It looks as though there is no definite solution for Francesco Bagnaia’s frustrating struggles with Ducati in 2025.
The two-time MotoGP champion started the year off the pace of teammate Marc Marquez, and has only taken steps backwards since.
Bagnaia will have questioned everything from his bike to his team to himself, and he still cannot come up with an answer.
His last hope remains that Ducati will revert some of their big changes for 2025 over the winter, and help him return to the form he produced when he won 11 Grands Prix last year.
Bagnaia’s ‘main issue’ was just exposed by a testing Hungarian Grand Prix layout, which requires a lot of braking.
There’s a chance that Ducati will ‘run out of patience’ with his woes, but he is at least under contract for 2026. He doesn’t want to have to leave the team.
READ MORE: Davide Tardozzi shares the only ‘problem’ Ducati see after Francesco Bagnaia’s ‘outburst’
Francesco Bagnaia wants to ‘crush’ rumours about Ducati’s GP25 bike in 2025
Bagnaia’s Ducati struggles may continue into 2026, given that no party has even a hint of an explanation as to why he has fallen off so much.
Luigi Dall’Igna revealed the real reason in a private meeting and pointed to his rider struggling mentally with his performance.
However, the deficit is now so large that it cannot be the entire explanation. Whether being on the GP24 would’ve made a difference this year is also another question.
Addressing MowMag, the Italian wanted to ‘crush’ rumours that he could’ve picked up on the GP25 bike’s shortfalls earlier in pre-season.
“I want to crush these speculations. They come from social media, what are we talking about? If I went back? That’s easy, of course I would choose GP24, that’s clear.
“But you can’t and I at that time was not able to recognise the potential. But there is no going back. Today I made centimetre changes to the bike, which is a lot.”
READ MORE: Marc Marquez says Francesco Bagnaia is facing the same ‘doubt’ he had when he left Honda
Why Francesco Bagnaia hit out at an ‘inappropriate’ reaction to his Ducati struggles
There’s a chance that if things continue as they are, the 28-year-old slides outside of the top three in the riders’ standings. Bagnaia would receive a ‘big hit’ financially if that were to happen.
No one wants to avoid that fate more than he does. 14 races into the campaign, and he has tried so many setups, bike configurations and different parts and still nothing has changed. It will be quite tiring.
There are suggestions that a move to Yamaha could be a good thing for the future, but he would be taking a risk jumping off a recognised race-winning bike.
Bagnaia slammed an ‘inappropriate’ reaction to his recent results ahead of riding at Balaton Park, and thinks criticism levelled at him has been unfair.
Somewhere in him remains the rider who competed for the title four times between 2021 and 2024, and no doubt will a lot more times before his career draws to a close.
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