Francesco Bagnaia’s first half of the 2025 MotoGP season couldn’t have gone much worse at Ducati.
He has notched just one victory after teammate Marc Marquez made a critical mistake at the Americas Grand Prix.
On merit, Bagnaia just hasn’t had the pace to win and has been even slower than Alex Marquez on a one-year-old GP24 for much of the season, too.
Every solution Ducati have tried just doesn’t seem to work. It’s going to be a case of waiting until 2026 for improvements.
Michele Pirro feels ‘sorry’ for Bagnaia, and the test rider believes that his team could have backed him even further in his pursuit of success.
With an eye on the future, Ducati have ‘been seen’ speaking to an ‘outstanding’ rider who could replace Bagnaia in 2027 if results fail to improve.
Photo by Mirco Lazzari gp/Getty ImagesFrancesco Bagnaia left ‘really raging’ at Ducati over Marc Marquez’s pace early in 2025
Bagnaia was visibly furious with his Ducati crew just before the summer break at the Czech Grand Prix. He now trails by 168 points and is third in the standings.
With the season set to draw to a close in just over three months, Bagnaia doesn’t think Ducati can fix a critical issue with his bike. He’s resigned to his fate.
And Mat Oxley believes that it took him a few races to also resign to his teammate’s form. Marquez beat him so convincingly and it left him ‘really raging’ at first.
“I kind of feel that, which quite often happens when a rider has a bad start to a season when they were expecting a good start,” he said on the Oxley Bom MotoGP podcast.
“They’re really kind of traumatised for the first four or five races and kind of raging inside. They don’t know what the f—- is going on. Then they kind of just get used to it and they accept it.
“To me, that’s what Bagnaia has done. He was really raging at the first few races and now he’s just accepted it, and he’s also accepted that he’s getting his a—- kicked by Marc Marquez.”
What can Francesco Bagnaia do to beat Marc Marquez?
The GP25 bike seems to be a machine that only one man can extract the most from. Both Bagnaia and Fabio Di Giannantonio have struggled on it otherwise.
With homologation rules in place for 2026, reverting back to the GP24 could be an option too, but it would feel like taking a few steps back.
Bagnaia has now realised his reality that beating Marquez is almost impossible to achieve. He is so good in so many areas.
If a change in machinery fails to spark anything, then it may be time to seek alternative solutions for the future to get back to his next form. There will be plenty of seats open for 2027.