MotoGP | Bagnaia: “I managed too much and Martin exploited it”

Sachsenring has never been on Pecco Bagnaia’s list of favorite tracks and the Ducati rider had already indicated it as the possible theater of the redemption of his opponents, after five consecutive victories between long races and Sprint. Indeed, on the German ups and downs he was not as brilliant as in the three previous weekends, but after the Sprint there is a bit of regret for having probably wasted an opportunity to extend the streak.

Despite starting from the second row, the reigning world champion had managed to take the lead at the start, but then admitted to having made an error of judgment, preferring to try to manage the degradation of the tires instead of imposing the pace and staying in front. Once he found himself third, behind Jorge Martin and Miguel Oliveira, in fact, he no longer had the chance to react due to the increase in pressure in the front tire. The doubt, therefore, is that if he had done less calculations perhaps now he could be at -7 instead of -15 compared to “Martinator”.

“I started very well, then I saw that Oliveira was trying to pass Martin, so I knew they would go long and I prepared to cross inside. The strategy was perfect, I was doing a good job, then maybe I decided to manage the rear tire too much to try to get it to the end well, but Jorge understood it and immediately exploited it to pass me, also because a couple of laps later he would have had more difficulty passing me, because the pressure of his front tire would have increased”, Bagnaia told Sky Sport MotoGP.

“It was a shame and probably my mistake not to make more use of it, because after a few laps the tyres drop for everyone and it doesn’t matter if you’ve managed it, because if you have someone in front you struggle to overtake him because of the pressure of the front tyre. Once they both passed me, I tried to do my best to repass straight away, but from that moment on the tyre was really difficult to manage,” he added.

There is no doubt that the German ups and downs are not among his favorite slopes, but Pecco reiterated this once again, trying to see the glass half full given how things went today.

“It’s not a great track. There are no fast spots, it’s very narrow and you can’t exploit the bike’s potential because the tyres don’t warm up. So it’s very complicated more than anything else. But I have to say that we did a great job here too, because this morning we were going really fast and I lost pole position only because of a yellow flag. In qualifying we had two problems, so let’s say it’s not a day where everything went smoothly. Obviously, everything went so smoothly in Assen that something had to happen here. In any case, Jorge and Miguel were simply better today.”

What is certain, however, is that there will still be work to do in view of tomorrow’s long race, even if with temperatures expected to drop again it won’t be easy to do it almost blindly. “The step we took today was quite big, for tomorrow we will continue to go in this direction, but the conditions will change again and this makes everything even more difficult. The front tyre pressure went up really high today, but tomorrow I don’t think it will be a problem because it should be ten degrees cooler, so it should be a bit more manageable, but we will definitely have to work on it”.