What was behind Pecco Bagnaia’s Barcelona MotoGP turnaround?

Pecco Bagnaia transformed another nightmare MotoGP weekend to a decent Sunday result at the Catalan Grand Prix on his factory Ducati.

The 2025 season has so far not seen the double world champion scale the same heights of the previous years on the factory Desmosedici, with the Italian so far winner of just one grand prix.

After 15 rounds, he is 250 points back of his dominant team-mate Marc Marquez and nine points away from being mathematically knocked out of title contention.

Since the summer break, however, Pecco Bagnaia’s season has seemingly nosedived. Having started the Austrian Grand Prix strongly, he struggled to eighth in that race, before suffering a torrid weekend in Hungary.

That round looked set to be a turning point, as a step forward with set-up on the Sunday at Balaton Park regained him his missing confidence on the GP25 and filled him with great optimism coming to Barcelona.

Having won at Barcelona twice last year, Bagnaia struggled from the off. He wasn’t able to crack the top 20 at all on Friday, qualified a three-year worst 21st on the grid and was only 14th in the sprint by virtue of multiple crashes ahead of him.

There was little hope even from himself that things would improve for the 24-lap grand prix. Typically a better Sunday performer anyway, Bagnaia made a surprisingly rapid rise through the field to get to 12 on lap one and then push all the way to seventh.

That was his best result since he was fourth at Brno and he even felt he could have broken into the top five if he’d started higher up the grid.

Ending the worst weekend of his year in a positive fashion, he warned the media on Sunday afternoon that he was wary of creating “false hope” for himself given what happened to him after the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Bagnaia’s Barcelona turnaround revealed, but step is only small

Ducati team boss Davide Tardozzi confirmed ahead of the sprint that Bagnaia had ditched the Hungary set-up that proved so hopeful a few weeks ago. The key now is avoiding major changes to the GP25 and getting Bagnaia to understand what he has.

In grands prix, when using the full race fuel tank, Bagnaia enjoys much better confidence on the front-end of his Ducati and can ride closer to how he is used to.

For the Catalan Grand Prix, Ducati did make a part change. Gigi Dall’Igna revealed that Bagnaia used a different swingarm. It is thought this was the version Marc Marquez and Fabio Di Giannantonio have been using this season.

The result was better grip for Bagnaia, which allowed him to push harder into the corners under braking.

“We'll have to try to start again from today because we found something that gave me a bit more grip, which helped me be competitive,” he said on Sunday. “The different swingarm and the large fuel tank helped me. It doesn't take much to have that little bit of extra confidence that makes the difference.

“We've been talking all year about details that help you feel a bit better and consequently go a bit faster. I've been taking huge risks since the start of the season; last year was an important lesson for me because it's better to finish the races than to crash.”

The reason he is wary about viewing this step as genuine progress is because this weekend’s San Marino Grand Prix is being run at Misano, where grip is a surplus. A strong weekend at Misano won’t necessarily be proof of anything.

Something else to consider is the fact that pace analysis reveals the Barcelona step to be small. In the sprint, Bagnaia was about a second per lap on average slower than team-mate Marc Marquez and around 0.6s behind VR46’s Di Giannantonio — both on GP25s.

In the grand prix, Bagnaia was considerably closer. But he was still 0.611s on average slower than race winner Alex Marquez and 0.532s down on Marc Marquez’s pace. Di Giannantonio crashed early on before retiring.

Bagnaia did have to make some moves on track, which will have contributed to this gap a little. But if he believed fifth was his maximum, then that was still 14.409s off the race win. So, traffic only offset is pace a little.

Both Bagnaia and Ducati deserve a lot of credit for this turnaround, but he is also right to be cautious about where this leads this weekend.