Pecco Bagnaia’s muted Austria MotoGP assessment as Ducati riders "closer to me"

Pecco Bagnaia believes his Ducati team-mates were “closer to me” than he was to them at the MotoGP Austrian Grand Prix, as his end result was no better than usual.

The double world champion looked to be more competitive on his Ducati across the Red Bull Ring weekend, though was never a factor in the podium battle.

Qualifying seventh on the grid, Pecco Bagnaia finished there in the grand prix, though was promoted a spot after Gresini’s Fermin Aldeguer was given a penalty post-race.

While he beat VR46’s Fabio Di Giannantonio on pure pace and was just a few seconds behind fifth-placed Marc Marquez, Bagnaia doesn’t believe he’s actually closed the gap to his Ducati stablemates.

“It's hard to say,” he told Sky Italy when asked to assess his weekend.

“We definitely worked well as a team and did the best we could. But more than me getting closer to the other Ducatis, they got closer to me, honestly, because in the end I was seventh, eighth; even in the other races I was close to doing that.

“This is a track where you can get off the ground a lot, so it's generally where I lose a little less.

“But we'll see, because I think today we noticed a loss compared to previous years: we're lacking in entry speed, corner speed, and especially in the first phase of pick-up, where we're not able to get good traction.

“We saw it a lot in the results, because today's race was quite slower than in the past, for everyone, because even [Pedro] Acosta, who won, wasn't very fast in terms of race distance. But probably the conditions, and then we lost a little more than we would have expected.”

What the data showed about Ducati in Austria

Bagnaia added that data from previous years has highlighted how much Ducati riders struggled into the corners and on acceleration at the Red Bull Ring last weekend.

“These days I've also tried to look at the old data, and you can clearly see the difference in the final phase of corner entry and the first phase of corner exit, where we were able to carry much more speed into the corners, and we were able to get better traction,” he explained.

“But in any case, for better or for worse, we all gave our all.

“I wouldn't have expected Ducati to struggle so much, but I would have expected KTM and Aprilia to be so strong, because Aprilia was already strong last year, and KTM, who decided on the engine changes since Aragon, have made a big step forward, and Pedro is riding them very well.”

Bagnaia also noted that he had a similar front brake problem to team-mate Marc Marquez during the race.

"Yes... it [the lever] came very close to me, three times it reached my hand and I had to push it away.”