42 races on the program in 2023

On the occasion of the Austrian Grand Prix, an exceptional press conference took place to outline a new GP weekend format starting next season.

The big news is the introduction of a sprint race on Saturday afternoon. Unlike the F1, there will be a sprint race on each event on the calendar and this will not define the grid for the Sunday race. 

With 21 meetings on the calendar, this brings the number of races on the program to 42. “Honestly, it’s going to be hard,” he told us. fabio quartararo when the calendar was published in Thailand. Physically and mentally, but that won't change my strategy. At the end of the day, we score half of the points during the sprint races, so we can say that there will be 10 races to play, it will be very intense! »

The sprint races will have half the laps of the main race and half the points will be at stake. 12 points will be awarded to the winner, 9 to the second, 7 to the third, then 6, 5, 4... and so on until the ninth. 777 points will therefore be at stake in 2023. As a reminder, the single-season record is held by Marc Marquez with 420 in 2019 (with 19 races on the calendar).

The format from 2023

The pilots of the MotoGP will be entitled to two longer sessions on Friday (45 min for FP1 and 1 hour for FP2). The combined ranking of these two sessions will decide who will automatically go to Q2. Until this year, they also had FP3 on Saturday morning to try to enter Q2.

Instead, this third free practice session will be similar to the current FP4. It will be followed by Q1 and Q2. The sprint race will be held at 15 p.m.

On Sunday morning, the warm-up will be reduced to 10 minutes (compared to 20 until 2022) and will be followed by 30 minutes of Fan Show for the spectators.

Sprint Races and a handful of changes to the race weekend format! 😎

All the details on how # MotoGP2023 will work! 👇 pic.twitter.com/WEkssbRAzu

- MotoGP @ 🏁 (@MotoGP) September 17, 2022