Pecco Bagnaia must have really breathed a sigh of relief when he managed to straighten things out on Friday at the Indonesian MotoGP Grand Prix. The day, in fact, was taking an almost sinister turn to that experienced in Mandalika 12 months ago, when he failed to achieve direct access to Q2. Which then compromised the rest of the weekend a bit, at least until Sunday, when he achieved a sensational victory after starting from the 13th place on the grid.
The situation today seemed very similar, with the reigning world champion traveling about a second behind the riders he usually battles with, without being able to find the key to the problem. When it was time to go for the time attack, fitting the soft tyre, however, the behavior of his Ducati suddenly normalized, allowing him to climb up the rankings to fourth place, not far from the best time of his teammate Enea Bastianini . For this reason, the person concerned preferred not to cause drama at the end of the day.
“We were reliving the nightmare of last year, with all the pressure for the team too, but fortunately it was enough to fit a new soft tire to get out of it. This morning we decided to go with an electronics strategy that wasn’t working. This afternoon we put the standard one back, but I still couldn’t be fast. I had a lot of problems in the right-hand corners, where I couldn’t brake or accelerate”, said Bagnaia.
“We tried many things and nothing worked, but as soon as we put on the new soft tyre, in the end everything went back to normal and this was a great help. It wasn’t possible: Martin and Bastianini were running in 1st with the same tire as me. ’30″6-1’30″7, I instead lapped in 1’31″5. A second difference was really hard to understand. It bothered me, but I knew that by putting on a new soft tire everything would go back to normal,” he added.
Francesco Bagnaia, Ducati Team
Photo credit: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
It’s clear that from a long race perspective the medium tire could continue to be a problem, but tomorrow in the meantime we will race with the soft and therefore there is time to try to remedy the situation: “For tomorrow I’m calm, because tomorrow morning we will work with the soft used in free practice and in the Sprint I think we will race with the soft, this morning Martin and Bastianini had a fantastic pace, but also Morbidelli. I think we are closer than we saw, I don’t want to think too much about what happened today.”
Also because, as he had already said in yesterday’s press conference, having 24 points to recover from Jorge Martin, at this stage of the championship he is forced to attack: “I can’t be conservative at this moment. However, this is my favorite moment of the season, because I really like doing many races near and outside of Europe. I always have a lot of fun and I hope to do it again this year. We know that 24 points is not a small number, but Martin made up for it last year, so we can we can do it too.”
Once the afternoon session was over, we also had the opportunity to witness a nice scene, because Bagnaia ran out of petrol in the starting practice area and his future boxing mate Marc Marquez arrived to help him, pushing him to the garage: “I hope that next year there will be no need for taxis (laughs). I wasn’t even able to try the start because I ran out of petrol, but it was a help because staying there in the sun wouldn’t have been the best that I didn’t have petrol and he helped me immediately.”
When he was then asked if he expected this help to come from him, he concluded: “I think that we respect each other among riders and it’s difficult that someone wouldn’t have stopped. Marc was there and fortunately he helped me.”
#MotoGP #Bagnaia #reliving #nightmare #soft
