- Aprilia team manager Massimo Rivola publicly criticized Jorge Martin after a Hungarian GP crash that also took out teammate Marco Bezzecchi, calling it a mistake a world champion should not make.
- Martin shoved Aprilia race manager Paolo Bonora in the garage earlier this year after a separate incident with Raul Fernandez, and later apologized for it.
- The crashes have cost Aprilia points at the exact moment Marc Marquez and Ducati pulled level with Martin at the top of the championship standings.
A Garage Turning on Its Own Rider
Jorge Martin arrived at Aprilia as a reigning MotoGP champion, the rider who was supposed to drag an Italian manufacturer that had never won a premier class title into contention. Instead, his own team has spent parts of this season speaking about him the way rivals usually talk about each other. “A world champion, I think he cannot do a mistake like that,” Aprilia team manager Massimo Rivola said after Martin’s front tire tucked under him at Turn One in Hungary, a crash that swept up five bikes and ended teammate Marco Bezzecchi’s race along with his own.
Rivola did not stop at frustration. He said he would not have objected if the stewards had handed Martin a harsher penalty, pointing to how dangerous a first corner incident becomes when it takes out half the field. For a team manager to say publicly that his own rider deserved more punishment than he got is the kind of comment that does not get walked back quietly in a paddock where every word gets replayed on a dozen broadcasts.
The Shove in the Garage
The Hungary crash was not the first time Martin’s season boiled over into conflict with his own side of the garage. Earlier in the year, after Raul Fernandez took him out in a separate incident, Martin pushed Aprilia race manager Paolo Bonora inside the team’s own garage, a confrontation that spread through MotoGP paddock channels within hours. Martin apologized afterward, telling Bonora directly that his reaction was unnecessary. “It was completely unnecessary for me to push him,” Martin said, an admission that did little to erase the image of a title contender losing his temper with the people paid to support him.
He also apologized to his fellow riders following the Hungary incident, aware that a crash of that size does not stay contained to the two bikes directly involved. Five riders down in one corner is the kind of moment that follows a rider through an entire season, replayed every time his name comes up in a stewards’ room.
Jack Miller Pushes Back on the Blame
Not everyone in the paddock has joined Rivola in placing the Hungary crash squarely on Martin. Jack Miller, never shy about defending a fellow rider when he thinks the story is incomplete, pointed to the ride height devices that have become a recurring factor in MotoGP incidents this season. “So, another device related crash, I believe,” Miller said, suggesting the mechanical culprit behind Martin’s front end tuck deserved more attention than it received in the rush to blame the rider.
That defense lands with real force inside the paddock, capturing a split over how much of Martin’s rough patch is temperament and how much is circumstance. His own team manager has chosen the harsher read in public. A rival rider has chosen the more sympathetic one. Martin himself has landed somewhere in between, owning his reaction in the garage while stopping short of accepting full blame for every incident that has piled up around him.
A Second Act That Started With Injury
Martin’s path to this tension began before he ever signed with Aprilia. He won the 2024 MotoGP title with Pramac Ducati, the factory team’s satellite operation, only to be pushed out when Ducati chose to protect its factory seats for other riders rather than promote its own champion. He moved to Aprilia for 2025 looking to prove the title was not a product of better equipment, and instead ran into a brutal run of injuries that cost him large stretches of the season. He returned at Brno determined to be judged on more than survival. “I’m not here to make laps,” he said at the time, a line that reads differently now that his second full season with Aprilia has turned into a different kind of fight.
By September this year, Martin had clawed his way level with Marc Marquez at the top of the standings, both riders sitting on 274 points after Marquez’s fifth win of the season at San Marino, a result that technically left Martin second only on a tiebreaker. “It’s nice, I’m happy that we are equal on points at this stage, it looks crazy for me,” Martin said ahead of the Austrian round, a race he had missed the year before through injury and where he had won his first premier class race back in 2021 as a Pramac rider. He described his recovering arm as good enough to treat the weekend as normal, saving the decision on surgery for if the problem returns.
A Garage Divide With History Behind It
MotoGP has seen this pattern before, a factory signing a proven champion only to watch the relationship curdle under the strain of expectation. Ducati’s own history includes stretches where a rider’s results were judged against what a title winning predecessor had done on the same bike, and other manufacturers have spent entire seasons managing friction between a star signing and the engineers who built the machine before he arrived. What makes Martin’s situation different is the speed of it. He is only in his second season at Aprilia, and the public criticism from his own team manager arrived well before anyone could call his tenure a settled disappointment or a settled success.
Bezzecchi, for his part, has mostly kept his own frustration out of the cameras, a restraint that has not gone unnoticed inside the paddock, not when his championship points took the same hit Martin’s did at Turn One in Hungary. Riders on other teams have privately described the Aprilia garage as a pressure cooker this season, caught between a manufacturer desperate for its first premier class title and two riders who are both capable of delivering it, if either can stay upright long enough to try.
What Aprilia’s Chaos Hands Marquez and Ducati
The timing of Aprilia’s internal strain could not be worse for Martin’s title defense. Every point Bezzecchi loses to a crash Martin is involved in is a point Aprilia cannot bank toward the constructors’ fight, and every public rebuke from Rivola adds pressure to a rider who is already managing an arm injury and a tied championship lead. Ducati, by contrast, gets to watch a direct threat to its own interests absorb hits from inside his own team rather than from the track.
Martin came to Aprilia to prove a title win travels with the rider, not the bike underneath him. He is now fighting that case for a second straight year, this time with his own garage publicly debating whether he deserves the benefit of the doubt. A tied points lead with Marquez heading into the final rounds says Martin is still winning the argument on the stopwatch. Whether Aprilia stays unified enough behind him to help him finish the job is a separate fight entirely, and on the evidence of this season, not a settled one.
Martin’s own answer, when asked directly about the tension, has leaned on results rather than relationships. He points to the standings, to the recovered arm, to a race win record that dates back to his Pramac days at this same Austrian circuit. What he has not done is pretend the Rivola comments did not happen, or that the shove in the garage belongs to someone else’s season. Owning both, in public, while still sitting level with Marquez at the top of the table, is its own kind of statement from a rider who has spent two years proving a title can travel with him, even through a team that sometimes seems unsure it wants to carry it. The final rounds of the season will settle the championship. They will not settle whether Aprilia ever fully trusted the champion it signed to deliver one.
Sources:
