Some fans hated saying goodbye to the 500s, others enjoyed the arrival of the roaring 990s, which had the added bonus of stealing some thunder from the superbikes. The WSB had grown in popularity by the 1990s as fans turned their backs on family doctors and got bored of waking up on race day wondering who would come in second after Mick Doohan. At that time, MotoGP rights holder Dorna of course did not own a WSB.
Since the start of the MotoGP season in 2002 there have been 329 races with two clear winners: Valentino Rossi is the most successful driver of the four-stroke era with 76 wins, while Honda is by far the most successful manufacturer to win races.
To date, 29 different riders have won MotoGP races, with the three most successful – Rossi, Marc Márquez and Jorge Lorenzo – accounting for more than half of those victories, confirming the Italian and two Spaniards as outstanding performers of the past two decades.
And only two or three of the top ten winners are racing, which confirms that MotoGP is entering a new era. That new era began last season when there were five first-time winners, something that had never happened before in the premier class.
MotoGP rider victories 2002-2020:
| driver | Wins |
| Valentino Rossi | 76 |
| Marc Marquez | 56 |
| Jorge Lorenzo | 47 |
| Casey Stoner | 38 |
| Dani Pedrosa | 31 |
| Andrea Dovizioso | 15th |
| Sete Gibernau and Maverick Viñales | 8th |
| Loris Capirossi | 7th |
| Max Biaggi and Marco Melandri | 5 |
| Cal Crutchlow, Franco Morbidelli, Alex Barros, Nicky Hayden, Fabio Quartararo and Álex Rins | 3rd |
| Miguel Oliveira, Danilo Petrucci and Makoto Tamada | 2 |
| Troy Bayliss, Brad Binder, Toni Elias, Andrea Iannone, Jack Miller, Joan Mir, Ben Spies, Chris Vermeulen and Tohru Ukawa | 1 |
Ride It Cowboy! When can Marc Marquez do that again?
Honda
Rossi is the only winner whose success includes all three four-stroke MotoGP engines – 990cc, 800cc and 1000cc. He is also one of only six drivers to have won races with more than one manufacturer: Honda and Yamaha. The others are Biaggi (Yamaha and Honda), Dovizioso (Honda and Ducati), Lorenzo (Yamaha and Ducati), Stoner (Ducati and Honda) and Viñales (Suzuki and Yamaha).
Honda leads the manufacturer fee by a wide margin, despite not winning a race last year, the first time in the four-stroke MotoGP era.
MotoGP manufacturer victories 2002-2020:
| Manufacturer | Wins |
| Honda | 153 |
| Yamaha | 115 |
| Ducati | 51 |
| Suzuki | 6th |
| KTM | 3rd |
MotoGP has ridden under three different power limits since 2002: 990 cc from 2002 to 2006, 800 cc from 2007 to 2011 and 1000 cc from 2012. Honda’s most successful machine is the 1000 cc RC213V, which has won 81 races in the past nine years on Am The least successful is the 800 RC212V, which won 24 races in five years. The legendary V5 won twice as many in its five-year tenure.
Since the beginning of the four-stroke MotoGP era, the technical regulations have been below five-year segments. The 990s were dumped after Daijiro Kato’s death in Suzuka in 2003 due to concerns about speed and power, and the unloved 800s were dumped after five years because their low-torque engines had created single-line races that gave us some of the most boring Grand Prix races in living memory.