MotoGP will adopt a new race-weekend structure in 2027, with sprint qualifying added on Friday and the 10-minute Sunday warm-up removed. Alex Rins, who will leave Yamaha and the championship at the end of the current season, is broadly positive about the change. His one personal frustration is that the session he has criticised for years is disappearing just as he is leaving the grid.

The revised weekend schedule

Friday will feature two practice sessions totalling 75 minutes. A 15-minute group qualifying session will then set the grid for the sprint. On Saturday, every rider will take part in Q1, with the 12 fastest advancing to Q2. That second stage will determine the starting order for Sunday’s race. The Sunday warm-up will no longer form part of the programme.

Rins has opposed the session since the early years of his world championship career, recalling that he was already complaining about it in 2012 and 2013. He argues that the warm-up adds 10 or 20 minutes of physical stress without delivering a meaningful benefit. His summary of the timing was blunt: “When I leave, they change it.” Even so, he regards the wider direction of the 2027 format as reasonable.

The Spaniard compares the new arrangement with Formula 1’s sprint weekends and believes a Q3 could eventually be added. He also expects total track time to stay the same or become shorter. For Rins, the more significant adjustment will be psychological and strategic: riders will need to approach a race weekend differently because the track schedule is being redistributed. Marc Marquez and Pedro Acosta have been particularly vocal about the change.