After last year's mad reshuffle headlined by Marc Marquez's blockbuster entry into the works Ducati squad, MotoGP's rider market should settle down in 2025 - also because so much of the grid is covered by the series' conventional two-year contract cycle, in this case ending after the 2026 season.
But there are two factors that will keep things simmering. The first, and most obvious one, is KTM's particular situation - and the suggestions that it could call time on its programme after 2025 amid the pressures of its insolvency. Given it has four top riders on two-year contracts, it would be a seismic event.
The other factor, though, is baked into MotoGP's existing contract landscape already. As it stands right now, four of MotoGP's five manufacturers either have a full set of contracted riders for 2026 or just have the one question mark. The outlier is Honda - in a big way.
Let's break down the role Honda could, and maybe should, play in ensuring MotoGP gets another true silly season this year.
The expiring contracts
Honda has three seats in its roster that are officially unfilled as yet for 2026. Let's leave rookie Somkiat Chantra and his Idemitsu-backed LCR ride out of it for the moment, though - unless Chantra really struggles, this was surely always envisioned as a multi-year project, and commercial considerations will surely help that come to fruition.
The plans of how to handle Luca Marini and Johann Zarco are more central to Honda's 'roster-building' right now.
Zarco, brought in from the Ducati camp on a two-year works deal to spearhead the LCR line-up and presumably keep long-time partner team boss Lucio Cecchinello happy, was the best Honda rider last year, exceptional in qualifying and efficient enough in races.
The move has been a clear success, with the low-pressure environment created - paradoxically - by Honda's ongoing struggles helping him work on his own craft, too. He certainly has no regrets about walking away from the most competitive bike on the grid - a latest-spec Ducati at Pramac - to join troubled Honda, with his old team-mate Jorge Martin's subsequent Ducati exit confirming Zarco's suspicion that glass ceilings were looming for many Ducati riders.
"It was the right decision, overall when you see what happened for Martin," Zarco told The Race MotoGP Podcast of his Ducati-to-Honda move.
"It was logical that I would be kicked away - or also, that's also part of the personal target or business target, you try to also get maybe better paid, you estimate that you deserve also some salary and with Ducati almost if I wanted to stay would've been maybe... I could never improve the salary. Which at some level you think that you can deserve more.
"When I saw what happened for Martin, then I said 'it was the right decision'. I couldn't think that it was the right decision from the beginning of the year.
"But I said I trust in it, and what I'm surprised by now is that I have a two-year contract but I'm so motivated to have two more years because I got like a second breath, an extra energy
"I would love to at least participate in the 2027 season, help Honda and see also with another bike, my adaptation, if I can be on the podium again."
Zarco is performing well enough to deserve heavy consideration for the upcoming MotoGP regulation change in 2027 - but he is also going to turn 35 this coming season.
He had entered MotoGP relatively late by modern standards at 26, and his age will have played a part in him being expendable at Ducati. Honda would be foolish not to consider it as well.
Then there's Marc Marquez's 2024 factory Honda replacement Marini, seven years younger than Zarco but less performant right now - but also a rider who has explicitly come into Honda with a view of making himself a development centrepiece, and who sounds ever more confident with every round that he's succeeded in that.
Honda itself doesn't sound unconvinced either. "He's very, very analytical," said factory team boss Alberto Puig in his end-of-2024 assessment of Marini to MotoGP.com. "Very analytical, and no limit for working.
"He could be working 24 hours. Because he really loves this.
"From a human side he is a really nice guy, super polite and respectful. We're very happy."
Marini put up just 14 points last year after an off-the-pace first half of the season - but it is easy to make the case for another off-sequence two-year deal if he starts this year like he ended 2024. It would be a conservative move, but a move befitting Honda's current position in the pecking order.
Mir contingency plan?
I don't like to say this because it's not right to be so categorical about a rider's dream to win the MotoGP world title - but Honda should think that its next champion probably isn't Zarco or Marini.
Normally that wouldn't be a huge problem when you already have a MotoGP champion under contract, but Joan Mir has really struggled in his time at the team so far, and the 2025-26 extension he eventually signed was far from a foregone conclusion.
"As a rider I've never been in this situation. Everybody here forgets very quick. They want results, but I cannot [deliver] at the moment," Mir told The Race MotoGP Podcast last year.
"In these two years I was not able to do nothing. But I hope to have some reward one day."
He quipped: "Imagine that I leave and straight away they [Honda] make the bike of the f***ing history. I will be cutting my veins."
At this point, though, Mir may well need Honda more than Honda needs Mir. MotoGP's last memory of a champion-level Mir is 2021, and it's been rough going since then.
He was crashing too much in 2024 - which was reflected in him being utterly trounced by Zarco in the standings (and being beaten by the retiring Takaaki Nakagami, too) - and the decision-makers at Honda must use 2025 to assess whether the Mir that could lead it to glory in the next rules cycle in particular is still in there.
Otherwise, it has to succession-plan.
The rider to assess them with
Honda didn't need Marc Marquez in 2024 - he would not have saved its 2024, so his Gresini defection proved for the best for everyone in the end - but there's one aspect it did miss.
When you have someone like Marquez, you know what you've got in the other guys in how they compare to him (usually, not well).
Now, Aleix Espargaro is no Marc Marquez, obviously. But his Aprilia body of work is well-documented, and the only question mark there was whether his strong production on the RS-GP was more a reflection of that RS-GP being tailored to his preferences.
Every indication from both public and private testing from late-2024, however, suggests Espargaro has taken very, very well to the Honda.
And that means it would be wise to use his planned wildcards in 2025 not just for bike developments, but to help benchmark the true level of its current roster.
No franchise rider?
There are five true A-listers in MotoGP right now: Pecco Bagnaia, Jorge Martin, Fabio Quartararo, Pedro Acosta and Marc Marquez. They are evenly spread around MotoGP's non-Honda manufacturers.
It's not an issue right this second. Marquez in 2023 proved current Honda has no real justification to have a franchise rider, and it's not like Yamaha is reaping massive benefits from having Quartararo on retainer right now.
But Yamaha operates in the knowledge that, if it does get its bike to the level it needs to be at, the rider to convert that level into wins is already there. For Honda, no such certainty exists.
The best way to attract a rider like that - any of those five, or, let's say, a David Alonso if his Moto2 tenure immediately proves that he is indeed a future superstar - is to take big strides with the Honda RC213V in 2025.
But it's also worthwhile to identify a target right now and make your intentions subtly clear while also feeding them all the relevant information for '27 - when a true A-lister should be more willing to bet on Honda.
Otherwise, it's not out of the question that Honda does take a quantum leap as part of MotoGP's transition into new regulations - but finds itself not having the rider to truly capitalise on it.
Watch the KTM situation
KTM's insolvency, however, is what potentially makes all this ground for short-term deliberations rather than just medium-to-long-term planning.
Ideally for MotoGP, KTM rights the ship and finds the funds and justifications to continue into 2026 and beyond. It would be good for Honda, too, despite its own long-term rivalry with KTM.
But while you don't want to circle like a vulture in such a delicate situation, any firm indication that KTM is either diminished or can't continue would mean it's game on right now to start talking to its riders.
Acosta is the prized asset there, obviously. But Brad Binder, Maverick Vinales and Enea Bastianini could all make the argument that they would be the best Honda rider if inserted into that line-up right now.
Four KTM free agents would transform the rider market - but it's Honda that currently has the most contractual flexibility to react.
