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Motorsport

Ducati struggles “out of my control” says cryptic Francesco Bagnaia

Francesco Bagnaia Ducati Misano (Organization) Marco Bezzecchi DAZN

Francesco Bagnaia was once again at a loss to explain an embarrassing performance after finishing last in the sprint race at the MotoGP Indonesian Grand Prix on Saturday.

The Italian, who dominated the field a week ago in Japan, finished almost 30 seconds behind winner Marco Bezzecchi, signalling a return to the struggles he has faced for most of the season.

After the race, the double world champion was unable to offer a coherent explanation, contradicting himself at times, whilst being generally cryptic.

“It’s not a technical problem,” he said in his media briefing. “It’s something out of my control.”

A little earlier, however, Bagnaia had told DAZN that the issue was indeed technical. After saying, “what happened to me is unacceptable,” he was asked if he was referring to a problem in terms of tyres. To this he responded, “No, in technical terms.”

Asked by DAZN how he could explain the performance, he was equivocal: “I don’t explain it, I can’t explain it. I want them to explain it to me, too. The team, I don’t know, I don’t know who. Someone. At least explain to me why I’ve been so slow, why I can’t be fast here. They have the data, I don’t know what happened. Today, my best lap was 1m31.7s, two seconds slower than the leaders, which is strange.”

These remarks come in the context of the factory Ducati team repeatedly denying that Bagnaia tested a GP24 in last month’s Misano test – his last track outing before his success in Japan.

Francesco Bagnaia, Ducati Team (Photo by: Robertus Pudyanto / Getty Images)

Following Davide Tardozzi’s Friday denial of VR46’s confirmation that it had lent Bagnaia a GP24 at Misano, the Ducati team manager doubled down on Saturday morning, saying, “What confirmation?” when he was again asked to respond to the story.

Whatever the truth of the GP24/GP25 matter, Bagnaia told Sky he was “in theory” riding the same bike as at Motegi.

Asked in what sense it was theoretically the same machine he had won on seven days earlier, he said: “In practice, I don’t know. But theoretically [it’s the same bike], yes.”

One thing Bagnaia was clear about was that he had returned to the bad feeling he had during the San Marino Grand Prix at Misano, one day before the increasingly controversial ‘breakthrough’ test.

“A week ago, I was like Bezzecchi [today]: pole position with a [lap] record, sprint win... Today, like yesterday, I find myself back where I was before the Misano test: there’s no way to push. When I try, the bike moves around a lot, and during the race, I often found myself without brakes. Sometimes I had to close the throttle on the straight.

“I finished the race, I made it to the end, but I was 30s behind the leader and 13s behind the penultimate rider. So I would also like to know what happened.”