2025 was a tough season for Pecco Bagnaia. Coming off four years where he had either won the championship or narrowly missed out, the speed at which things fell apart surprised everyone. The fact that Bagnaia’s decline coincided with the arrival of Marc Márquez as his teammate in the factory Ducati Lenovo squad prompted a lot of people to infer causation from correlation. Bagnaia, however, rejected such an idea.
Things had been difficult from the Sepang test, where the Italian had struggled with the way the Ducati GP25 behaved on corner entry. That would turn out to be a problem that Ducati never managed to fix. Bagnaia’s results went downhill as the season progressed.
There were false dawns, which made things worse. The test at Aragon where Bagnaia thought that the 355mm brake discs would help him find the feeling from the front on braking that he was missing. A big setup change at Hungary, which he thought had made an improvement. Worst of all, his triumphant clean sweep at Motegi, taking pole and victory in both sprint and GP. A week later, he crashed out of last place at Mandalika.
Before the final race of 2025 at Valencia, I spoke to Cristian Gabarrini, the man who has been Bagnaia’s crew chief since the Italian arrived in MotoGP in 2019. Gabarrini talked about how difficult 2025 was for everyone on Bagnaia’s side of the Ducati Lenovo garage, how they tried to address the problems the Italian had in braking, about managing a rider who is going through that difficult a period, and about just how mystified they were by the results at Motegi.
