Sprint races, a final round title showdown, trials, tribulations and sensations - that was the year 2023 in MotoGP... but who were the big standouts? This is BSN's Top 10 MotoGP Riders of the 2023.

Fabio Quartararo kicks off our top five run down

A year is a long time in MotoGP, but even by those standards, Fabio Quartararo and Yamaha’s 2021 MotoGP World Championship title seemed a particularly distant memory by the time the 2023 MotoGP season got underway.

Indeed, this was a tough year for Yamaha as a team, no matter how you look at it, and it probably felt like a long one too. 

While perhaps not unexpected considering the noises coming from Yamaha come the end of the 2022 season, it remains to be seen whether the 2023 season will prove a more significant transition towards a more competitive future for the Japanese firm than it might seem right now.

For Fabio Quartararo, the 2023 MotoGP season asked more of him than ever before, testing his ability to steer Yamaha away from its tried, tested if seemingly exhausted methods of honing the M1’s as an all-rounder into the harder-edged weapon the Frenchman has been angling for.

Time will tell whether his wisdom will be the catalyst for Yamaha’s return to the front, but even if it isn’t, it represents a maturing step for what is - let’s not forget - still a young, still developing racer.

In the meantime, Quartararo continued doing what he does best on track in his efforts to wring the best from the Yamaha package, but while it is no coincidence his better results were to be found around some of the more technical venues, even these served to show just how far the game has progressed around Yamaha over the past couple of years.

There was at least some pleasure to be found in some of the smaller notes to be taken away from the season, Quartararo enjoying the strongest finishing record of any rider in the top fifteen and scoring points in all-but-one of the season’s 20 full-length Grand Prix encounters.

Among them three podiums - a trio of thirds - achieved in Texas, India and Indonesia, spurring him on to tenth in the overall standings.

While it may read like a sizeable drop from 2022 on paper, it’s hard to argue that he wasn’t at least close to getting the best he could from both himself and the M1 over the course of the year.

6 - Alex Marquez

7 - Luca Marini

8 - Johann Zarco

9 - Fabio di Giannantonio

10 - Aleix Espargaro