{"id":276381,"date":"2025-11-10T23:08:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T23:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/276381\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T23:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T23:08:09","slug":"bezzecchi-makes-motogp-history-for-aprilia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/276381\/","title":{"rendered":"Bezzecchi makes MotoGP history for Aprilia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another MotoGP<\/a> weekend, another miserable three days for Ducati<\/a>\u2019s Desmosedici GP25, ending with an eighth, a 15th and a crash in Sunday\u2019s Portuguese Grand Prix.<\/p>\n

There was a silver lining of sorts. Nico Bulega<\/a>\u2019s ride to 15th (the World Superbike runner-up is subbing for injured world champion Marc M\u00e1rquez<\/a>) gave the factory team its first grand prix point since M\u00e1rquez won the championship in Japan<\/a>, six weeks and four race weekends ago!<\/p>\n

Pecco Bagnaia<\/a> was pushing hard in fourth place on Sunday when he tumbled out \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

And then the long trudge back to pitlane, shoulders slumped, head bowed. And yet\u2026 and yet\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 in all but name \u2014 a GP24.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019ll do Turn 7 like Marc,\u2019 and boom, I crashed!\u201d<\/p>\n

The one-day Valencia test doesn\u2019t usually mean much, but it will be interesting to watch Bagnaia and VR46<\/a>\u2019s GP25 rider Fabio Di Giannantonio<\/a> 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\u2019s happening with the front tyre, just like Alex M\u00e1rquez<\/a>, when he went from a GP23 to a GP24 at last November\u2019s post-season Barcelona tests.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first time I tried the GP24 in the Catalunya tests, it was like, wow, this bike is super-nice to ride!\u201d recalls Alex. \u201cI could ride the bike as I wanted, I didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Alex<\/p>\n

M\u00e1rquez and Acosta spent lots of time together in the sprint, less in the main race<\/p>\n

\n Dorna\n <\/p>\n

Throughout his ten-month 2025 prison sentence, Bagnaia has had to sit and examine his own data and compare it with data from Ducati\u2019s other five riders, two of them on GP25s, three of them on GP24s.<\/p>\n

He has looked at team-mate Marc\u2019s GP25 data and wondered how the hell the Spaniard is doing what he\u2019s doing. And occasionally he\u2019s made the mistake of trying to emulate the 2025 champ.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s impossible [to do what you do], especially at Turn 7,\u201d Bagnaia told Marc during April\u2019s Spanish GP at Jerez<\/a>. \u201cThis morning I said, \u2018I\u2019ll do Turn 7 like Marc,\u2019 and boom, I crashed!\u201d<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s also had to look at Alex\u2019s 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%!<\/p>\n

\u201cLast year I never had this feeling and I was doing things that this year I cannot do,\u201d said Bagnaia earlier this season and he wasn\u2019t making it up.<\/p>\n

Of course, Ducati won\u2019t admit next week that its GP26 prototype is basically a GP24, because manufacturers rarely admit they\u2019ve gone backwards, because this means their engineers didn\u2019t do their sums right.<\/p>\n

Is the GP24 still the best motorcycle on the grid? There\u2019s been no doubt that through most of this season the bike has been faster and friendlier than all the others. But perhaps Aprilia<\/a>\u2019s RS-GP is now the best.<\/p>\n

And we should stop right there and think about that \u2014 one of Ducati\u2019s four rivals has finally built a bike that\u2019s better than last year\u2019s Desmosedici.<\/p>\n

When Aprilia gets it right and keeps moving forward over the weekend it gets to Sunday afternoon with a bike that\u2019s at least as fast as anything out there.<\/p>\n

\"Marco<\/p>\n

The pace of the podium men \u2013 M\u00e1rquez, Bezzecchi and Acosta \u2013 made this the second most spread out dry race of the year<\/p>\n

\n MotoGP\n <\/p>\n

And this isn\u2019t easy for the Noale factory, because most of the season it\u2019s only had one rider that\u2019s really on it, which is a huge handicap, because it\u2019s working from only one good data and feedback source.<\/p>\n

Marco Bezzecchi<\/a> didn\u2019t have what he needed on Saturday afternoon, when he couldn\u2019t run with Alex or KTM<\/a>\u2019s Pedro Acosta<\/a>, but no-one even got close to him on Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another MotoGP weekend, another miserable three days for Ducati\u2019s Desmosedici GP25, ending with an eighth, a 15th and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[160286,64,63,10732,806,805,803,804,160287,85],"class_list":["post-276381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-2025-motogp-portuguese-gp","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-marco-bezzecchi","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-portimao","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}