Jorge Lorenzo’s two-year stint at Ducati was a disappointing one, and he was asked to take a sizeable pay cut before eventually leaving in 2019.
Lorenzo’s move to Ducati sparked ‘chaos’ for the MotoGP rider market in 2017. He had spent his entire premier class career with the factory Yamaha team, winning three championships in 2010, 2012 and 2015.
But the Spaniard made the switch to Ducati in 2017, following in the footsteps of his former Yamaha teammate Valentino Rossi, who moved to the Bologna Bullets in 2011. However, both of their stints were eerily similar.
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Ducati were not offering Jorge Lorenzo a ‘tenth’ of what Yamaha were before leaving the team
The Spaniard failed to win a race in his first season with Ducati in 2017, and while he did win three races in 2018, he finished ninth in the standings, his lowest finish up to that point.
Lorenzo was ‘obsessed’ with improving Ducati’s bike, but he struggled to mount a serious challenge at the front. At the end of 2018, he left the Borgo Panigale outfit and partnered with Marc Marquez at Honda in 2019 – he had his worst season on record before retiring.
Speaking on the Fast & Curious YouTube channel, he felt that he could have won more titles if Ducati were ‘more patient’ with him.
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Lorenzo said: “2019 was a very difficult year, and if it hadn’t been for that decision to go with the flow, wouldn’t it?
“If Ducati had been a bit more patient and had renewed my contract, well, I would surely have carried on in motorcycling for another three years and perhaps had a few more titles to my name.
“But overall I always say that I can’t complain and I feel privileged to have had the career that I did. It wasn’t perfect, but it could have been much worse.”
He then added that after leaving Ducati, he did not feel valued by top teams in MotoGP. The Bologna Bullets had asked him to take a 90% pay cut to stay with the team before he joined Honda.
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“It was tough, and perhaps it was the first time in my life that I was – if not actually in a state of depression, then certainly very close to it, wasn’t it?” he added.
“Because it was the first time I realised that I didn’t feel valued by the top teams. And that, for many years, I’d been with some of the best teams.
“I’d always been of interest to Yamaha and the biggest teams, but on that occasion Ducati – which had offered me the biggest contract in MotoGP history up to that point – wasn’t even offering me a tenth of that.
“And Yamaha couldn’t take me onto their factory team, so I had to accept a place with the new Petronas team. So, I didn’t want to go to a satellite team and I went into a sort of mini-depression.”
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