Luca Marini thinks the MotoGP calendar should be condensed to allow for a longer off-season.
Luca Marini thinks the winter break should be longer, but that reducing the number of races is not necessarily the solution to the problem of creating the space.
MotoGP’s 2026 season will have been going for nine months by the time it finishes at Valencia, having started at the end of February and run to the end of November
After less than two months off, the teams will then be beginning the 2027 season, with the preseason tests at Sepang expected to start in early February as normal.
It’s a schedule that leaves little time off in between seasons, something that Marini would like to fix.
Decreasing the number of races would be an obvious way to create space in the off-season, but Luca Marini has suggested an alternative approach. The Honda HRC rider suggests that condensing the calendar – having a similar number of races over a shorter period of time – would be effective.
“For me, the course of events over the year is not ideal,” Luca Marini told Speedweek.
“I think we should put the races closer together and try to create a bigger window in the winter.”
Marini added that the lack of time between one season and the next means it’s not possible to make physical improvements anymore while racing in MotoGP.
“The fact is, today we have zero time,” he said, “neither to really recover, and, more importantly, no time at all to prepare so specifically for the next season.
“There is no time to improve further.”
He added: “With the current calendar, there is no break at all. I train all year round.
“It is not possible to do nothing with the current planning.
“I need all the energy to be ready – but I would like to have more time to work out old injuries even more concretely, for example.
“I would also like to improve physically from season to season, but that takes time for specific physio programmes.”