Enea Bastianini will join the new look Gresini Ducati team in the 2021 MotoGP World Championship for what will be his second season in the top flight.
The Italian made his debut in MotoGP with Avintia Ducati on the back of winning the 2020 title. He is also a runner-up in the Moto3 World Championship.
Enea Bastianini - Route to MotoGP
While it took Bastianini five seasons of Moto3 racing to step up to Moto2, he secured the intermediate class title at only his second attempt.
Indeed, one could say Bastianini deserved to step up to Moto2 - and therefore MotoGP - earlier than he did after securing third in the overall Moto3 standings as long ago as 2015 for what was his second season in the category.
Though he won only a single race, his consistency earned him a lofty finishing position, a strength that would be highlighted again in 2016 when he scored only one victory en route to the runners-up spot behind Brad Binder.
Despite these results, Bastianini would continue to spend the next two seasons in Moto3, managing just one more win with Leopard Racing in 2018 before eventually moving up to Moto2 in 2019.
Joining the Italtrans Racing Team, Bastianini was the standout rookie performer, proving a consistent top ten racer and peaking with a run to third at Brno. He’d end the year tenth in the standings, marginally behind top rookie Fabio Di Giannantonio.
Sticking with Italtrans for 2020, Bastianini got his title winning campaign off to a good start by scoring two wins from the opening four races at Andalucia and Brno.
Though he achieved just one more win - at Misano - he kept arch rival Luca Marini honest before the Italian lost his momentum in the closing stages of the year, while he’d repel a late charge from Sam Lowes when the Briton crashed in Valencia and injured himself.
As such, after a nervy final round showdown in Portimao, Bastianini’s fifth place finish would be enough to land him the title by nine points.
By that stage it had already been confirmed that he would be MotoGP bound for 2021 after signing a contract with Ducati and being placed at Avintia Racing alongside Marini in an all-rookie line-up running two-year-old GP19 machinery.
Avintia Ducati (2021)
Johann Zarco had taken the same Avintia GP19 bike to the team's first pole and podium in 2020. But despite the growing age gap to the 2021 bikes, Bastianini was able to stand on the podium twice on his way to 11th in the world championship (two places higher than Zarco the previous year).
That's despite failing to qualify higher than ninth, his main Achilles' heel in his rookie season. Indeed, Bastianini's Misano rostrums were only achieved after charging from just twelfth and 16th on the grid.
Although beaten to top rookie honours by race winner Jorge Martin on the latest GP21, Bastianini scored more than twice the points of team-mate Marini, the only rider on equal machinery.
It'll be interesting to see what the young Italian can do on GP21 machinery at Gresini next year, as the Italian team reverts to full Independent status ater splitting fromt the factory Aprilia project.
