MotoGP | Bagnaia: “I knew that the first one who would give up would lose”

In Barcelona, ​​he was the one who gave Aleix Espargaro the Sprint win on the last lap and the situation was reversed for Pecco Bagnaia at the Sachsenring, where it was his rival in the race for the title Jorge Martin who served him the German Grand Prix on a silver platter with a crash. His fourth consecutive win, which allowed him to also take the lead in the World Championship, with a 10-point margin over “Martinator”.

The Ducati rider was keen to point out, however, that both he and the rider from Madrid were really doing a different sport compared to the rest of the group in the final part of the race and that by keeping up that infernal pace with very little grip it was almost inevitable that one of the two would end up making a mistake. Indeed, with great honesty, he admitted that he too had risked ending up with his wheels in the air at a certain point.

“Sooner or later something had to happen to one of the two, because the last ten laps of the race were on nothing: the front was closing and the back was going. We had no more traction, but we were continuing to do low 1’21″s, so it was really tough. Honestly, the lap before Jorge fell, I lost the front too, in fact I widened the trajectory a bit. But the first one who would have given up, would have lost, so I didn’t want to give up until the end and he was doing the same. But something had to happen to one of the two to continue with this pace”, Bagnaia told Sky Sport MotoGP.

With four consecutive victories, the top of the world rankings and the wedding coming up in about ten days, it seems like a happy moment, in which everything has aligned for the best for Bagnaia, who however was keen to underline that all of this was achieved with a lot of work.

“The planets didn’t align, but we aligned them. It wasn’t an easy start to the championship, but we did an incredible job. We definitely weren’t the favourites, because Jorge was stronger here, but we managed to get ourselves in order to fight for the win. Today for me, race management was extremely important and similar to Barcelona: when Jorge and Morbidelli passed me, maybe they were pushing a little too hard on the tyres and in the last laps maybe I had a little more. But it was really tough, a long race, in which the tyres struggled a lot, especially the front one, so winning today is a fantastic thing, also because it’s the fourth win in a row and the last as a bachelor.”

As the Ducati rider explained, after Martin and Morbidelli passed him, he was also called upon to have a moment of management and therefore he was asked if there had been any particular problem in that moment of the race.

“I started well and was able to push straight away. When I got to the front, however, it seemed to me that the tyre temperature on the right had dropped, especially the rear, because I couldn’t stop when braking and had to brake earlier at Turn 1, so both Jorge and Franco passed me there. But I was also losing a bit of rear, so when they both passed me I tried to understand the situation and slowly bring the temperature back up. I managed to do it and that was the most important thing, because I think that if I had stuck to them straight away I wouldn’t have had the energy to push Jorge like that in the end.”

But he deserves credit for the fact that Martin probably wouldn’t have made a mistake if Pecco hadn’t tried to push him until the end: “He knew I was faster in T3 and that I was gaining a lot on the descent, so he wanted to avoid me getting within two tenths of him. We pushed hard, but in the last laps the front didn’t want to know anymore, it closed in all the long corners. Every time I tried to get a little closer, I saw that he was pushing even harder and in the end he slipped to the 1, but we were doing an incredible pace”.

Once he arrived at the parc fermé, Bagnaia then crossed the track to go and give his soap bars to two children who had dedicated a banner to him, then he explained why he had chosen them among the more than 250 thousand spectators who had gathered on the German ups and downs.

“I had been passing by there all weekend and I saw that they had written to me to give him a gadget, but I didn’t want to just give him the hat and I promised myself that if I won I would bring him the soaps. It wasn’t easy, because it was quite a long race, but I saw the little girl’s face and she was extremely happy, so I was very pleased”, he concluded.