak. This will never change.”
His crew chief, Alberto Giribuola, has offered a different read on the season, telling GPOne that Razgatlioglu’s riding style is “sometimes pure magic” even when the results don’t reflect it. That gap between raw talent and translatable results is exactly what makes his transition so difficult to diagnose. A rider who spent years winning on instinct is now having to relearn those instincts from scratch, on a bike with a completely different feel, against tyres that behave nothing like the ones he mastered in Superbikes.
Riders who switch from World Superbike to MotoGP rarely make the jump look easy, but few arrive with the résumé Razgatlioglu brought with him, and fewer still have to make that adjustment with an entire factory’s rider development plan quietly riding on the outcome. Three world titles are not supposed to leave a rider guessing at the back of a session sheet, yet that is exactly where he has spent most of his rookie campaign. Rivals who came up through Moto2 and Moto3 built their feel for MotoGP tyres and electronics over years in the support classes. Razgatlioglu is trying to build that same feel in a single season, in public, with cameras on him every time a lap time comes up short of what his name suggests it should be.
Why Yamaha Is Betting on Patience
Yamaha’s confidence in Razgatlioglu hasn’t wavered even as the results have lagged, and the factory is restructuring its entire rider lineup around him for 2027. Jorge Martin and Ai Ogura will join the factory squad in place of Fabio Quartararo and Alex Rins, while Izan Guevara steps up from Moto2 to join Razgatlioglu at Pramac. That reshuffle means Razgatlioglu, the rider still searching for his footing in his rookie season, will be the only member of Yamaha’s four-bike stable with any MotoGP experience at all heading into next year.
That responsibility adds a layer of pressure to a season that was already difficult. Every new teammate arriving in 2027 will lean on Razgatlioglu’s feedback to shortcut their own learning curves, even as he continues fighting to translate his own feel for a motorcycle into lap time. Martin, Ogura, and Guevara will all effectively be asking the rider still finishing near the back of the field to explain a bike that keeps confusing him too, a strange role reversal for a rider signed specifically because of what he already knew. It is an unusual position for a rider who, twelve months ago, was still collecting Superbike trophies and being talked about as the biggest signing MotoGP had made in years.
For now, Misano offers no easy answers, and every session that passes without a breakthrough adds another data point to a rookie campaign that keeps refusing to follow the script anyone expected when he signed. Razgatlioglu arrived at a circuit where his experience should have counted for something and instead found himself further from his rivals than usual, still hunting for the version of the bike that felt right on Friday morning. “We are talking with the team. We don’t know this problem,” he said, a rare moment of a champion openly admitting he is out of explanations rather than reaching for the usual diplomatic deflection riders offer after a difficult session. The version of Razgatlioglu who wins races again will likely look nothing like the one Superbike fans grew used to, built instead from a season spent learning what MotoGP demands that his old career never did.
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