Pecco Bagnaia’s dramatic plunge from dominating Motegi to crashing out of a distant last place at Mandalika a week later was another scarcely-believable twist in his poor 2025 MotoGP season and came amid ever-deeper intrigue over the specification of his Ducati and his relationship with the team.
His contract with Ducati runs through 2026, but is a partnership that looked like it might be career-long when he was winning titles now doomed to split before too long?
Here are our team’s thoughts:
Ducati won't put up with this forever
Val Khorounzhiy
Inevitable? Of course not.
Jorge Martin walking away from Aprilia in 2026 or 2027 looked as nailed on as anything just a few months ago, and now it feels like a 50/50. Elite team sport is funny like that - almost every bridge can be mended by just a handful of good results.
What I do think is true, though, is that while Bagnaia is losing his nerve, senior Ducati figures are at the end of their rope, too. Its works team sealed the teams' title in Indonesia, and the big talking point was Bagnaia being slow and miserable. The constructors' title was secured in the Misano sprint, and the big talking point was Bagnaia being slow and miserable.
Bagnaia very capably spearheaded the greatest period in Ducati's MotoGP history, but Ducati head honcho Gigi Dall'Igna must be absolutely fed up having to write or talk about this. And if there's one thing that's clear about Dall'Igna, it's that if he suspects the rider is a weak link, he will have no hesitation slotting in someone else. Say, maybe, a rider he had all but hand-picked out of Moto2 who ensured Ducati got away from a generally terrible Mandalika weekend with a dominant win.
The 2026 bike could still save this
Simon Patterson
It’s increasingly obvious that relations between Ducati and Bagnaia are becoming frostier than their annual season launch in an Alpine ski resort - and that what should have been a career-long relationship between the pair is starting to look more and more like it could come to an end in only a year’s time unless they turn things around.
Sure, in public both sides are adamant that everything is fine. Dall’Igna talks at length about how important Bagnaia is to them, while the double world champion still tells anecdotes about falling in love with motorcycles when he was a boy because of his father’s Ducati.
Yet there’s no smoke without fire, and the chinks in the relationship have started to show in recent months. Dall’Igna, while saying what he says on one hand, has been quite dismissive of Bagnaia’s problems on the other, something that came to a head recently with Casey Stoner’s presence in the garage at the Misano test.
Bagnaia, too, is becoming increasingly surly. Missing media scrums and giving dismissive answers referring back to Ducati management are all very out of character, and should be a warning sign for the bosses.
Yet despite all of that, it doesn’t feel like a lost cause - at least not quite yet. There’s a long time until contracts for 2027 and beyond need to be decided, and in the interim there’ll be a new bike for Bagnaia to ride.
Should that machine turn out to be something a little more competitive than what Ducati has got right now, something that lets him get his 2024 (or Motegi 2025) feeling back, then a long-term future is still very much on the cards.
Ducati's lost better riders than Bagnaia
Jack Benyon
It's time for Ducati to move on.
It already made the wrong decision 'allowing' Martin to leave when it had to accommodate Marquez, and now it has to rectify that error. With hindsight, it’s Martin not Bagnaia who should’ve been on the second red bike this year.
Maybe - maybe - given a different bike there’s a rider in Bagnaia who’s closer to Marquez. But there's not a Marquez-beating rider in there.
Bagnaia hasn’t just been dominated by Marc Marquez, he has been well beaten by a satellite rider, too, in Alex Marquez - stop me if you've heard this before, but it's a second one now! - so Ducati simply can't accept that and continue.
Also, I'd argue another rider it let escape for this year - Marco Bezzecchi - has done a better job than Bagnaia in 2025 with his new employer Aprilia.
This is just an untenable situation and too much loyalty to ask of a manufacturer that's expected to win every year.
Bagnaia's increasingly frequent attacks on a bike that's romped to the title almost 300 points ahead of him are difficult to fathom, and have to be for Ducati, too.
Bagnaia needs to learn from Marquez - and write off 2025
Ollie Card
This is the most challenging time of Bagnaia’s tenure with Ducati, a team he is so synonymous with it’s hard to imagine him anywhere else on the grid.
Bagnaia clearly has a lot to offer any team. His amiable approach and methodical sensitivity has historically sat neatly between Dall'Igna's intensely brooding engineering leadership and Davide Tardozzi’s rallying cry management, altogether culminating in Ducati’s great successes in its bike development over recent years. But the stress test of this year’s rollercoaster results shows how any happy marriage can have its bumpy patches.
A diva he is not, but Pecco not getting what he wants from the bike has led to the death by a thousand cuts, threatening to scuff the lustre of the Ducati diamond, exacerbated by Marc Marquez having the comeback story of the century on the other side of the garage.
This isn’t purely down to Bagnaia and his performances on track. Ducati management have done their fair share of mishandling over the messaging around Bagnaia’s deficit and the shortcomings of the GP25 itself, and this layering of mixed signals is making matters worse.
Ducati doesn’t need a Marquez-beater. In fact, it would be highly inconvenient to have two riders at equal level tripping up over the same piece of asphalt. However, the team has two podium-capable bikes, and the inconsistencies have rattled all corners of Ducati. Pecco’s rightly-earned high status at Ducati only buys so much leeway and, fair criticism or not, his increasing verbal frustrations become a bad look for team harmony.
I don’t see Bagnaia leaving any time soon, but I believe he would benefit from two things. Firstly, Pecco needs to seek Marc’s counsel on one of his strengths that often gets overlooked; communication. Marc found out the hard way during his Honda years how to best handle messaging in the trickiest times in a way that kept his team motivated and loyal to him to the tearful end.
Secondly, he needs to write off 2025. You cannot fast-track a reset, so bin the bounce backs and renaissances, openly admit you’re setting your sights on 2026 and rediscover the joy of racing with the pressure off.
Bagnaia's stature at Ducati is changed for good
Glenn Freeman
I don't think a split is inevitable, but what I'm more sure of is that we won't see Bagnaia lead Ducati again whenever a post-Marquez era begins.
Whatever the reasons for what's gone on this year, the message to Ducati is clear: no matter how much you love the guy for what he's achieved, you now know you can't 100% trust him to get the job done if he's your main hope.
This year has been a write-off for a while, and the Motegi wins may end up looking like one of the strangest blips of all time. But let's see how 2026 goes before we start getting too over-excited and breaking up this partnership.
If Bagnaia can find some sort of form next year, then great, keep him in the fold. I can see why Ducati wouldn't want to cast aside an Italian who won back-to-back world titles in red.
But whenever Ducati loses Marquez, it'll need to go looking for a new leader.
They can't come back from this
Matt Beer
Val made the point that the Martin/Aprilia relationship seemed irredeemable when he was trying to walk out of the team when all he’d done on its bike was get repeatedly injured, but in some ways that one was easier to reset because the relationship hadn’t really had chance to start yet. You could either do a total reset and try to start again as if that madness hadn’t happened, or instantly cut both sides’ losses. Thankfully Aprilia and Martin chose option one and though the memories of early summer 2025 may linger if results don’t come soon whenever he’s finally fit again, right now it’s forgotten.
The Bagnaia/Ducati relationship feels harder to fix because it runs so much deeper and longer. There’s been more damage because there’s so much more depth there. The circumstances of how Bagnaia could go from being basically the fastest thing on the grid for the majority of the previous four seasons to being so lost and hopeless in 2025 raise too many question marks and suspicions on both sides.
There’s now only one ‘winning’ scenario for Bagnaia at Ducati: to turn things around so comprehensively in 2026 that he beats Marquez in a straight title fight. That feels very unlikely.
Every other outcome carries reputational damage. Get closer to Marquez but not beat him and there’s a shadow over whether Bagnaia would’ve ever been a champion if he’d had stronger opposition. Win again only when Marquez leaves Ducati - same situation. Get blitzed by Marquez’s Ducati successor - even worse. Keep on struggling to consistently get near the podium - untenable.
Heading to a different team or manufacturer may be the best solution in the medium-term. You just have to hope (and being a VR46 protege is a pretty good safety net here) there are other employers out there who believe in the Bagnaia of Motegi more than they fear being stuck with the Bagnaia of Mandalika.
