David Alonso – Moto3 World Champion
A path started between the Aspar Team and David Alonso has come to full fruition in 2024, with rider and team claiming the Moto3 World Championship title after seven years, 114 races, 33 wins, 56 podiums.
The first step of this story was started by Nico Terol, back in 2017 when he was still the last Aspar Team world champion. He had received a task from the team’s alma mater, Jorge Martínez “Aspar” to look for the champions of the future.
Terol was in charge of looking after the young talents that Aspar wanted to take to the elite level, riders who had to succeed him as the new Aspar Team world champions. And he had to do it starting from the base.
His first signing for the renewed Aspar Team Junior was the very young rider, David Alonso, who was just starting to compete at big tracks. Those first meetings, at the doors of the Spanish Championship garages would begin to forge a partnership and eventually lead to a signing in October 2017, with Alonso to compete in 85GP with the team.
That day, in Jerez, David Alonso was sixth, 41 seconds behind his new teammate and now rival, Iván Ortolá. But Amadeo and Nico saw something in him that made them bet on having him along into 2018.
Dani and Javi, two young members of the team in those early years, and were the first people who began to help the Colombian’s first steps, as Dani Villar would also soon do.
In 2018, David earnt his first title, the Spanish 85GP Championship. Two years later, in one of the most difficult years of our lives, he would win the second, the European Talent Cup, and a year later, repeated as champion, this time in the Red Bull Rookies Cup.
It was 2021 and, after having been fourth the previous season, he achieved the long-awaited title that on so many occasions has meant the leap to the World Championship.
But it wasn’t meant to be, at least that year. A decision, agreed by the team, between Nico Terol and Jorge Martínez “Aspar”, not to accelerate his growth in a world in which speed only counts on the track, led him to another season in JuniorGP, in which he also focused on developing the new Moto3 that would be put on track in the World Championship in 2023.
In that sense, it was a tough year, a year in which, used to winning, he only reached the podium once, although it was on the higher step. The straw that almost broke the camel’s back was his debut in the World Championship, at 15 years old, as a substitute for a contender for the title, Sergio García Dols.
The dream of almost every teenage rider, to race in a race that until then he had only seen on TV, turned into a swamp of doubts. He even told Gino Borsoi, his team manager at the time, “It was my first race in the World Championship, but the worst since I’ve been riding motorcycles. I remember that day a lot, it was a bad season, and making my debut in the World Championship was the final straw. I finished last in the standings, thinking ‘don’t let them lap me’. I didn’t know where to put myself, I told Borsoi that I didn’t think I could go fast on a Moto3 in my life,” Alonso explained this season, three years after that moment.
The hard task of developing a bike, with the help of Vicente, Javi, Pepe, Cristian and David, seemed to bear no fruit. But it was all part of a long-term plan. David Alonso knew how to wait and, above all, trusted in a team and in the advice of Nico Terol that would soon turn out to be the best plan.
At the end of 2022, the time came: the announcement of the definitive move to the World Championship. The gap left by a dream pair, the duo formed by Izan Guevara and Sergio García, was difficult to fill.
In a twist of fate, Alonso fell into the expert hands that had led his mentor Nico Terol to the title – Gábor Tálmacsi, who was faced with the challenge of a rider with almost no world championship experience and with everything to learn.
They got down to work and it took them four races to reach the podium and nine to taste victory for the first time, in an impossible race that started at the back of the grid in Silverstone and ended on the top of the podium on a circuit that five days earlier David had only seen in videos.
Four victories and several more podiums allowed the team to dream of revalidating the title, the Moto3 title, which had been in the Aspar Team’s showcases on two occasions in the previous three years. At the end of the season, David achieved the same number of victories as the champion and only the initial inexperience in his visits to Portugal or Argentina kept him from fighting for higher heights. He had to settle for the ‘Rookie of the year’ title. But in 2024, the demands would increase.
From GASGAS red to CFMOTO blue to mark that step from kid to favourite, from being one more to being the rival that everyone would look at. With the champion and runner-up moving up to Moto2, he, third in 2023, had no one ahead of him to overshadow him.
But motorcycles are not mathematics and 2 + 2 does not always give 4 in a sport with as many variables as this. Alonso led four of the five days of preseason and hinted at what would follow this year. The victory in Qatar did not come as a surprise; the win in America was a positive point. The victories in France, Barcelona and Italy were a message to the outside world: he was not going to give options. To anyone.
With three rivals evenly matched, three riders who were taking points from each other, Alonso’s advantage was increasing little by little. The blow on the table in Germany, after hitting the ground on Friday, was another important step on that path.
The feeling of superiority that the Colombian conveyed, with six victories in nine races, began to arouse rumours about whether he would be able to surpass Joan Mir’s 10 Moto3 victories in 2017 or Valentino Rossi’s 11 lightweight class wins in 1997.
The long faces after finishing second in Great Britain gave way again to joy with the triumph in Austria. A new victory in Misano put an end to the doubts of Aragon and San Marino and allowed him to once again distance himself from his three rivals, already shooting towards the title and forcing them to start to rethink their objectives until the end of the year.
In Indonesia he went from the ground, on Friday, to the sky, on Sunday. And now in Japan, where he arrived hoping to close out the title with four races to go, he achieved the title as champions like to do it, with a win.
It has been a long road to reach the Moto3 title, and he has shared it with many people. Many of them have even been on the podium with him: Jorge, Nico, Mauri, Barabba, Óscar, Roger, Majo, Giagi, Paolo and Vicente.
Without them, and many others, you would not be reading this, and he would not have celebrated in Japan the seventh world title in the lightweight category for a master 125/Moto3 team, the CFMOTO Aspar Team.
But without David, and without that decision at the end of 2017, all this would not have come to pass.
David Alonso’s record
- 2017 6th Spanish 85GP Championship (1 race with Aspar Team Junior)
- 2018 CHAMPION Spanish 85GP Championship (8 races, 6 wins, 7 podiums)
- 2019 5th European Talent Cup (8 races, 4 podiums)
- 2020 CHAMPION European Talent Cup (11 races, 5 wins, 10 podiums)
- 4th Red Bull Rookies Cup (12 races, 1 win, 3 podiums)
- 2021 CHAMPION Red Bull Rookies Cup (14 races, 6 wins, 10 podiums)
- 7th JuniorGP (12 races, 2 podiums)
- 38th Moto3 (1 race)
- 2022 7th JuniorGP (10 races, 1 win, 1 podium)
- 44th Moto3 (1 race)
- 2023 3rd Moto3 (20 races, 4 wins, 8 podiums)
- 2024 CHAMPION Moto3 (*** to date: 16 races, 10 wins, 11 podiums)
David Alonso facts
- David Alonso is the first ever Colombian rider to clinch a Grand Prix world title. Colombia becomes the 20th different nation with at least one Grand Prix world championship. He is also the first Latin American rider to clinch a GP world title since Carlos Lavado in 1986 (250cc) for Venezuela.
- This is the first time that a CFMoto rider takes the Moto3 title.
- Alonso has won 14 times in Moto3, and he is now the most successful rider in the class ahead of Romano Fenati (13). With 10 wins so far this year, he joined Marc Marquez, Joan Mir and Fausto Gresini as riders to have taken 10 wins in a single lightweight class season. The record is the 11 taken by Valentino Rossi in 1997.
- Alonso took the world title four Grands Prix before the end of the season, becoming the first rider to clinch the Moto3 title that early since Brad Binder in 2016.
- Since the introduction of Moto3 in 2012, Alonso (18 years 164 days old) is the third-youngest rider to clinch the title after Pedro Acosta (17 years 166 days old) and Izan Guevara (18 years 100 days old).
- Alonso has stood on the podium 11 times so far in 2024, more than any other riders on the Moto3 grid.
