Ducati’s disappointing 2025 MotoGP team must back up its big talk in 2026

One thing you won’t hear any MotoGP team say during its launch events this pre-season is how they don’t expect to be competitive and don’t believe they have a winning outfit. From a PR standpoint, it’s not exactly the done thing.

But there does come a point where those strong words stand up only as just that: talk, with diminishing levels of believability.

The VR46 team’s launch event in Rome, where it unveiled revised colours for the season ahead, featured that exact rhetoric, though said with some sense of urgency to right a ship that drifted astray across a 2025 season that should have yielded so much more.

From the moment it was announced that Valentino Rossi’s team would be coming to the MotoGP grid for the 2022 season, it endured a difficult birth. An announcement from Tanal Entertainment claiming VR46 would be sponsored by Aramco turned out to be false, despite insistence from the Rossi camp that this would, in fact, come to pass.

This led to some speculation he may even have to delay his retirement a year to ride for his new team and attract some meaningful sponsorship. That never happened, with VR46 finding title sponsorship from Mooney for its first two seasons.

The project, helmed by Luca Marini and Marco Bezzecchi, was developed to give VR46 Academy talents a final destination on their way up the ladder to MotoGP. Powered by Ducati, podium success came in 2022, before Bezzecchi managed three victories in 2023 on his way to third in the standings.

The 2024 season proved troublesome, however. The GP23 Ducati was at odds with Bezzecchi’s riding style, which meant he managed just one rostrum all year. VR46 was dealt another blow when an opportunity to join the factory Aprilia squad was presented to Bezzecchi.

Gone for 2025 was the team’s best asset, with Franco Morbidelli finding a home after a difficult 2024 for Pramac in his place. Ducati elected to give Fabio Di Giannnatonio factory support for 2025, after he was given an 11th-hour deal to replace Honda-bound Marini in 2024, though the GP25 proved inconsistent in all but Marc Marquez’s hands.

VR46 failed to live up to satellite Ducati standards set by Gresini in 2025

Di Giannantonio managed just three grand prix podiums on the factory-spec Ducati and 262 points. That was just 26 behind Pecco Bagnaia’s total. But that speaks more to how chaotic the double world champion’s year was rather than Di Giannantonio having legitimate factory team credentials, given the former at least managed a pair of grands prix wins.

Di Giannantonio’s team-mate Morbidelli performed respectably, by contrast, on the GP24, managing a couple of grand prix podiums early on in the campaign. But the 2020 championship runner-up’s season was marred by repeated on-track incidents, leading to greater scrutiny from the FIM stewards.

From the San Marino Grand Prix, the FIM stewards imposed an ultimatum. If he were to be found guilty of another on-track transgression, he would face a pitlane start. If he did it again after that, he would be sitting at home for a weekend.

It’s a tactic the stewards found useful for troublesome Moto3 riders. But for a MotoGP rider to be in that position in the first place should be a major concern for a team.

Morbidelli ended the year just 31 points behind Di Giannantonio in the standings. But VR46 was the only Ducati team not to win a race in 2025, while Morbidelli and Di Giannantonio were the only two of the marque’s riders to not stand on the top step of a podium. It was 188 points adrift of Gresini in the teams’ rankings.

That’s a fact that stings more when you consider Gresini did not have factory support, and was fielding a rookie in Fermin Aldeguer. Gresini now has factory support for 2026 for Alex Marquez, leaving VR46 with nowhere to hide this season if it fails to live up to those standards.

“To be a factory-supported team from Ducati is very important,” team boss Pablo Nieto said at VR46’s team launch in Rome on Wednesday. It’s going to be a lot of pressure, but if you don’t have pressure, it means you cannot make anything. So, it’s going to be an important year for us.”

The same was true of last year, however, so VR46 must up its game.

“We are very lucky that all of our adventures in MotoGP, we always raced with Ducati,” Valentino Rossi said. “Ducati in the last years is the best bike on the grid. So, this gives us the chance to win, also in the past. Unfortuantely not last year, but to fight for the podium and arrive in the top three of the team ranking. But we need to improve, to raise our level, because last season there were a lot of ups and downs.”

Rossi has remained largely out of the way when commenting on the overall performance of his team. But, four years into a venture that should be yielding more success based on the mere fact a MotoGP legend - and not just any legend, at that - has put his name to it, Rossi’s comments sound like a genuine bit of pressure being placed on his riders.

VR46 could become a destination for bigger talents

Looking to the immediate future, the VR46 Academy has run out of MotoGP-ready talents it can bring up. Therefore, it has to start positioning itself as a destination for bigger names from elsewhere on the current grid.

It was front and centre in rider market rumours earlier last season relating to Pedro Acosta, with both parties confirming conversations were had. Marc Marquez’s season with Gresini and the success he found has opened up satellite teams to being strong destinations for riders looking for competitive machinery.

Should VR46 remain with Ducati into the 850cc era, it will have two highly sought-after bikes in its garage. Just how much the team would be willing to depart from its ethos of housing homegrown talent is another question, but the value in a Valentino Rossi-backed outfit proving successful with a big name would be massive.

Should VR46 not want to dump both of its current riders, Morbidelli and Di Giannantonio face big years.

Di Giannantonio has so far proven to be a one-trick pony, as far as being a MotoGP race winner is concerned. He gained a lot of goodwill during his first season with VR46, but a failure to build on that in a contract year may find him facing few options elsewhere on the grid.

Morbidelli, being an actual Academy talent, and a significant one as its first world champion and its first MotoGP race winner, is probably the more popular choice if a decision had to be made. However, since his breakout 2020 season, he has come nowhere close to replicating that. Some of this is not of his own making, as injury struck in 2021 before poor Yamaha machinery held him back in the ensuing years.

But this will be his ninth season in the premier class, and it’s not unfair to suggest that, without VR46, he wouldn’t have been on the grid in 2025 anyway. The season he went on to have was not the statement it needed to be.

VR46 could, of course, gain a big name in 2027 and have a strong Italian talent to partner. Nicolo Bulega, an ex-VR46 Academy rider still on good terms with Rossi, increases his MotoGP involvement this year with a testing role. His knowledge of Pirelli tyres from World Superbike is a valuable asset to Ducati, and one very likely to lead him onto the MotoGP grid full-time in 2027.

That seems more likely to be at a satellite Ducati team rather than the factory squad, and VR46 would be a good fit, if not for anything other than the redemption arc of a promising Academy talent going on his own away from grands prix to work his way back to the very top class.

By the start of the 2027 season, Bulega will have had several months of riding the GP27 prototype on Pirelli rubber. Already, that makes him a better candidate than either Morbidelli or Di Giannantonio regardless of what results may come their way in 2026.

If VR46 is serious about wanting to win races again in 2026, Di Giannantonio and Morbidelli’s careers may well hinge on proving circumstance is not the only reason Rossi banked on them…