MotoGP deletes the holeshot device in 2027. Marc Marquez says the Turn 1 problem is the 44 starts..
Marc Marquez did the arithmetic himself in Brno's Thursday press conference. A MotoGP rider now lines up for 44 starts a season, and that number, he told reporters ahead of the Czech Grand Prix, is the real danger at the first corner, not the device most of the paddock keeps blaming.
Two weeks earlier at Balaton Park, Jorge Martin lost the front into Turn 1 and ran into the side of Marco Bezzecchi, taking Raul Fernandez, Fermin Aldeguer and Fabio Di Giannantonio down in the same accident. Four riders out at one corner on the opening lap reopened a question MotoGP has carried since 2019, when the start devices arrived: does the hardware make the first corner more dangerous than it needs to be?
The front ride-height device is the usual suspect, and the mechanism is specific. To arm it, a rider compresses the fork and locks the front end low on the run to the line, which forces a harder, stranger brake input into Turn 1 to keep suspension travel available for the corner. Martin said the devices had a part in Hungary, and Diogo Moreira has argued they make the bike harder to stop on the brakes into the first turn. That reading is real. It is also about to be overtaken by the rulebook.
What 2027 already removes
From 2027, the technical regulations ban ride-height devices of any kind, holeshot systems for the start included, in the package published by the manufacturers' association and the FIM. The same rewrite drops engine capacity from 1000cc to 850cc, narrows the front fairing's upper aero body from 600mm to 550mm, and cuts the grand-prix fuel allowance to 20 litres. The device that creates the awkward first-corner brake point is, in other words, legislated out of existence from the opening round of next season.
That timing is what makes the safety argument awkward. The riders pressing hardest for a device ban are pressing for a change that is already coming. It leaves the sharper question, the one Marquez actually put on the table: once the device is gone, is the first corner safe?
Marquez's arithmetic
His answer starts with how often a rider now launches. Four times a weekend, Marquez said: two practice starts at the end of FP1, the Saturday sprint, the Sunday grand prix. The sprint format introduced in 2023 doubled the number of races, and across a 22-round calendar that adds up to the 44 grand-prix and sprint starts he named, before the practice launches are even counted.
Volume changes behaviour, he argued, more than the hardware does. "The first rider normally is the one that marks the brake point, and when you arrive in the fourth time there you have already the mark in your brake point, in the limit," he said in the press conference. His point is that repetition has eaten the caution the first lap used to carry. A rider braking into Turn 1 for the first time on a Sunday once left himself a margin; now he has rehearsed the corner so many times that he arrives knowing the mark and uses all of it.
Marquez built the example out of his own crash. "In Balaton, I was leading for the first time this year in the first corner and I had my mark and I braked at 100 per cent," he said, framing Martin's accident as a small front-end mistake with no time to recover, made at a brake point nobody approaches tentatively anymore. He was careful about the rear device, calling it safer than no device at all because it settles the bike on corner exit. His complaint narrows to the front unit's brake point, and beyond that, to how often the grid now drills it.
Two levers, one of them untouched
Banning the device pulls one lever. Cutting the number of starts would pull another, and only the first is written into the 2027 rules. That distinction is what splits the paddock cleanly: Martin and Moreira locate the danger in the hardware, the thing the new regulations fix, while Marquez locates it in the calendar, the thing they leave alone.
Both positions can hold at once. A first corner can be safer without the front ride-height device and still be dangerous because a full season of competitive launches has trained every rider to brake at the absolute limit from the opening session. Removing the device addresses the brake-point mechanics. It does nothing about the repetition that, on Marquez's account, removed the margin in the first place.
MotoGP races at Brno this weekend with the device still fitted and the start count unchanged, Bezzecchi carrying a 20-point lead over Martin into a round that adds two more launches to the season's tally. The 2027 rulebook will answer the device half of Marquez's question on schedule. The other half, whether a championship built on that many starts can make its first corner safe by subtraction, is one nobody has yet written a regulation to address.