Francesco Bagnaia: “If I’m not competitive here, there’s a problem”

Francesco Bagnaia has admitted that failure to fight at the front of his home Italian MotoGP at Mugello this weekend will signal “there's a problem” for the remainder of the 2025 campaign.

Bagnaia changed from the standard 340mm to larger 355mm front disc during warm-up at Aragon, finally increasing the double world champion’s confidence with the front end of the latest Ducati GP25.

Combined with Bagnaia’s dominant record of five Mugello wins in a row, including Sprints, expectations are high that the Italian can finally go head-to-head with title-leading team-mate Marc Marquez.

But Bagnaia warned he doesn’t think the brake change fully solved his problems - and revealed the flowing Mugello layout probably won’t allow him to run the 355 size brakes anyway.

"In Aragon, it's true that in the race on Sunday I was competitive, but my feeling I think, is not depending just on what we did in Aragon," Bagnaia explained.

"So let's see if I can have a good feeling and good set-up from the start of the weekend. 

"I know how important it is to make a good result here, and I will try to do my maximum to keep the pace of Marc, who is normally the strongest. So I will try to at least fight for the win."

"If I will not be competitive here, there's a problem"

Bagnaia then stressed the importance of Mugello as a measure of his competitiveness for the remainder of 2025.

"It will be very important because if I will not be competitive here, we can say there's a problem," Bagnaia warned.

"So I will try to fight for it. I know that I'm not in the situation of imagining a win in both races. Because we know how strong Marc was this season and we know how strong Alex was this season.

"So it will be important to restart from Sunday in Aragon and try to [improve] our pace session by session."

Even with the brake change in Spain, Bagnaia acknowledged he was a step behind Marc and Alex Marquez.

"We have to be realistic and consider that the last GP until the race was quite difficult for me. Then it's true that I gained some confidence [with the 355mm brakes] for the Sunday race, but it's true also that I finished in the same place as the start of the season. In third place," Bagnaia said.

"I was close to them, but Marc was playing. I was there with Alex fighting and he finished in front of me. So I think is a good point to restart, but we need to do another step this weekend and it's the correct track to try to do it."

"We will try starting with the standard brakes"

Pressed on his brake options at Mugello, Bagnaia explained that he expects to revert to the standard 340mm discs due to the characteristics of the Tuscan circuit.

"This track it’s more difficult to use the 355 because the temperature of the brake is not arriving to the [correct] temperature for the disc," Bagnaia confirmed.

"So we will try starting with the standard one that are the 340mm with the low mass and hope to not have any kind of issues like we had in the past.

"But I think that this track, we need the brakes obviously, but less than other tracks, which maybe could be better for us."

Bagnaia arrives at Mugello searching for his second victory of 2025, his sole win so far coming at COTA after Marc Marquez crashed out.

The Italian currently trails his team-mate by 93 points in the championship, with Alex Marquez 61 points ahead in second.

Marc Marquez has not won at Mugello since 2014.