Fabio di Giannantonio finds improvement with “biggest issue“ at Sepang test

Fabio di Giannantonio is cautiously confident that last year’s front-end woes on the GP25 are behind him, but is reserving final judgement until Buriram.

The VR46 Ducati rider took the revised GP26 to third place on the Sepang MotoGP test timesheets despite not getting a chance to try his “full package” of preferred parts at the same time.

Nonetheless, despite running through various hardware and set-up options over the three days, Fabio di Giannantonio felt consistently good with the front.

“I'm really happy about these three days of testing because I think the speed has always been there, and the feeling too,” he said.

“I'm happy because I had no slow laps in every kind of run that we were doing.

“I tried many, many things on the set-up side and new pieces for the chassis, for the aero.

“It’s just a pity for the rain of yesterday because we needed a couple more runs to complete the full package.

“I think in Thailand we will see the full package together.”

di Giannantonio’s best lap of the test was a 1m 56.785s on the final morning, followed by a slightly slower 1m 57.093s in the afternoon.

“We tried something in the time attack in the afternoon to try to improve, but it was the opposite. I still did a ‘57.0. It's a great lap. But it was not with the best package for us.”

After a 2025 season in which his front feeling on the GP25 could change dramatically from one session to the next, di Giannantonio used the word “predictable” for how the GP26 had performed.

“The biggest issue for me was to find consistency in feeling from the front,” he confirmed.

“And here, more or less with all the [changes] we've made, the front was feeling good, so that is already a good improvement.”

The big question now is whether that predictability will carry over to the final test at Buriram later this month.

“Let's see if we can repeat it in another condition in Thailand. That's the key,” di Giannantonio said.

But the Italian insisted the high grip levels at the end of the Sepang test were still ‘realistic’.

“Now the grip level of Malaysia is always good, and then it comes really good [by the end of the race weekend]. So the track conditions [at the test] were still in the range that you can understand what you're trying.”

Team-mate Franco Morbidelli was seventh fastest on the satellite-spec machine, later denying that it could be called a 'GP25'.