Ducati MotoGP rider Pecco Bagnaia claims he has "nothing more to demonstrate" in the 2025 season, having laboured to a terrible 14th-place finish in the Indonesia sprint six days after his Japanese Grand Prix triumph.
Changes to the Desmosedici Bagnaia is riding - widely rumoured to be a return to as much of a 2024-spec bike as regulations will allow - yielded a led-every-lap double win at Motegi that ended a truly dreadful run of form for the two-time champion.
But at Mandalika, a track that is among Bagnaia's weakest in MotoGP, he had not looked fast all weekend - though this was exacerbated in the sprint.
A look at the onboard from Bagnaia's race shows him not particularly untidy but struggling with the bike shaking on the main straight and also puzzlingly slow in the accelerations and changes of direction in the first sector in particular.
In the battle during the start action, he very quickly went backwards to last place from an already underwhelming 16th on the grid before trundling home 29 seconds behind the winner, his good friend Marco Bezzecchi.
The 29-second margin is a time loss of over two seconds per lap, but perhaps more striking was Bagnaia finishing 13 seconds back from 13th-placed Alex Rins’s Yamaha, especially given that Rins's race was compromised by a Marc Marquez divebomb.
Asked after the race just what exactly had happened, Bagnaia said: "I would like to know. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know."
He said the bike was "theoretically" the same as what it was at Motegi but "the feeling isn't".
"I am not riding, I am just a passenger of my bike. I cannot control anything. Just having a lot of movement, I think four times I arrived to the first corner or Turn 10 without brakes, three times I needed to close the throttle for the shakes.
"I cannot brake harder because I was losing the front almost every corner, again. I cannot open the throttle because I was [wheel]spinning a lot. I cannot accelerate in a good way because the bike was shaking a lot.
"It’s difficult to imagine a race like this, a weekend like this, considering what happened a week ago. But luckily one week ago we had this kind of race and weekend, because like this every doubt that people were having is gone. I don't have anything more to demonstrate this season. The only situation where I was in my good feeling, where I was riding my bike, I won the weekend, everything. And now I'm back to the feeling of Misano and all the rest of the season.
"I was thinking that I would arrive here with the same feeling as Motegi, because it's true that in Motegi we did things on the bike. And now...theoretically the same bike is not working anymore, it's working like before. So, I don't understand it."
Asked by The Race what Ducati's engineering crew told him, Bagnaia said: "The bike is the same. So..."
"I don't think it's a technical problem," he added cryptically. "I think it's more another thing that is [also] out of my control."
Bagnaia said he "doesn't know" what else can be done this season - hinting perhaps that he is pinning his hopes on a different engine homologation for 2026.
"Like I said, I have nothing more to show, to demonstrate. I demonstrated one week ago what I'm able to do. I'm just frustrated because one week ago I was winning and today I was last. And in qualifying, pushing like hell, I finished 16th. So something is not working anymore."
The Race says
Ducati has clearly mishandled the whole Bagnaia spec situation over the course of 2025, and there may well be more strangeness going on behind the scenes in that regard, but he is not blameless.
The bike isn't perfect, and it can clearly be a bit of a liability around Mandalika, but it is not this bad. It is not 2s-off-the-pace bad. And it was never as bad as it was made to look on this side of the garage across Red Bull Ring, Balaton, Barcelona and Misano - we know that because of what was going on on the other side of the garage, or even sometimes on the VR46 side with Fabio Di Giannantonio on the same bike spec.
The idea that Bagnaia has nothing more to prove this season just because he was great at Motegi is laughable. He'll probably regret putting it out there once he's cooled off - and if not, he'd be well advised not to bring it up in contract negotiations.
