Why Pecco Bagnaia’s 2025 MotoGP nightmare is frustrating Ducati

Gigi Dall’Igna would be a terrible person to play poker against. He keeps his emotions to himself and his face very rarely tells. But behind his eyes you can see the cogs turning, the computations being carried by one of MotoGP’s absolute best engineers and the man who has transformed Ducati Into the all-conquering force it is today.

One side of the Ducati garage, that of Marc Marquez, has given the Italian marque most reason to celebrate. After 16 rounds, he’s won 11 grands prix, 14 sprints and is within touching distance of a seventh premier class title that five years ago seemed very unlikely in the wake of his injury woes. One more, Ducati is about to be at the centre of motorcycle racing history.

But on the other side, that of the one who once stood as the benchmark for the brand - Pecco Bagnaia - the story couldn’t be any different.

For all of the noise that envelopes a MotoGP race, it was surprisingly quiet in the factory Ducati garage on Saturday at the San Marino Grand Prix. Crash.net has been ushered into a viewing area on Bagnaia’s side of the garage. Dall’Igna comes to sit down on the rider’s chair, Bagnaia’s crew chief soon to take the seat next to him.

There is little reaction from Dall’Igna when Marquez overtakes Marco Bezzecchi for the lead, and only a brief pained expression when the Spaniard crashes out seconds later. Bagnaia remains in the race, but struggles to 13th. There is little reaction from anyone on that side of the garage. There’s a sense of familiarity about the result.

Once more, shoots of progress gave way to the stark reality that Bagnaia is completely stuck. From the start of the season, the double world champion has not been at the level he was in the previous years on the GP25. He bagged a win at COTA, but that was very much a result of team-mate Marquez crashing out of a commanding lead.

Since then, he hasn’t come close to replicating it. From the summer break, the situation with Bagnaia has gotten especially desperate. A strong start to the Austrian Grand Prix weekend gave way to a disappointing Sunday race that led to him telling the media that he was losing his patience.

He backtracked on these comments a week later in Hungary, only to go on and have one of his worst weekends in years. Ducati turned his GP25 upside down across the weekend and seemed to find something that propelled him to a fighting ninth. Full of enthusiasm for this coming to Barcelona, it all fell apart again.

Tensions remained. Ducati continued to publicly back Bagnaia, but team boss Davide Tardozzi told Sky Italy that his rider had to “help us help him”. The bike wasn’t changed much and hasn’t been since. He did well in the Catalan Grand Prix, coming from 21st to seventh. Misano started off well, but once more it nosedived. He was 13th in the sprint and crashed out of the grand prix.

Afterwards, Bagnaia said again that his patience was being tested, to which Gigi Dall’Igna responded: “I’ve lost my patience too, and Pecco’s fans have lost their patience. It seems quite normal to me that someone can say these things when results aren’t coming.”

Why there has been no fix to Bagnaia’s problems

In the wake of the San Marino Grand Prix, the Spanish language version of motorsport.com reported that Ducati’s patience internally was being tested because it genuinely doesn’t believe the bike is the problem after months of constant changes.

This has been suggested on a number of occasions by senior figures from the brand publicly, who have called on Bagnaia to use his talents to ride around his issues. However, he has said he cannot do this in the same way Marc Marquez can.

This has put Bagnaia’s struggles into a brighter spotlight. The domination of the field by Marquez on the GP25 has made it hard to say the bike is bad. But Marquez had a knack for riding difficult Honda machinery to incredible results where his stablemates could not. In some ways, there are parallels to be drawn between Marquez vs Jorge Lorenzo in 2019 at Honda and Marquez vs Bagnaia at Ducati in 2025.

Statistically, this is Bagnaia’s worst season since 2020, when he was 16th in the points with the Pramac Ducati squad. At present he is at a scoring pace of 14.8 points per round, down from 24.9 last year and 23.35 from 2023. Currently, his points per round pace is only just above what he was achieving in 2022 (13.9) in the pre-sprint era.

Bagnaia’s issues with the GP25 revolve around his feeling with the front end and the fact he can’t push under braking like he used to be able to. This is something Ducati riders in the past have said was impressive to look at when viewing his data. He claims someone like Alex Marquez’s data on the GP24 is exactly the same to his from last year. 

Pre-season Ducati didn’t get its engine configuration spot on. With a development freeze imposed until the end of 2026 from round one this year, it elected to go down the safe route and run a modified 2024 engine instead. Something in that design has knocked Bagnaia off balance, but has been manageable for Marc Marquez and for VR46’s Fabio Di Giannantonio, albeit in fluctuation.

With Marquez riding around this, it has led many to point the finger at the Spaniard having simply mentally deflated Bagnaia. That’s not something Ducati subscribes to.

“When we said that we wanted to have Marc, we spoke to Pecco before,” Ducati sporting director Mauro Grassili told select media, including Crash.net, at Misano. “Pecco was happy having Marc as a team-mate. So, Pecco is really part of our strategy as Marc is part of our strategy. So, honestly speaking, I don’t know [if Bagnaia has been mentally affected]. But our target is to have both riders in the right positions and we will help Pecco come back.”

Further backing this up, Marc Marquez tested a GP24 at Misano last week and said that he could get the same lap time out of it as he could on the GP25 with just a bit of adjustment in his riding. 

What is surprising about Bagnaia’s struggles is the fact that the 2023 Ducati wasn’t the best when it came to front end feeling, and led to some early season crashes for him. But he was quickly able to adapt and went on to win the championship. Ducati’s frustrations, then, are understandable because it has stood alongside him through similar and seen him excel.

Clearly, though, Bagnaia’s confidence is the main reason why 2025 has only progressively gotten worse. Ducati’s head of data David Attisano suggested at Misano that what Bagnaia is reporting in his feedback is not matching to what is being recorded by the bike.

“I think that the data maybe could not tell everything, because there is something in the human factor that we cannot replicate,” he said.

“We are not able at the moment. At the moment we are not able to clone Pecco in a simulation. So, we cannot understand why he is feeling something that is not in the right direction in some practice sessions. There are some aspects that are difficult to explain from his side, because you have to translate feeling into communication with us.

“And even with his engineers there is confidence and all the things around used to talk about technical things, riding style and so on. I think that it’s impossible to translate in an exact way the feeling into words exchanging with engineers.

“On the other side, I don’t know if we are measuring all the quantities that are related to the feeling of the rider. We are measuring a lot of quantities and in a lot of situations we are giving him feedback and answers.”

Ducati's recent announcement that Alex Marquez will have a factory bike next year opens up two pathways for Bagnaia. Either he will find some vindication for his troubles in 2025 if Ducati's second-best rider of this season begins to experience the same thing. But, if Alex Marquez remains where he is in the pecking order, Bagnaia is in even bigger trouble. 

Bagnaia enjoyed a positive test day at Misano last Monday, but this has never been an indicator of tangible change at any point this year. With six rounds to go, Bagnaia is at risk of losing third in the standings to an in-form Marco Bezzecchi on the factory Aprilia. But more importantly, he risks going into 2026 on the same bike facing another year of misery if he cannot course correct soon...