- Fabio Di Giannantonio has stopped attending MotoGP’s safety commission, telling reporters it became too difficult to get the series to commit to anything riders asked for.
- Only four riders showed up to the most recent meeting at Motegi, where MotoGP presented its new 2027 race weekend format, a format several riders have since criticized without being in the room to say so directly.
- Di Giannantonio says an attempt to build a riders’ association similar to Formula 1’s GPDA stalled when some riders worked against it, and he has since redirected his energy toward his own body and his own garage instead.
The Meeting Almost Nobody Attends Anymore
Every MotoGP race weekend ends Friday practice with a meeting almost nobody shows up to anymore. The safety commission exists to let riders raise concerns directly with the series about track conditions, medical procedures, and race direction decisions that affect their physical safety on a bike that can exceed 220 miles an hour. At Motegi, where MotoGP unveiled its new 2027 weekend format to the paddock, four riders attended. Fabio Di Giannantonio was not one of them, and he is not shy about explaining why.
“It was really difficult to get promises on the things that we were trying to ask,” Di Giannantonio said, describing the specific frustration that led him to stop going. He is not accusing the series of ignoring riders outright. He acknowledges that MotoGP has to weigh what riders want against what teams, manufacturers, broadcasters, and host countries all want from the same seventy-two hours of track time. But that balancing act, repeated meeting after meeting without visible results, wore him down enough that he decided his own time was better spent elsewhere.
The Union That Almost Happened
Before he gave up on the meetings, Di Giannantonio was part of an effort to build something more permanent: a riders’ association modeled on Formula 1’s Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, the body that gives F1 drivers a unified, contractually recognized voice on safety matters. MotoGP has never had an equivalent, and for a stretch this year it looked like it might. Di Giannantonio says the effort came close before falling apart from the inside. “Many riders did some [obstructions] to really make it,” he said, declining to name names but making clear the failure wasn’t external. The series didn’t kill the association. Some of the riders who would have belonged to it did.
That detail reframes the entire story. It is easy to cast rider safety as a clean fight between athletes and the organization that employs them. Di Giannantonio’s account describes something messier: a group of competitors who cannot agree among themselves on how hard to push, who benefits from staying quiet, and who has the standing to speak for the field. In a sport where every rider is also a direct rival for the same limited seats and sponsorship money, building solidarity turns out to be its own kind of race, and one Di Giannantonio watched his side lose.
Choosing His Body Over the Boardroom
Di Giannantonio’s response was not louder protest. It was withdrawal, and he describes it almost as a relief. “I decided to invest more time on my body and on my box,” he said, meaning his physical conditioning and his own garage, rather than continuing to spend energy on a process he no longer believed would change anything. For a rider who has spent this season finishing out a VR46 contract he will not renew, preparing to move to KTM alongside incoming teammate Luca Marini in 2027, the calculation is straightforward. He has a limited number of seasons left at the top level of a sport that has already put him through a burned hand in Thailand and a concussion during preseason testing at Portimao. Every hour spent arguing in a meeting room is an hour not spent preparing a body that absorbs that kind of punishment for a living.
It is a quietly bleak piece of logic from a 28-year-old who is good enough to have won a grand prix and respected enough that his opinion on safety carries weight whether he voices it in a commission meeting or not. The sport’s governance structure, in his telling, simply stopped being worth the investment of his attention. That is not the same as not caring. It is a rider doing the math on where his advocacy actually produces results and concluding the answer is nowhere near the meeting room.
A Format Nobody in the Room Agreed To
The irony is that the 2027 format MotoGP presented at the under-attended Motegi meeting has become one of the most contested topics in the paddock anyway, just conducted through press conferences and social media instead of the forum designed for exactly that conversation. Francesco Bagnaia, Marini, Jack Miller, and Pedro Acosta have all voiced concerns publicly, with Acosta warning the new sprint qualifying structure could shorten careers by squeezing more intense, high-stakes sessions into less preparation time. Marc Marquez has said riders should stay quiet about the format changes rather than relitigate them in public, a position that puts him at odds with riders airing exactly the complaints the safety commission was built to absorb quietly.
Di Giannantonio, notably, is not joining that public pushback. Asked about the 2027 changes directly, his response was almost shruggingly neutral: “At the moment it’s just a change. It’s okay.” He thinks the reduced track time will likely suit riders and teams overall, while acknowledging it will be harder on anyone who relies on extra laps to build feel for a bike or track. It is the response of someone who has already decided this particular fight isn’t his to pick, a few months after deciding the same thing about the meeting where that fight was supposed to happen.
What Gets Lost When the Room Empties Out
Bagnaia has previously called rider absence from the safety commission a serious problem in its own right, arguing that skipping the meetings only weakens whatever leverage riders collectively have. Di Giannantonio’s account suggests both things can be true at once. The meetings may matter, and they may also have become a venue where showing up stopped producing anything riders could point to afterward. A commission with four attendees out of a twenty-two rider grid is not a forum. It’s a formality, and formalities rarely survive contact with riders who have limited seasons, real injuries, and a sport that keeps asking them to negotiate their own safety in a room that, by Di Giannantonio’s account, rarely listens closely enough to answer back.
A Different Rider by the Time He Reaches KTM
Di Giannantonio arrives at KTM for 2027 as a rider who has already tried the institutional route and walked away from it with his eyes open. That matters for how he is likely to operate inside a new garage. He is not bringing a crusade with him, and he is not bringing naivety either. He has seen a safety commission that four people bother attending, watched a riders’ association collapse from internal politics rather than outside resistance, and drawn his own conclusion about where his limited energy produces results. Marini, his incoming teammate, has been more publicly vocal about the 2027 format than Di Giannantonio has, which could make for an interesting internal dynamic at a team now housing one rider still willing to fight those battles in public and one who has quietly decided the fight isn’t winnable from inside the room anyway.
Whether that resignation is realism or surrender depends on who in the paddock you ask. Bagnaia would likely call it part of the problem. Di Giannantonio, for his part, sounds like a rider who has simply run the experiment, reached a conclusion, and moved on to spending his Friday afternoons somewhere he believes will actually change his Sunday.
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