Pecco Bagnaia continues to command the MotoGP world championship standings with authority, so much so that last weekend he experienced a perfect weekend at the Austrian Grand Prix, taking pole position and winning both the sprint and the main race.
Despite this, Ducati does not rest and continues to develop its Desmosedici GP23. After the Spielberg weekend, Brad Binder, second in both races, commented the reigning world champion, claiming that he had noticed a change in his bike while he, Bagnaia and Bezzecchi (the podium riders) looked back at the best moments of the race before taking the podium.
“You have something for starts,” the South African KTM rider laughed. And he couldn’t have been more right, because Ducati changed at the Red Bull Ring. Pecco Bagnaia had new parts specifically dedicated to the start, and was the only member of the Borgo Panigale brand to benefit from them.
“It was really important to get a good start,” said the defending champion after winning Saturday’s Sprint. “We know the potential of KTM at the start, so it was really important to get a perfect start. Ducati gave me something new for this weekend and it was good, I got a great start,” he added, referring to at the KTM starts, given that the Mattighofen team has excelled in this sense throughout 2023.
Brad Binder, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
Gigi Dall’Igna, general manager of Ducati Corse, also said he was satisfied with the progress made on the bike to improve in the first few metres: “These excellent starts highlighted the considerable work done by the team to introduce a package of innovations which has allowed us to successfully counter our increasingly fierce rivals in this delicate and important phase of the season”.
But what is the origin of these improvements? Clutch, electronics? Pecco Bagnaia preferred to keep the mystery. “A new invisible part, we can say,” he said with a laugh, without wanting to give too many details about this evolution. “It’s clear that there was something about our bike, but I prefer someone from Ducati to talk about it before me. I don’t want to be the first”.
“It’s something that helps me in the first part of the acceleration, which is the one where I lost the most. The KTM riders can be very aggressive, while for us, with the carbon clutch, it’s more difficult to have acceleration like this. But here we made progress and that helped us a lot. We won both races and kept great options thanks to the starts,” concluded Bagnaia after the weekend.
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