Alvaro Bautista picks out 2025 “reset” moment: “I felt a lot of pain inside”

A crash at the Aragon WorldSBK proved a critical “reset” point for Alvaro Bautista in his final season as a factory Ducati rider.

Bautista was in a late-season battle with Danilo Petrucci and Andrea Locatelli for third place in the 2025 World Superbike riders’ standings, but a crash in Race 1 at the third-last round in Aragon seemed to end his chances at a top-three finish.

But from there Bautista was on the podium in every race, and the Spanish rider thinks his response to that crash was critical in him making such a strong end to the season. 

“Maybe not the best, but an important moment for me was Aragon in Race 1,” Alvaro Bautista told WorldSBK.com at EICMA.

“I crashed out, and after that crash was, for me– I felt like it was a [before and after]. It changed me a lot inside. 

“Sincerely, it has been one crash in all my career that I [felt] a lot of inside pain. 

“I had a memory of a couple of crashes like this and, in Aragon, it was like a starting point.

“After that, I was on the podium in all the rest of the races, but my mentality, my feelings, changed a lot there. 

“I said ‘It was not the best moment of the season but it was very important to have that moment’. 

“I think in all the bad moments you can learn something and that crash gave me another point of view, another perspective, and I think I learned a lot from that. 

“So, on one side I’m not happy about that crash but on the other hand I’m really that it happened because I think after that I approached in a different way everything. 

“It has been an important moment last [season] but also for the future. “

The late-season reset got Bautista a top-three spot in the World Superbike standings in the end. Not what he aims for, but a good way to end his time at the factory Ducati team, he said.

“After winning two championships, to finish third seems like not a good result,” Bautista said.

“But it’s true that in 2024 and 2025 we couldn’t fight with the same weapons as the others; the conditions we had were worse, we were penalised [by] the weight penalisation rule. 

“So, at the end, it was the maximum we can achieve because Nicolo [Bulega] and Toprak [Razgatlioglu] were very strong, but we were not in the same conditions to fight against them. 

“So, I think it was important at least to finish in the podium at the end of the season and to end the relationship with Aruba with a third place is better than fourth or fifth. 

“Also, because we won also the Teams’ Championship, so I think it has been a good way to end this period with them.”