MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

In the second half of the Ducati Lenovo MotoGP team presentation, the host, Barbara Pedrotti, asked Ducati test rider Michele Pirro how he would sum up the Bologna factory's 2025 MotoGP project in a single word. Pirro chose the phrase "Dream Team", which prompted Pedrotti to give him a pass for ignoring the set criteria as, she said, he had said the phrase quickly enough for it to be a single word.

In the context of MotoGP in 2025, the pairing of Pecco Bagnaia and Marc Márquez certainly qualifies as a dream team. The rider who finally brought the riders championship back to Ducati after 15 years, then followed it up with another and came close to making it three in a row, paired with the greatest rider of his generation, and possibly of all time. As team manager Davide Tardozzi pointed out, they have 11 titles between them.

There have been quite a few dream team pairings over the past couple of decades. Marc Márquez and Jorge Lorenzo in 2019. Dani Pedrosa and Marc Márquez in 2013. Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo in 2008, and again in 2013. Dani Pedrosa and Casey Stoner in 2011. They have generally proved to be a mixed blessing. Jorge Lorenzo retired at the end of 2019, Marc Márquez took his own teammate out at Aragon in 2013, Valentino Rossi had a wall installed in the Yamaha garage in 2008, and the less said about 2015 the better.

The biggest problem is, unsurprisingly, managing egos. That is an issue in most teams, of course, but realistically, it is very rare for a team to have two riders who know they can win the championship. Every rider goes into a season believing they can win, but only a select few know they can do it.

So managing Pecco Bagnaia and Marc Márquez is not going to be easy. In a demonstration of the Streisand Effect, the one word summing up 2025 Ducati's Sporting Director Mauro Grassilli gave to Barbara Pedrotti was "harmony". A peculiar word to invoke in any situation where harmony is a given. If you need to bring it up...

Both Bagnaia and Márquez are professional enough to handle any friction. And there will be friction. But Bagnaia will not be steamrollered by Márquez, as the six-time MotoGP champion has done with previous teammates. He has form for standing up to him. In the latest recap of the 2024 MotoGP season on the Dorna website, the "There can be only one" series, they finally show the footage recorded outside Race Direction after their collision in the first race of 2024 at Portimão, Márquez attempts to give Bagnaia a dressing down. Bagnaia coolly stands his ground, and rejects Márquez' accusations. These two are a match for one another in terms of strength of will.

The incident is gone, but not forgotten. In a lighthearted but pointed comment when discussing the clash in the double interview Ducati released with Bagnaia and Márquez hosted by Gavin Emmett, Bagnaia pointed out that the crash in Portimão might have cost him the championship. "Look at this race, I was finishing fifth. So 11 points and I win the title," Bagnaia said, smiling. The pair laughed and pointed, Márquez holding up his hand and saying "sorry!"

A little joke. A lighthearted moment. But one filled with subtext. Neither Pecco Bagnaia nor Marc Márquez will give each other any quarter.

But they also understand their best hope of success lies in working together to make the Ducati Desmosedici GP25 as good as possible. If they do that during testing, and can thereby eliminate the competition, they can then focus on beating one another. Both are experienced, calculating, and ambitious. A formidable combination.

They also both know about the importance of a good teammate. "For me, the teammate I learned most from was Dani Pedrosa," Márquez told the press conference after the presentation. "That was a master class every session. Especially when you arrive in MotoGP and you have a teammate like Dani Pedrosa. It was amazing to understand. There I learned a lot."

For Bagnaia, two teammates really stood out. "The first time I understood something was in Moto3, when Jorge Martin arrived and the first test was wet and he was so fast, and following him I learned a lot of things in the wet. Then absolutely in MotoGP we have to speak about Jack Miller, that together we did an incredible job in terms of atmosphere inside the box, inside the garage. I think we both did an amazing job to create what Ducati is right now."

And they are both already learning from one another. "I arrive in a box where there is a rider who won 2 world championships, who is super fast, who only rode a Ducati, so he knows very well how to fix every problem," Márquez said. "And as we see, many times on Friday, Pecco is behind, but then from one practice to another, he's the fastest rider on the race track. So I will try to learn from him, because he has a lot of experience with a Ducati bike."

Bagnaia has already been studying how Márquez rides since the Spaniard arrived at Gresini in 2024. "It's absolutely a new thing, because we start in a month, but already from last year I tried to learn his left corners, that are not easy. But I think that during the season I improved a bit and I will continue doing it."

The more important lesson for Bagnaia is seeing how Márquez handles difficulties. "What I think and I know that with a rider like him, a champion like him with 8 titles, and winning the title also in difficult situations, not having the best bike. It's absolutely a motivation for me. Trying also to learn to be competitive as it is when the things are not ideal."

This is where Bagnaia lost the championship in 2024, by making unforced errors when there was no need. That had tormented Bagnaia over the winter, and he had thrown himself into trying to learn from his mistakes and ensure it doesn't happen again. "I spent hours analyzing and rewatching many times my mistakes and my worst races from last year," the two-time MotoGP champion said. "And the first thing is that, it's true that I want always to arrive as far in front as I can, as is possible. But I understood that sometimes it's better just to wait a bit."

A MotoGP title isn't won in a single weekend, Bagnaia explained. "Because the championship is long. It's true that you can gain and lose many points every weekend, but if last year... it's true that it wasn't always my fault. But it's true also that in more than one situation, if I had waited, I would not have crashed, and taking maybe 13 points was enough to win. So I just try to understand that, just try to improve on that."

There were also crashes he just didn't understand, Bagnaia said. "It's also difficult to predict sometimes the times that I crashed, because I lost the front many times when I was calm, so like in Barcelona last lap, like in Malaysia. So it's something that it's also not easy to understand, but I will try."

Bagnaia emphasized that working with his team was key. "What I said before, it's not that the team have to improve, but we have to improve as a team, in some situations. And I think it's not something that we have to search, it's something that has to come easily just doing our job, and not being under pressure sometimes, just working like normal, and everything will be easier, absolutely."

Communication, key to working as a team, was one of the major changes Gigi Dall'Igna had made when he came to Ducati at the end of 2013. One of the first things Dall'Igna had done was rotate engineers between race team, test team, and factory. He also rotated engineers between departments, so that each department - engine, chassis, suspension, electronics, etc - understood each others' problems. He created a culture where communication was a central pillar of Ducati's MotoGP efforts.

That culture was the biggest difference that Marc Márquez had noticed when he moved across from Honda. "Of course I was ten years with Honda and yeah, the engineers are the engineers, they're top level. But one of the most important things is the communication, and at Ducati I think is the biggest difference, that communication. Not only between engineers. Between race track and factory, but also between riders, team manager, they are in contact and they want to know what you are doing." Márquez added this is easier to achieve when a factory is successful. "But of course then if the performance is good in the race track, then everything flows in a better way."

Can Gigi Dall'Igna make everything flow in a better way in 2025? It sounds like the step from the GP24 to the GP25 will be more modest. "I like to take risks, but you have to be smart in taking risks," the Ducati Corse boss said during the launch. And that was what it looked like at the test after the last race in Barcelona in November 2024: a few updates, but nothing radical.

But they will have a lot of new parts, even if those parts are not major updates. "We have so much material," Dall'Igna said. "We have a new swingarm, a new chassis, a new fairing, a completely new one. We've also changed the ride-height device a little bit, we have something new to experiment with in this respect." Ducati's ride-height device is already the most sophisticated on the grid, requiring a mass of plumbing, so an update there is worrying for the opposition.

Ducati's real advantage is in the amount of data they have, and in how they can process it. During the presentation, a lot was made of the partnership with Lenovo, and their use of AI. Ducati has often entered into strategic partnerships to help push their MotoGP project forward, rather than just taking sponsorship money, and Lenovo is very much in this category.

At the presentation, Lenovo's President of Intelligent Devices Group, Luca Rossi, spoke with pride of how Lenovo process 100GB of data every weekend from each bike, collected from over 50 sensors. It is interesting that these exact same numbers were used in a Lenovo press release at the 2024 launch, and also in a previous story in 2023, suggesting that these are left intentionally vague rather than highly precise numbers. Precise numbers might give a little too much of the game away.

But these are still very large datasets, and that makes them very useful for feeding into AI engineering models, to extract patterns and quickly understand what is working, what isn't, and how to improve. AI is too much of a blanket term, spanning the gamut of chatbots producing factually incorrect low quality texts, renders of motorcycles with three front brake calipers and crash bars that turn into exhausts, artificial voice overs of videos, identifying and inventing new medicines and chemicals, and producing engineering structures that bear loads incredibly efficiently.

Analyzing the data collected by racing motorcycles is an ideal use for AI. Engineering models can analyze vast quantities of data and identify exactly where a particular motorcycle is losing time. They can identify improvements in setup, in engine settings, even in riding styles.

Ducati have been using special software to analyze tire wear and load for several years now, and in the past couple of years have also been using AI to analyze rider body position. All this takes a lot of computing power, and the knowhow to manage and optimize it. This is where companies like Lenovo and NetApp come in.

This is one of the areas where Ducati is making the difference, as their performance in 2024 made clear. Ducati were the only factory to understand how to consistently extract the full potential from Michelin's new rear tire. That was in part because they had more bikes on the grid, and so more data from those bikes. But they also had the capability to process and analyze that data, and ultimately extract more performance from the tires and the bikes.

When fans and journalists complain of the increasing role technology plays in determining the outcome of races, they usually mean the bikes themselves. But increasingly, technology is giving the teams an advantage in the garage, before the bikes even exit pit lane.

But the rider is still the biggest part of the performance equation, Pecco Bagnaia insisted. "I think it's like a 70/30 percentage, I think 70% by humans and 30% by technology," the Italian said. "Because it's true that we need technology, Lenovo is helping us a lot on developing technology to improve on the data side. But the one who will take the results, who will take the points are the humans and the engineers."

Technology and data are useful, but they are tools in the hands of the people involved in racing, both riders and engineers. "The engineers are working day and night at home. They are working day and night in the race weekend. We are working every day to be the best athletes possible, and we have to finalize the results," Bagnaia said. "So it's a complementary job and I think humans still are a big part of it, and this is the main thing and it’s the most fascinating thing about our work, our job."

Marc Márquez agreed. "In the end, of course, the technology is super important. But I will say that it is a big help for the humans involved. In the end, the humans take the decisions. So yeah, Ducati Lenovo team have super good technology, but in the end they are humans. The bike has super good technology, but in the end, the riders are humans. So it’s a big help, but the last decision is always in your hands."

Watch the double interview with Pecco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez below:

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