A reader wants Superbikeplanet to “shed some light on Toprak Razgatlioglu’s performance in MotoGP since moving from WSBK.”

The answer is that Razgatlioglu is a point-and-shoot rider on a bike originally designed for a corner-speed rider (Valentino Rossi).

Why can’t a rider of one style quickly master a bike engineered for the other style?

One way to address this is to consider the backwards-bike. It was an experiment, built such that turning the handlebar to the right caused the front wheel to steer to the left, and vice-versa. Learning to ride such a bike has revealed how deep go the reflexes we learned in mastering a pedal bicycle. No one could ride the backwards-bike!

Persons who stuck with it were, after eighteen months or so of steady effort, finally able to ride it. But the downside was that they were no longer able to ride a conventional bicycle.

What this shows is that we don’t ride a bicycle) or motorcycle) by making a series of right-idea moves coming from the conscious mind.

Rather, control is deeply reflexive.

Let’s remember back to 2016, when the king of corner-speed riders, Jorge Lorenzo, was hired by Ducati to ride their extreme point-and-shoot bike. For eighteen difficult months this unlikely union strove to bear fruit, but did not. Finally, with Lorenzo and Ducati at each other’s throats, he won three GPs. He had retrained himself – but it was too late—they split.

Now let’s contrast the two basic competition riding styles. In the corner-speed style, the rider’s line is the arc of maximum radius that will fit the corner, allowing the bike to maintain a high speed all the way through the corner. Because apex speed is high, less braking and less acceleration are needed. That defines this style, which originated with bikes having limited acceleration—125s and 250s in classical times. Kenny Roberts and others have pointed out that this style requires gambling that there is enough grip on the chosen line to maintain stability and grip. Rider Bradley Smith once described the characteristics of a corner-speed bike: “It’s very long, very stable. That’s how you put springs in it, that’s how you put geometry in it. The rider creeps around the bike (to avoid upsetting tire grip).”

Softer springs provide increased mechanical grip, and relatively slower steering geometry stabilizes the chassis. Stability above all, to keep the tires reliably gripping.

Valentino Rossi described the tire he needed for his corner-speed style—it needed a relatively stiffer carcass to prevent buckling under the heavy cornering load. I asked him, “What happens when you ride the tire that Colin Edwards likes (Colin is a point-and-shoot man)?”

“The bike jumps sideways in the corner.”

Colin, by contrast, needed a very flexible carcass to lay down the largest possible footprint, allowing the high acceleration his point-and-shoot style requires.

The point-and-shoot style is about security under changing conditions – such as are found in dirt-track riding. The point-and-shootist describes what Cal Crutchlow called “Honda’s V-shaped line.”

The bike is braked very late and very hard, and it turns-in at a lesser lean angle than is used in corner-speed. As the bike approaches the planned apex, the rider increases lean angle and turns more sharply, then lifts as soon as possible to begin the hard acceleration that will recover a competitive exit speed. The point here is that during both braking and acceleration the rider is controlling the grip – the bike is not committed to a line that may not, this lap, have the grip to safely turn the bike. The point-and-shoot rider uses a conservative apex speed because his style depends, not on perilous cornering on the tire edges, but on the braking and acceleration he controls.

The point-and-shoot bike is given mass properties that allow very hard initial braking. This means that a combination of a higher CG and/or shorter wheelbase transfers weight to the front tire RIGHT NOW – no waiting. The bike is given quick steer geometry that needs a muscular rider to fling it from one phase of the corner to the next (Cal Crutchlow described the Honda, as ridden by Marc Marquez in his first era of success as “very physical".) Riders other than Marc got nowhere with that bike.

And here is a final point. When bikes are seeking maximum grip at full lean, the movement of their suspension is closer to horizontal than to vertical. This makes the suspension near-useless at high lean. Therefore, for corner-speed riders who need every possible bit of grip, the chassis is designed to be laterally flexible, so it can allow the tires to track up-and-down over pavement irregularities, rather than get air-time which generates no grip at all.
The point-and-shoot bike, dependent as it is on maximum braking, cannot afford this level of chassis flex because it leads to braking instability. It is therefore made much stiffer, compromising its ability to turn in the long, fast corners where the corner-speed bike excels.
These differences in chassis capability are responsible for much of what we see as “point-and-shoot” tracks versus “corner-speed” tracks. The Aprilias currently excel where there are long fast corners, while the Ducatis more often prevail at places like CoTA, where there are many “small” corners that favor the point-and-shoot ability to get in and get out quickly.

Now it gets more complicated. Fabio Quartararo is a corner-speed rider and on a bike engineered for him. He was champion in 2021. Meanwhile, Maverick Vinales, also then on Yamaha, was holding forth on his need for a bike to support “a more aggressive” riding style (i.e. harder braking and acceleration). Whatever the causes, the evolving result was a bike on which neither of them could win races. So it has remained since then – every spring at the pre-season tests, the Yamaha lacks engine power and rear grip.

This suggests it is a mistake to imagine corner-speed and point-and-shoot as ingredients in little bottles on a spice rack. Add a pinch of this for rider A, a quarter-teaspoon of that for rider B - to assure success. That has not worked. Even replacing the long traditional Yamaha in-line four with a V4 has produced a bike down on engine power and rear grip.

Even though Rossi’s long-time crew chief Jerry Burgess enunciated that for success, a manufacturer must build a bike that all riders can ride well, it is now revealed that in fact, the rider and machine must closely evolve together, and if the bike that works well for the star rider cannot be ridden by others on the team, that’s just how it is. The rider and machine are not Lego parts to be snapped together in mix ‘n match style.

Now the big question. Why does a big corporation with a long history of racing success hire a point-and-shoot rider like Razgatlioglu to ride a motorcycle rooted in years of corner-speed refinement?

The answer is that only the people at trackside – riders and technicians – even know there is such a thing as riding style. We can imagine someone in a corner office with deep-pile carpeting on the floor, shouting into the phone, “I’m sick and tired of zero results after millions spent. I want ACTION – get somebody new and hot on that bike RIGHT NOW.”

Look at the slo-mo videos of Razgatlioglu on the World Superbike, braking with the rear wheel hovering just above the pavement. There is no wavering, no constant correction. As he turns-in, he lets the rear tire kiss the pavement, already at a slip angle, already sliding. This is a fabulous performance and is exactly what we saw Marquez do in his full-strength years. Full strength? You may also have seen the videos of T.R., walking casually and confidently on his hands, legs in the air. He is a gymnast who happens to ride racing motorcycles.

In another video T.R. is between two other bikes whose presence obliges him to avoid one of them. He coolly lets the rear tire touch the pavement just long enough to allow the correction.

Many years ago Suzuki and Yosh had become desperate enough to try “the young and hot” in the hope that one of them would “just click with the bike, and start winning races.” I remember hearing the result as a journalist poked his microphone at one such unfortunate. All he could summon was, “This bike sure has a lot of …potential,” meaning “It could be a lot better.”

As soon as Yamaha are able to tailor a bike to suit Razgatlioglu’s radical style, we may see fireworks. For some reason Quartararo waited through years of “spice-rack engineering” without result, such that his time remaining in the sport is limited.

Another hope is that the Japanese brands have put 110% of their R&D into the 2027 850 bike (somehow without discovering one single thing that could make their present 1000s lap quicker).

Another serious concern is that Moto2 riders incoming in 2027 will have a big advantage over established champions because Moto2’s spec tire is Pirelli. Pirelli for 2027 replaces Michelin as MotoGP spec tire provider. Tire behavior is another deep complexity that riders must master.


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