AMCN speaks with our first new GP winner since Remy Gardner broke through in 2021
Still a teenager when he won his first Moto2 race at Silverstone on 25 May, Senna Agius may just be Australia’s next world champion. The win has helped turn around a season that looked a little hit and miss after two podium finishes in the first few races. Banking 25 points after Silverstone boosted him to sixth in the standings going into Round 8 at Aragon.
Senna has achieved a lot in just a few years but his hardest critic is himself. And that’s were he finds his motivation. “I’ve just got this underlying fire in me. And it doesn’t matter what it was, doesn’t matter what I was doing, if it’s my training, if I was a tennis player, it would be the exact same. And I don’t know what it is. I’ve just got this will to be better about everything because I hate losing, even if it’s not relevant to sport. If I can do something better, then I get angry; ‘Why didn’t I do that?!’
“So that’s transferred into my racing; it’s the character I am. And whether I’m gonna go, yeah, out training or running or get into something completely left-field, I just wanna be the best I can at it. And that’s with everything in my life.”
He looks back at his season run-up to Silverstone: “Podium at the first race. We made a group error in America. We had our own struggles in Argentina.
“I’ve made mistakes recently. A small, I would say debatable, jumpstart. And then the shortcut at Le Mans, getting a Long Lap (penalty). I was going to be in the top 10 those two races. So I’ve just actually made two costly mistakes that have cost us a lot of points recently, which is annoying.
“My work ethic on and off the bike is 100 per cent there. So all the ingredients are there. I just need to find my feet and keep it going. The team believe in me, I hold them accountable… I often remind them to be hard on me.
“I’m way quicker at every track than last year. And I’ve showed that on my long runs on Saturday morning. I can do races and runs really well.”
How does strategy evolve?
“I have a Tuesday evening meeting with my guys, after a race weekend. I write notes and kinda journal a little bit of it, which helps for sure. And then the same thing; I tell my guys what we need to improve on my side, and then they tell me from their side what I need to improve on the riding. And, good or bad, no matter what, even after podiums, we’re dissecting parts of the race that could be better.
“The simple fact is Moto2 is hard… and if you don’t get to the first corner with the leaders it’s very, very difficult to make up the ground.”
Senna earned his ride in the World Championship by winning in Europe – on a Moto2 bike. Strong results in the smaller classes earned him a ride in the European Moto2 Championship; he finished second in his first year and easily won the title in his second. Along the way he earned some wildcard rides in world Moto2 before securing a full-time ride in 2024, where he did very well, just missing out on Rookie of the Year to Diogo Moreira.
Moreira was just ahead of Senna in the championship at the time of witing, and was second in the UK race.
“We almost won Rookie of the Year. I let that slip away; a costly crash in Malaysia,” he says again in harsh analysis of himself.
For 2025, Moto2 now runs similar qualifying sessions to MotoGP: the Friday afternoon session’s times split the riders into Q1 and Q2 – Q2 is the fastest 10 plus the two fastest from Q1, and the order they finish Q2 dictates pole to 12th, with 13th to last dictated by the times in Q1.
“Qualifying is dependant how quick you get up to speed within one session on track,” says Senna. “The Q2 deciding factor is Friday afternoon. So you’ve got no real rhythm on the track, yet you really need to get going. So it’s even harder than last year to be competitive earlier because there’s more pressure. So when qualifying’s gone good, we’ve done well. When we’ve qualified a little bit farther, you know, with these tyres, they’re a bit more finicky when you’re back in the pack with temperature and pressures and stuff, so it makes it hard to move forward really fast.”
Crashing is another part of top-level racing and Senna describes how he finds the edge. “Honestly, when you gel with the bike, you kinda go into a trance. It’s weird. Like, when everything’s clicking, the risk is no longer there, you can feel like you can flirt with that risk a lot more than when you’re struggling. You know what I mean? When you’re struggling, it’s hard to get to that last tenth to find the lap time. So you have to take risks. If you don’t take risks, you’re never gonna be there.”
So how does he save a crash situation? “You can react quick because when everything’s that close (to the ground). The front grip’s related depending where you’re saving it on the elbow. That point when you release the brake and yet before you pick up the throttle, if it goes, you’ve already got two points of contact on the ground. So it’s actually quite easy to slide it. It’s the same as in US flat track when they close the throttle to decelerate (not use the brakes).
“When the front tyre is destroyed or you push on the limit, it’s more the crashes where you’ve got less lean angle; and when it locks, you’ve got a higher distance to the ground when you fall. That’s when you can’t do anything about it. The bike just literally falls down and that’s it. But when you’re so close to the ground, you’re pretty much on the ground and you can just play with that limit.
“And the bikes are obviously better, the tyres are better than previous years in our championship with Pirelli, so there’s a lot more feeling.
“So, what Marc Marquez does is alien because he does it every time, and it looks spectacular. But everyone has had those little moments.”
Like many professional racers, Senna’s competitive instinct has kept him away from recreational riding, as he’s always looking to push too hard. “If it’s not competitive, I’m not interested in it! Riding on the road, I can’t even do it. I don’t enjoy it at all. My training is my escape because I like doing a lot of my training alone. My off-bike training, I do a lot alone. Doing the hard yards alone I get a lot more out of it mentally. So my training’s my escape, but I just like normal stuff. You know what I mean? I live with Dad at home, so I’m not getting up to too much havoc.”
