Inside the nerve centre of Ducati’s 2025 MotoGP domination

For a motorcycle manufacturer that produces around 60,000 bikes per year for public sale and has created some of racing’s most iconic machines, Ducati’s factory at Borgo Panigale is charmingly unassuming. 

The company was founded in 1926 initially as a manufacturer of radio parts. The factory site was first built on a decade later. The first stone laid on the site was blessed by a local bishop to bring good fortune to the company: scarcely could they have believed at the time just what heights would follow in the wake of that blessing!

During the Second World War, the factory was commandeered by the fascists to produce parts for military equipment. As a result, the Ducati factory was a constant target for US bombing raids, with one - Operation Pancake - decimating the site in 1944. Of the original buildings, just one remains today. 

Ducati rebuilt the factory in 1946 and switched its focus to producing motorcycle engines to keep communities connected in a time of great post-war economic hardship. Ducati hasn’t looked back since. 

Innovation remains at the heart of what Ducati does, which becomes immediately obvious as Crash.net is led through the production area of the factory. As we are led around, we come to a set of doors off limits to all but 120 or so employees. This is the entrance to the Ducati Corse race department, where the brand’s domination of MotoGP in recent years has been crafted. 

The only glimpse we get is of a corridor when one employee - much to their surprise - throws the doors open to see a tour taking place, only to turn tail and head back in. 

Behind those doors, Ducati’s MotoGP project for the current year is still being worked on, while more importantly development for the 2027 regulations shift is taking place. Unsurprisingly, then, a bunch of journalists aren’t exactly deemed welcome. 

But Crash was offered a glimpse behind the scenes of Ducati’s 2025 domination later that Friday at Misano following practice at the San Marino Grand Prix. Race teams are a massive operation, with synergy between what’s going on at the track and the work being done back at the factory key in any success. 

And success has been in large supply for Ducati. Enjoying a storied history in racing, Ducati’s path to MotoGP domination is a winding one. It fielded a factory effort in MotoGP from 2003 under the new four stroke regulations, before winning the world title in 2007 with Casey Stoner. But this would give way to years of toil as the alien talents of the Australian proved to mask the deficiencies of a bike far less competitive than Stoner’s results suggested. 

The arrival of Gigi Dall’Igna from Aprilia at the end of 2013 as general manager was a pivotal point for Ducati, who’d just gone through its nadir after losing Stoner to Honda in 2011 and experiencing two dire years with Valentino Rossi. Steadily, Ducati built itself back up, largely through pioneering. 

Dall’Igna changed the game when he stuck wings on his bikes in 2015, and has remained at the forefront of aerodynamic development. Then in 2018 he started tinkering with ride height devices, which - again - became a battleground Ducati excelled in. At the same time, Ducati provided bikes to a number of satellite teams to improve data acquisition, as well as nurture talent. 

In 2022, all of this came together to deliver Ducati its first riders’ world title since 2007. Pecco Bagnaia overturned a 91-point deficit to Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo at the halfway point of the campaign to win the first of two championships. In 2024, Pramac Ducati rider Jorge Martin added his name to Ducati legend. And in 2025, six constructors’ championship successes in a row, it is nearing a reality few could have predicted a decade ago: a world title with Marc Marquez. 

This season has been especially dominant for Ducati and its GP25. Marquez has won 11 of the 16 grands prix, as well as 14 sprints. Bagnaia has a grand prix win to his credit, while Alex Marquez of Gresini has two victories to his name on Sunday’s on the year-old GP24 bike. As such, Ducati had the constructors’ championship wrapped up at round 15 of 22. 

How Ducati’s Remote Garage is pivotal to its current success

A key pillar to this success is Ducati’s Remote Garage. At the San Marino Grand Prix, Crash was afforded the opportunity to step into Ducati’s race truck behind its garage to understand how the on-site engineers work closely with the race department at the factory remotely to process and analyse hundreds of gigabytes of data from Pecco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez’s bikes. 

This is something Ducati pioneered as a means to work around travel restrictions placed in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. And it wouldn’t have been possible without title partner Lenovo, who provides high performance computing systems to improve data analysis in all kinds of climactic conditions, as well as access to its Edge Servers to boost connectivity. 

“We had this idea. But at the end we said ‘how can we efficiently realise this idea to be effective?’,” Ducati’s Vehicle Development Manager Nicolo Mancinelli said. “So, we had the luck to have Lenovo as a partner. So, they helped us a lot to build the infrastructure and choose the proper machine settings and so on to make this effective, sustainable for costs and resources. 

“So, this has been a real great help for us internally to have this. At the same time the partnership is so helpful to speed up analysis and simulation during the race weekend. We challenged them and said ‘we need this kind of processing’. For example, data analysis processing is quite demanding for even simulation running during the weekend. 

“And so, we challenged them and they answered in a ‘race pace’, not a commercial environment. So, they understood that here you have to move in a really fast pace. So, this is a really strong motivation keep growing the partnership because we challenged them and they can improve the products. Because the laptops we use in the garage has to withstand extreme ambient conditions and computational demands in the 40 degrees of Sepang. So, I think is was very useful to have this partnership.”

Because MotoGP does not have live telemetry like in Formula 1 under the current regulations due to cost concerns, data can only be acquired once a bike has come back to the garage. This boosts the need for faster, more efficient data analysis. 

Ducati’s engineering staff onsite will start their day at around 7am during a race weekend and work on through to midnight. During track sessions, Ducati is acquiring data on tyre behaviour, how each set-up change is working, what the electronics are doing and how the rider is affecting the bike. Alongside this, former 250cc world champion Manuel Poggiali is filming trackside to carry out video analysis after each session. 

After each session, all of this data is pored over by the engineers in the truck, who are aided by up to four technicians in Ducati’s Remote Garage (who are connected via video link) in the heart of its race department at its Borgo Panigale base. 

Ducati does this for its factory team, but also for Gresini Racing and VR46. With its factory riders, it analyses absolutely everything and then uses this to inform set-up changes, tyre choices, riding style alterations, etc. Before each day’s action, the engineers will meet separately with Marquez and Bagnaia for a half an hour meeting to discuss all of this. 

How this is impactful was evident at Misano. Ducati had a solid Friday at Misano, but Marquez in particular wasn't totally comfortable. Marquez then qualified fourth on Saturday morning before being competitive enough in the sprint to fight for the win before he crashed out of the lead. After this, Ducati got to work in the race truck with its Remote Garage and analysed exactly what went wrong, before firming up what it needed to do for the grand prix. 

On Sunday, Marquez went on to win the race ahead of Aprilia’s Marco Bezzecchi to put one hand on the championship trophy. Think back to any weekend this season where Marquez or Bagnaia have struggled on a particular day and then made a significant step the day after, and this is all down to Ducati’s Remote Garage operation. 

KTM's Pedro Acosta has said repeatedly in 2025 that Ducati "wakes up on Saturday". And now you know why.

The wider significance of Ducati’s partnership with Lenovo

Lenovo became title sponsor of the factory Ducati team in 2021, a year after it successfully created the Italian marque’s Remote Garage. That innovation has only continued and into the cutting edge of technology. 

The tech industry is awash with one particular buzzphrase right now: Artificial Intelligence. In the field of science and engineering, it is something that has immeasurable practical application. And this is something Lenovo is aiding Ducati with. 

“AI is on the edge of technology,” Ducati’s Head of Data Analysis - Racing and R&D David Attisano says. “It’s something that Ducati, as an innovation company, has to take into account, make some experiments and include it if it’s suitable for our applications. We have two applications that are relevant, which is virtual sensing and anomaly detection. 

“These two aspects are used nowadays because we have the power of calculation, the amount of data and so on, to use them. For example, virtual sensing is something very common. You have a lot of data coming from the development of the bike. You are using a lot of sensors on the bike running on the track on a race weekend. On the track, we have about 50 sensors. 

“But in practice with our development team with Michele Pirro, we have a lot more sensors and we can measure more quantities. AI helps us to make these quantities matching to the sensors and removing the sensors having the quantity measured before the testing session. So, this virtual sensing is very common in the field of engineering. During a racing session we are moving from 1000 and 1200 virtual sensors.

“The other side is anomaly detection. There are a lot of algorithms, but in real-time we don’t have the capability of the computer to elaborate on all the data and be so precise on the application. So, anomaly detection is something that - looking at the past - can predict if something is going to fail. Or something has failed but no one was aware of it, replicating behaviour in the past. I think in the motorcycle industry we are pioneers in this. There are other aspects of AI that we are developing, like generative AI.”

Gigi Dall’Igna is as old school as engineers come, but he has never shied away from technology and dubbed it “the future” when we spoke to him in the Ducati garage at Misano. Lenovo, seemingly, is allowing him - within the parameters of the rules - to continue spreading his wings in MotoGP bike development. 

But the association between Ducati and Lenovo goes well beyond the technical. Global Sponsorship and Activation Manager Lara Rodin spoke of the significance of the Lenovo brand being carried by superstar names in Pecco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez.

“It means having a huge opportunity to reach millions and millions of fans all over the world, which is one of the objectives we want to achieve together in addition to the digital transformation that we are working on since the beginning of the partnership,” she said. 

“So, just think about the number of fans that this sport itself has all over the world. Being partner with two of the most iconic or important riders in the existing championship is giving you the possibility to shorten the distance in contacting people who are sharing the same passion, which is priceless.”