MotoGP | Bagnaia: “It’s nice to have a base and not have to chase”

Friday no longer seems to be Pecco Bagnaia’s Achilles’ heel. Since last year we had become accustomed to seeing him chase on the first day of the weekend, but in Jerez he was the fastest and today in Le Mans he bowed only to world champion Jorge Martin. The key is simple and the reigning world champion hasn’t hidden it: he has finally found a basic set-up to make his Ducati GP24 work best straight away, just like he did with the GP22 two years ago.

“The last two weekends we can say that perhaps we have found a base that helps me. Having used Friday in Jerez as if it were a test really helped us a lot. Today we did a perfect job with the team and we managed to continually improve the situation. We have a very good pace and in the time attack I made a small mistake at the penultimate corner, but it’s good to be able to start like this because you can focus mainly on performance rather than chasing”, said Bagnaia at the end day.

This doesn’t mean that the development work is finished, because we are only at the fifth race of the season, but the direction taken seems to be the right one and this is certainly important to experience the weekends with more serenity.

“Usually you finish developing the bikes at the last race, so you always try to do a little better and then you leave everything to start from scratch. In my opinion this bike is very good, it started off well straight away, even if in some things you still need to understand it, like on vibrations or on certain reactions that it has sometimes that you don’t expect. But we have certainly taken a step forward”, he explained, adding that for now this weekend the vibration problem has not arisen. .

The only discordant note of the day was that Martin took the French track record from him, even if Pecco doesn’t seem too interested in this. If anything, he is already focused on going and getting that front row tomorrow morning which he has always lacked so far in 2024.

“The important thing today was to stay in the top ten and show a certain consistency. Even this morning I was fifth without changing the tyres. In the afternoon with the first tire I set the best time on the last lap of the third run, so it’s fine to be second. However, we know that the moment in which we need to set the time is tomorrow morning and this year I have never started on the front row, so that is the objective.”

Finally, when asked if he believes it will be an all-Ducati battle between him and Martin, he concluded: “Vinales was also very fast, but I can also see Bastianini well: even if he has to start from Q1 tomorrow morning, he has always gone very well. strong. It is not very easy to identify the strongest.”