Francesco Bagnaia: “If someone one day can explain Motegi…”

It’s one of the biggest mysteries of the 2025 MotoGP season, not least for the rider involved.

How did Francesco Bagnaia’s fortunes transform so dramatically with a dominant double victory at Motegi, only to slump straight back to where he had been before Japan?

Bagnaia arrived at Motegi on the back of a five-round podium drought, capped by a pointless home weekend at Misano.

That was followed by an official test day, during which VR46 later confirmed that one of Franco Morbidelli’s GP24 machines was made available to the struggling double MotoGP champion.

Whatever was discovered then appeared to work spectacularly at Motegi.

Bagnaia - hampered by corner entry issues all season - finally looked like the rider of old, claiming pole position with a new lap record, then leading every lap of the Sprint and the grand prix. His only threat came from puffs of smoke during the Sunday race.

But hopes that a breakthrough had been found were crushed just a week later when Bagnaia slumped to 16th on the grid and scored no points in Mandalika, a pattern repeated at Phillip Island.

Sepang saw a return to form with pole and a Sprint victory, but Bagnaia wouldn’t stand on the rostrum again in 2025, a puncture in the Malaysian Grand Prix followed by three non-scores in the final four races.

“Honestly, if someone one day can explain to me what happened in Motegi, I will reward them,” Bagnaia reflected in the closing stages of the season.

“Because Motegi was the first time this season that I felt back in ’24. I was able to do what I wanted with my bike, and the result was quite clear: The lap record [in qualifying], then winning both races with gap.

“So it was incredible to me, feeling again like this.

“And then I was back to reality in Indonesia, and it was maybe the worst weekend I had in MotoGP. For feeling, for results, for the crash I had. I think it's one of the strangest crashes I had in my career.

“And then we were more or less in the same way in Phillip Island, with a bike that was quite uncontrollable in some situations.

“Luckily, in the race we found something and I was maybe able to finish in the top 7, a good result, considering all the rest of the weekend.

“And then Sepang started quite good, then due to my mistakes, I was out of Q2 on Friday, but moving from Q1 was helping, and then the pole position and [Sprint] win.”

While Bagnaia’s Sepang Sprint win was actually by a larger margin than in Motegi, the Italian made clear that feeling-wise, there was a big difference.

“Japan, honestly, is where I had the best feeling on my bike this season, more similar to my feeling from last year,” he said. “[Sepang] not, but we built more performance day by day.”

While crediting the Ducati team for improving his feeling on the GP25 over the Malaysian weekend, the Italian admitted that adapting to a package that dominated the season in the hands of team-mate Marc Marquez was a personal weakness.

“Honestly, I'm not a good adapter to what I don't like. This is my weak point, and even if I'm working on it, it's difficult to improve,” Bagnaia said.

“So I'm just trying to always give the best and most detailed feeling on the bike to the team. But I think [the good results were] more because I felt better [on the bike] than because I'm adapting to the bike.”

The other quirk of Bagnaia’s season is that, rather than chipping away at the issues as the season went on, his performance deteriorated from Austria onwards, leaving Motegi and Sepang as isolated exceptions.

“From Austria, I started to have more movement on the bike, and it's quite difficult to understand where it comes from,” Bagnaia said. “So we tried different things, but we never had a solution. Sometimes it's happening, sometimes not.

“This is the very difficult thing to understand. When the bike starts shaking, I [have to] close the gas. But for the team, to work on it, is more difficult.”

Bagnaia slipped from third at the midway stage of the season to fifth in the final MotoGP standings.