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Can the 2021 MotoGP season match the weirdness and wildness of 2020? The circumstances are different, but the path that led to Qatar 2021 has laid the groundwork for another fascinating year.

2021 sees two trends colliding to create (we hope) a perfect storm. There is the long-term strategy set out after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 by Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta, with support and backing from the many bright minds in Dorna and IRTA.

It was a busy day for MotoGP rider announcements, this Monday. Three riders were confirmed in teams, with a fourth confirmed as leaving. The announcements were hardly a shock, but there was room for the odd raised eyebrow or two.

At Honda, there was the expected reshuffling to make room for Pol Espargaro in the Repsol Honda squad, the Spaniard offered a two-year deal alongside Marc Marquez. This bumped Alex Márquez down to the LCR Honda team, with a two-year contract as compensation.

Alex Márquez may have lost his ride in the factory team before a wheel has turned in the 2020 MotoGP season, but at least he is now assured of three seasons in the premier class to prove himself.

If there was a surprise in the announcements, it was that Cal Crutchlow was being released to make room for Alex Márquez.

The Englishman has been a valuable asset in the development of the Honda RC213V, his feedback highly rated, and he is a firm favorite in the LCR squad, bringing a lot of media exposure to the satellite team.

As the MotoGP Championship gears up for its first race of the 2020 season this coming weekend, we get a bevy of announcements from Jerez, Spain.

The first item is that Franco Morbidelli will be continuing with the Petronas Yamaha squad, signing a two-year contract with the satellite Yamaha team. This surprised no one.

More surprising was the silence about the future of Valentino Rossi, as the Italian is expected to announce his move to the Petronas Yamaha garage this week. However, The Doctor may have held his tongue because of the news that was coming from the Honda contingency.

Confirming the paddock rumors, HRC announced that it had signed Pol Espargaro to the Repsol Honda squad on a two-year deal, thus displacing Alex Marquez from the factory-backed team before the Spaniard had turned a single racing wheel with the Japanese manufacturer.

Episode 148 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one dives into the rapidly evolving silly season in the MotoGP paddock.

As such, this episode sees David Emmett, Steve English, and Neil Morrison on the microphones, sharing their news and perspectives on what is going on inside grand prix racing.

At the core of the show is the rumor that Pol Espargaro will be headed to the Repsol Honda garage for the 2021 season, replacing Alex Marquez in the factory team.

The rumors had been doing the rounds for some time, but last night, things came to a head. Multiple media outlets were reporting that Pol Espargaro has signed a deal to ride for Repsol Honda in 2021.

The most interesting facet of this was that several outlets had independent sourcing, making this look highly credible. Information I have seen also confirms this.

Though an agreement seems to have been reached, there are still some hoops to jump through. Speaking to Spanish daily AS.com, Espargaro’s manager Homer Bosch said negotiations with Honda, KTM, and Ducati were still going on.

For the past 24 hours, the internet has been blowing up over multiple reports that HRC is about to drop Alex Marquez from its factory MotoGP team, and replace him with Pol Espargaro in the Repsol Honda squad.

The news has been covered by Sky Sport Italia, AutosportMotorsport, and The Race, and those reports have led to an interesting rebuke (of sorts) on by HRC’s Alberto Puig on the MotoGP.com website.

You have to give credit to the factory Honda MotoGP team, they are true pillars of consistency, and have shown a strong commitment to using the same livery over, over, and over again each year.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this…per se. Good branding scholars will tell you the value of an iconic and unchanged marque, and having the same design on their race bikes certainly makes it easy on fans.

However, when it comes to launching your team for the next season, it creates the problem of people asking, “why should we care?”

Episode 123 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one is another MotoGP show, as we finish the season with the final stop on the calendar, the Valencia GP

Of course, this means that we see Neil Morrison and David Emmett on the mics, as they are our MotoGP Championship reporting duo for the 2019 season.

As you can imagine, there is a lot to talk about on this episode, as the Spanish round started with the startling news that Jorge Lorenzo would be retiring at the end of the season.

Repsol Honda has officially confirmed that Alex Marquez will partner his brother Marc at the Repsol Honda team for next year. It is the first time that a pair of brothers have raced in the same team in MotoGP.

There have been other brothers riding in the same class at the same time – Aleix and Pol Espargaro the latest example of that, but never before have brothers raced in the same team in either 500cc or MotoGP. 

This was supposed to be a quiet weekend. Winding down at the last race of the season, with only the most symbolic of prizes still on the line: the team championship; third overall in MotoGP. But the final round of MotoGP at Valencia has exploded into a frenzy of rabid rumor, wild speculation, and bizarre conspiracy theories.

It all started off with Jorge Lorenzo announcing he would be retiring at the end of 2019. Though the rumor had been floating around the paddock since the summer, it still came as a surprise.

The rumor mill had calmed down a little since LCR Honda had first announced that Johann Zarco would be stepping in to replace Takaaki Nakagami for the last three races of the season. There had been a lot of talk of whether that meant Honda would sack Lorenzo, or Lorenzo would leave Honda for another team, with no satisfactory outcome.

Lorenzo’s retirement was the sort of surprise which you half expect. After an evening of digesting the idea of MotoGP without Jorge Lorenzo, the hive mind of the paddock turned to thoughts of who might replace the Spaniard.

On Friday, it didn’t seem like it would be settled any time soon, rumor suggesting that Honda would not make a decision before the Jerez test.

With the three overseas* races out of the way and MotoGP back in Europe, the thoughts of the teams, riders, and series organizers are starting to turn to the future.

At Le Mans, there was much discussion in team trucks and among the organizers. And as a consequence, there was a stream of paddock rumor, interviews, and news articles on what’s coming up for the future. Here’s a round up of recent news.