MotoGP | Bagnaia: “GP24? Enormous potential, but not everything is under control”

Pecco Bagnaia and Ducati were the star performers of the 2024 MotoGP pre-season, scaring the competition with shattered records. When it started to get serious, however, the music changed for the two-time reigning world champion: apart from the beautiful victory achieved on Sunday in Qatar, leading practically from start to finish, there were more downs than the highs for the moment.

After the first three rounds of the season, the Piedmontese finds himself in fourth place in the world championship standings, already 30 points behind the leader Jorge Martin. This weekend, however, he returns to the track in Jerez, where last year he had already managed to overturn a not particularly exciting moment, given that he had just recovered from two crashes in Argentina and in Austin, which had deprived him of a second place and a victory that seemed practically on ice. This is why he approaches the Andalusian trip with optimism, even if he is aware that the situation is less simple than it might seem.

“We know what our potential is and where we can get to. Our performance can lead us to win all the races, so this is our goal, but we have to start from a little further back. We know that the situation at the moment is a little 'more complicated, because we don't have everything under control. But in Austin we understood several things that we will bring here and in my opinion we can be competitive straight away,” Bagnaia told Italian journalists immediately after the conclusion of the press conference that opened the weekend. of the Spanish GP.

What is tormenting both him and Martin is an annoying chatter in the rear. A problem that doesn't seem to affect his teammate Enea Bastianini. The trouble, however, is that even in Borgo Panigale they haven't yet managed to understand why the rider from Rimini is immune to it.

“It's difficult to understand, because Martin and I have a lot of vibrations, while Enea doesn't have any, but we have very similar set-ups. It's something that escapes even the technicians, who can't give an explanation as to why Enea was so fast without having vibrations.”

What is certain is that the adaptation to the GP24 is proving to take longer than anyone would have expected: “It's really a situation that needs to be understood. With the GP22, even if I started last, we had already found the right balance from Portimao and from there up front we practically never touched anything again. Instead, with last year's bike it was all a bit of a chase, even though it still got us 15 podiums and in the races in which I didn't get to the podium I crashed. Let's say it depends a lot from the feeling with the bike: this has enormous potential, but we need to understand some situations.”

But it must also be said that starting the season uphill was also a leitmotif of his two world titles: “The two races last year in which I didn't finish I was second and first, while this year I was knocked out I was fifth in Portimao. The situation is a little different, but the potential is the same, but we have to understand how to resolve these vibrations, which are more complicated than we thought. We thought we had succeeded in Qatar, because we went a lot on Sunday stronger than Saturday, but obviously a little more work is needed.”