Pecco Bagnaia has “8 or 10 years” in MotoGP, targets Marc Marquez-like rebound

Francesco Bagnaia is already plotting his path back to the top of MotoGP, having been dethroned as World Champion by Jorge Martin last weekend.

Bagnaia won 11 Sunday races in 2024, a tally that took him into the top-10 on the all-time list for premier class Grand Prix victories, but the Italian is uninterested in celebrating these numbers, instead he just wants to keep them growing.

“Honestly, I’m not at a point in my career where I want to check those numbers,” Bagnaia said after last weekend’s Solidarity Grand Prix.

“I’m a very young rider, and I think I still have eight or 10 years in front of me, so I will try to do my maximum, I will continue to try to be that fast, that strong, and continue to try to increase.

"The most important thing is to increase in terms of championship titles, and I will try.”

Bagnaia added that, although he lost the title in 2024, it has still been a valuable year for him.

“I’m not considering [2024] like a loss, properly, because I learn from my mistakes — I know that we lost the championship for the mistakes and this is something that I will improve,” he said.

“Also, if we look at the stats of Marc, he won two titles in a row, then he lost in 2015, and then he won four in a row.

“So, you never know, and I will try to do my maximum to achieve again the maximum goal.”

In order to get back to the top, and reclaim the #1 plate he’s held in the last two years, Bagnaia must learn from the mistakes he made in 2024 that cost him the title.

“The first thing I will have to learn is to understand better the situations, because it’s true that three out of these eight zeros came from strange situations,” Bagnaia said.

“The one in Portimao with Marc, the one in Jerez with Brad [Binder], and the one with Alex Marquez in Aragon.

“So, I think all three — it’s true that I’ve been taken out by other riders, but all three were situations that I could maybe have avoided.

“The one with Marc, maybe try to wait a bit, but he was faster, so maybe wait and don’t cross the line. I’m saying that, but when I’m racing I just want to arrive more in front as I can; but maybe for next year I will try to improve that.

“The one with Alex Marquez, I was clearly faster by four tenths, and I didn’t wait because he goes wide so I said ‘Okay, it’s my moment’, and then he touched me and [the contact] makes me crash. The one with Brad, the same.

“So, I think I have to learn from my mistakes. The others were more tricky to analyse because I was doing the same things, just entering a bit slower, and I crashed the same.

“So, they are more difficult to analyse, but for the things that I know I had a mistake it’s more easy to learn and to understand.”

The former World Champion said that his crash in the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix and his falls in the Malaysian and Catalan Sprints were the worst errors he made all season.

“The one in Misano [Emilia-Romagna] was one of the worst, because I was easily finishing third,” he said.

“The more difficult one to accept is the one in Malaysia, honestly, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong: I entered slower, and maybe that was the reason for the crash, but this one is the most difficult to accept, like also the one here [in Catalunya] in the Sprint.”

Bagnaia added that, aside from his obvious mistakes, he lost out at the start of the year with an uncomfortable feeling on the Desmosedici.

“I think the worst part of the season, apart from the mistakes, was the first part, because I decided to go with new parts on the bike, that was the new forks and the new swingarm, and I lost time,” he said.

“It’s true that I won in Qatar, but until Jerez I was struggling to be fast. Portimao was always one of my good tracks and I was struggling a lot to be fast, Austin was tough.

“So, I wasn’t happy, and as soon as we decided to go back to my standard [setup] I started to be more fast and more strong, so from that moment everything was better.”