I believe it. The hubris is high in the Ducati factory team. It finally took someone like Casey to force them to look into it with new (old) ideas.

 

Hopefully Pecco will still continue to win or at least compete with MM.

Then shove it up Ducati’s ass !

 

Italian teams in general (see: Ferrari) are notorious for not listening to riders/drivers.

I watched P2 or P3 in Azerbaijan and it looked like the front end of Pecco's bike almost had a bad headshake. He was clearly uncomfortable on it, and slow.

A smaller fork for Motegi = stable front end, happy and fast Bagnaia...

 

Click bait?

😂🤣😂

 

They only did what Lorenzo was asking AFTER he signed a contract with Honda...and then immediately he's up there winning races with his comfortable gas tank, etc.

They're awful. Just like Ferrari in F1.

They will pay a multiple world title winner millions of dollars to fight for thousands of a second.....and then be like oh no you couldn't possibly know what youre talking about.

Lorenzo was bookin' it on the Ducati once they made the changes! We missed out on some amazing races and i was so mad.

 

I suspect Ducati had to honor their agreement with Marquez to secure his title, along with all the marketing/advertising deals the championship brings. The Spanish market is huge and the fans rabid. The coincidence seems a little too obvious. Is Moto GP going to wind up like F1, Nascar, and the NFL, with advertisers calling the shots?

 

This is really disappointing if it's true. It sounds like Ducati were really invested in the fairytale, which shows by the way they ignored Pecco's team. I bet if Marc said jump, they'd all be jumping.

For those who wanted Marc to win, I think he still would've won. But we wanted to see a close title race. This was a gift to Marc that he didn't need.

I feel cheated. We wanted a title fight. Are you telling me all we needed was for Ducati to listen and respond??

 

What did Dovi always tell Ducati? Make the bike turn. They didn’t make the bike turn until after he left.

 

What this scenario does is re-enforce the fact that Marc Marquez is indeed a different rider, practically an alien, similar to Casey Stoner, who could ride and win on an unrideable bike. The Honda Marc won so many times on couldn’t be ridden by others. The 2025 Ducati can’t be ridden by others to the same level Marc can.

It really all means that Marc Marquez will go down in history as an alien-level rider. I don’t care for his tactics when struggling like on the finally uncompetitive Honda against the Ducati, even with an alien rider like Marc, but you (and I) can’t deny he is the best “rider” to ever race in MotoGP. He will eventually break all the records, unless he literally dies before achieving them.

I cheer for Pecco much more than for Marc though because Pecco is much more of a reserved gentleman than Marc.

 

One point on the "article" (it's really more of an aggregation of other articles and interviews):

"Bagnaia fumed over Stoner not being there more often to help him in 2025."

That's not at all true. In fact, this is the Bagnaia quote from the link on their own website:

"It’s a shame he can’t always be there: we understand each other, we have similar ideas, and we talk often."

Definitely not "fuming," as if it were Casey's responsibility for getting the bike properly set-up.

Otherwise? I agree with others that not just Ducati, but other MotoGP factory teams (mainly HRC in the past) have a long history of preferring to listen to their engineers above the feedback from the racers who are actually riding the bikes. "We got it right, you just aren't riding properly." And, on top of that, although Ducati famously states that all of their riders and race team have full access to the data from all of the other riders, it's pretty hard to "be heard" when you're teammate is annihilating you and the competitition riding the same bike.

I think it'd really show Ducati if Pecco beat Marc in all of the upcoming races.

My own thoughts prior to the Japanese round were that Pecco just needed to get out of his head, get angry, and just ride the damn thing. There is a long history of riders who have just gotten a little "off" and can't seem to get back to winning because there's always something "wrong" with the bikes.

I can't remember which mechanic (probably several) who have played tricks on great riders--"Oh, it's doing that bad thing on the track? I'll fix that for you" and then they do nothing but tell the rider that they did, the rider goes out on track, comes back, and the rider says the bike is great, thanks! 🤣

 

The reality is nobody can beat Marc except himself as he’s shown a few times this season. If Motegi wasn’t wrap up the title time, Marc would have likely beaten Pecco there too.

 

So you’re saying that Mark wasn’t concerned about winning in Japan because he knew he had the title in hand regardless?

Or can you please clarify?

 

I dont completely buy that Ducati were not listening and trying to make adjustments. These are prototype motorcycles, there are thousands of different combinations to setting up a MotoGP bike. It would be more likely that Stoner was better able to communicate to the engineers how the bike was behaving and what adjustments needed to be made.

 

^I suspect that's true, had he been close in points to Pecco he would've fought tooth and nail to catch him, but no sense risking a championship in hand today just for first place honors.

 

Gotcha.