Another MotoGP weekend, another miserable three days for Ducati’s Desmosedici GP25, ending with an eighth, a 15th and a crash in Sunday’s Portuguese Grand Prix.
There was a silver lining of sorts. Nico Bulega’s ride to 15th (the World Superbike runner-up is subbing for injured world champion Marc Márquez) gave the factory team its first grand prix point since Márquez won the championship in Japan, six weeks and four race weekends ago!
Pecco Bagnaia was pushing hard in fourth place on Sunday when he tumbled out — a gentle squeeze of front brake as he swept into Turn 11 a little faster than usual and the front was gone, like always, no warning, no nothing. His fourth crash from the last six GPs.
And then the long trudge back to pitlane, shoulders slumped, head bowed. And yet… and yet… maybe there was just a glimmer of a smile behind his dark visor, because Bagnaia is very nearly at the end of his 2025 nightmare, which started ten months ago during the opening pre-season tests at Sepang, Malaysia.
Eight days from now, Bagnaia will awake from his nightmare when he rolls out of Valencia pitlane to commence testing for the 2026 season aboard what will be — in all but name — a GP24.
“I said, ‘I’ll do Turn 7 like Marc,’ and boom, I crashed!”
The one-day Valencia test doesn’t usually mean much, but it will be interesting to watch Bagnaia and VR46’s GP25 rider Fabio Di Giannantonio during their get-out-of-jail day. They will both be in heaven, instead of hell, riding motorcycles that do what they want them to do and keep them informed about what’s happening with the front tyre, just like Alex Márquez, when he went from a GP23 to a GP24 at last November’s post-season Barcelona tests.
“The first time I tried the GP24 in the Catalunya tests, it was like, wow, this bike is super-nice to ride!” recalls Alex. “I could ride the bike as I wanted, I didn’t need to adapt a lot to extract its potential. I had struggled a lot with the GP23, so it was so nice to find a bike that was quite natural.”
Márquez and Acosta spent lots of time together in the sprint, less in the main race
Dorna
Throughout his ten-month 2025 prison sentence, Bagnaia has had to sit and examine his own data and compare it with data from Ducati’s other five riders, two of them on GP25s, three of them on GP24s.
He has looked at team-mate Marc’s GP25 data and wondered how the hell the Spaniard is doing what he’s doing. And occasionally he’s made the mistake of trying to emulate the 2025 champ.
“It’s impossible [to do what you do], especially at Turn 7,” Bagnaia told Marc during April’s Spanish GP at Jerez. “This morning I said, ‘I’ll do Turn 7 like Marc,’ and boom, I crashed!”
And he’s also had to look at Alex’s GP24 data and get all nostalgic for his 2024 campaign, during which he rode his GP24 to 11 grand prix victories and scored an average 24.9 points per weekend. This season he is averaging 13.7 points per weekend, a drop of 45%!
“Last year I never had this feeling and I was doing things that this year I cannot do,” said Bagnaia earlier this season and he wasn’t making it up.
Of course, Ducati won’t admit next week that its GP26 prototype is basically a GP24, because manufacturers rarely admit they’ve gone backwards, because this means their engineers didn’t do their sums right.
Is the GP24 still the best motorcycle on the grid? There’s been no doubt that through most of this season the bike has been faster and friendlier than all the others. But perhaps Aprilia’s RS-GP is now the best.
And we should stop right there and think about that — one of Ducati’s four rivals has finally built a bike that’s better than last year’s Desmosedici.
When Aprilia gets it right and keeps moving forward over the weekend it gets to Sunday afternoon with a bike that’s at least as fast as anything out there.
The pace of the podium men – Márquez, Bezzecchi and Acosta – made this the second most spread out dry race of the year
MotoGP
And this isn’t easy for the Noale factory, because most of the season it’s only had one rider that’s really on it, which is a huge handicap, because it’s working from only one good data and feedback source.
Marco Bezzecchi didn’t have what he needed on Saturday afternoon, when he couldn’t run with Alex or KTM’s Pedro Acosta, but no-one even got close to him on Sunday afternoon.
He took half a second out of the rest of the pack on the very first lap and the closest anyone got after that was Alex, who briefly closed the gap to four-tenths once he got into the groove.