Perhaps he does not bear the surname Rossi, but it is now established that Luca Marini is the brother of nine-time world motorcycle champion Valentino Rossi. And he rides for the VR46 Ducati team. When this announced his intention to move up to MotoGP in 2022, it was fate that Marini would clinch one of the seats. But Marini had to earn his place the hard way. His first results in Moto2 weren’t spectacular, but that changed in 2018 with the VR46 team, when he took his first grand prix win.
He obtained two more in 2019 and three in 2020, taking second place in the standings and earning the move to MotoGP in 2021 with a two-year-old Desmosedici, with the support of VR46 in the Avintia garage. At the end of the year, he was clearly beaten by his teammate Enea Bastianini, who overtook him by 61 points in the standings and scored two podiums. Marini scored 41 points in total, with fifth place in the crazy finale of the Austrian Grand Prix with slicks on a wet track as his best result.
The results obtained in 2022 astride the current Ducati were not immediately noteworthy. He is one of only two Ducati riders, after rookie Fabio Di Giannantonio, to fail to finish on the podium this season, and not take a pole position, unlike teammate Marco Bezzecchi. But Marini edged Bezzecchi 9-6 in terms of race results (based on the grands prix they both crossed the line at) and overtook him in the standings by nine points. When the soft-spoken Marini spoke to Autosport for a chat about his year in VR46 hospitality at the Valencia Grand Prix, he appeared anything but fazed by his 2022 results.
“No, no, I’m really satisfied and honestly at the beginning of the season if I had known I could get these kind of results I would have been happy, very happy. Because I think last year I struggled a lot and this year the team was new , the bike was new, we struggled at the start of the season,” Marini explained when asked by Autosport if he might be disappointed with his 2022, given what teammate Bezzecchi and the other Ducatis have achieved this year.
“It wasn’t easy and we started way back. Now we’re consistent, we’re always in the top six and that makes me really happy. But every time you finish sixth you say ‘I’d like a little more because we’re getting closer to the podium every race ‘, but not enough to be there. We have to be smarter and smarter and say ‘okay, this season we’ve learned a lot and we’ve grown a lot, and next year we’ll be there fighting for the top’.”
While Marini remains his own man, the connections to his superstar older brother are unrelenting
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
If you go deeper, you realize that Marini’s season was probably the most complicated of all the Ducati riders. His teammate Bezzecchi and Fabio Di Giannantonio contested the season with the fully developed 2021 bikes. Therefore, they could only focus on driving. Jorge Martin, under the Pramac team, has remained with the same team with which he raced in his last season rookies. Both he and Bastianini kept their team bosses, despite the latter moving to the Gresini team.
Marini, on the other hand, moved from Avintia to VR46, from a 2019 bike to the 2022 Ducati and passed from Luca Ferracioli to David Munoz as team boss (the latter moved from Petronas SRT as Rossi’s former track engineer). Ducati 2022 also had a difficult start. The new engine developed for this bike was very aggressive in acceleration, which prompted world champion Francesco Bagnaia to ask for a 2021/2022 hybrid engine to be fitted to his GP22 from the factory team.
None of the satellite pilots had this luxury. With all of these changes, Marini admits 2022 has started off as a second season since rookies. “Yeah, that’s the feeling,” he said when asked if he felt like a rookie again in 2022. “Sure, you know the tires, which is really important; you know the electronics. learned this year is much more than last season. And this is a huge step to fight for even more important positions next year, because last year I struggled to score points. This year I’m always there, second I got good results, good points in the championship, and if I can take another step like this year it will be perfect”.
In the first races, when he fought for 13th place in Qatar, 14th in Indonesia, 11th in Argentina, 12th in America and 16th in Spain, while Bastianini won with his 2021 bike, Marini he consoled himself with the fact that the other Ducati 2022 riders were all having problems. Bastianini took advantage of the data he has access to from his Ducati counterparts to not think that the problems he was facing were only his own.
After a shaky start to 2022, Marini found a way to ride the GP22 this year
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
“The bike was difficult to ride,” Marini notes. “It was difficult to stop. The feeling is that the electronic part of the bike – the engine brake, the first part of the accelerator, the traction – was not at 100%. Then, the bike developed with each race. I remember the race of Qatar was the worst, but my data engineer was also new, his first time in MotoGP – he had worked with me in Moto2 – so it was difficult for him too, and even with my crew chief we had to understand my basic settings”.
“We lost the first four or five races because of this. But I remember that the bike also needed some time, because I saw the other riders like Zarco, Pecco, Miller in difficulty, Martin in great difficulty. So I was like ‘ok, it’s not just me’. But Ducati worked very hard and fixed everything in five races and I remember that more or less from Le Mans, to Mugello, everything went well”.
From Le Mans onwards, he has been in the top 10 in 10 of the last 13 races and scored a fourth-place finish twice in Austria and the San Marino GP. Until the Thailand GP, Marini had never crashed in a race, and it was only after a technical problem that forced him to retire from the Malaysian GP that he didn’t see the checkered flag. All the other Ducati riders recorded at least three retirements in 2022 due to various accidents.
The school of thought in motorsport is that it’s easy to make a fast driver less prone to accidents and it’s hard to make a slow driver fast. Marini’s approach, however, is conscious. He pushes, but he understands that sometimes there is a limit that once exceeded leads to a fall. And for him, crashing while overdoing it is an unsuccessful way to learn.
“It’s not like I’m trying not to crash, I’m on the edge,” Marini says of his approach. “But I always feel my bike very well, and I also like it, it’s an easy bike to ride…it’s never easy, but it’s a bike that allows me to feel the front better. So, every time I feel I’m to the limit and I try to avoid a mistake. But every time I push to get to the limit”.
“Every lap I do in qualifying and in practice is like this. So, I arrive at a race with a lot of data, with a lot of sensations and feedback from practice that allow me to know where the limit is more or less in each corner, simply. But I don’t know why the other riders crash, because if you get to the end of a race you get more data and more experience, because in the end you only do six, seven laps in a row during practice. You never do more”.
Marini’s size and stature has often hindered him in MotoGP
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
One issue that hampers Marini is his weight. His tall stature now makes him the heaviest rider on the grid, in a category where the minimum weight of the bike minus the rider must be 157kg. There is currently no minimum weight limit for a rider in the premier class.
This year Marini has embarked on a crusade to raise the issue, as he has noticed the negative effects of his weight, i.e. how hard the rear tire works under acceleration. That hasn’t stopped him from delivering strong results in 2022, but with the slim margins there are now in MotoGP, it’s a natural barrier that could negatively affect his quest for consistent podium finishes.
He talked about it at length, noting that his current weight is the absolute limit he can reach before he starts losing muscle strength. This is a problem that has afflicted Danilo Petrucci for a long time during his time in MotoGP. For Marini “having a weight limit is a right thing. It’s not about trying to disadvantage the smaller riders, nobody wants such a high minimum weight limit. We just want something that can level things out a little more and give everyone has the same chance to fight for victory”. No doubt this will be a case that will be discussed for some time in Safety Commission meetings, but Marini will not use it as an excuse for the winter.
For 2023, he will continue with the 2022 bike, he admits that “it’s not an advantage”, but points out that Ducati will not make great strides with its GP23 and that the brand’s support is there regardless of the bike with which you run, if there are results. For this reason, he knows that the first races of 2023 offer him a great opportunity, in the same way Bastianini took advantage of the first races of 2022.
Inevitably, however, the biggest problem will always remain for Marini: he is Valentino Rossi’s brother. According to some, he will only be in MotoGP because the Doctor has ordered him to. But this is a guess. For him, people can say what they want, there’s no pressure and there’s no confrontation. “No, honestly it doesn’t change much,” he says when asked if being Rossi’s brother in the VR46 team adds pressure. “The comparison has never happened because it’s impossible to make comparisons. What Vale has done in his career is something incredible and no one will do something similar to what he did, also because it’s a different period”.
The Italian has made steady progress in his two years in MotoGP, going from the fringes of the points to a regular top 10 contender
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
“Now it’s impossible to win 10 races in a row because the level is too high, everything is at an incredible level, the 24 MotoGP riders are incredible, the bikes are fantastic and every rider can win a race. So, it’s not possible to make a comparison. For me there is no more pressure. The riders who have pressure are here to win, because they are here for this, because it is difficult to win every Sunday”.
Was Marini given a better chance than others because of his family ties? Perhaps. Has he proved to be an independent man? Absolutely yes. The 25-year-old is one of the wisest riders in MotoGP at the moment, and he will no doubt prove to be an outstanding ambassador for the series going forward. He’s not like him brother to him, and he’s okay with that.
Because Marini made steady progress in 2022 under challenging circumstances and is on course to make 2023 a breakthrough season. Maybe then viewers will finally give him proper recognition.
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