{"id":658288,"date":"2026-05-08T19:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T19:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/658288\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T19:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T19:00:08","slug":"pecco-bagnaia-much-happier-despite-le-mans-motogp-practice-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/658288\/","title":{"rendered":"Pecco Bagnaia \u201cmuch happier\u201d despite Le Mans MotoGP practice crash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Pecco Bagnaia finished a promising opening day at the 2026 French MotoGP third on the timesheets, despite a late crash.<\/p>\n<p>The Italian was able to build on progress made at the recent Jerez test, including a new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/motogp\/teams\/ducati-lenovo-team\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ducati<\/a> fairing, but admitted he\u2019s still missing something.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the Jerez test I was feeling a bit better, and today I felt it [again], so I\u2019m happy,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/motogp\/racer\/911999\/francesco-bagnaia\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Bagnaia <\/a>told MotoGP.com.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s clear that we&#8217;re still missing something, but it was a step. And glad that it&#8217;s like this because today I was able to push, control the tyres and it makes me much happier.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEven if I crashed, I crashed pushing and not like sometimes this year when I crashed without really knowing why.<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut I still miss some turning, so we are pushing to make the bike stop better and turn more.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTomorrow we will try something if it\u2019s dry. But right now, I&#8217;m okay, I&#8217;m happy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bagnaia revealed that rain could arrive just as Saturday morning\u2019s qualifying gets underway.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe weather forecast looks like for qualifying it will start to rain, so it&#8217;s important that we make a step in the wet compared to Jerez, because I was struggling quite a lot for grip.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bagnaia\u2019s late fall also had consequences for team-mate Marc Marquez, whose final attempt to secure a direct Qualifying 2 place<a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/motogp\/news\/1094660\/1\/unlucky-marc-marquez-left-qualifying-1-le-mans-motogp\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> was scuppered due to the yellow flags<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pecco Bagnaia finished a promising opening day at the 2026 French MotoGP third on the timesheets, despite a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,17197,8456,7607,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-658288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-ducati","tag-ducati-lenovo-team","tag-francesco-bagnaia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658288","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=658288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}