Pecco Bagnaia's 2025 MotoGP season remains a truly glum affair, as a flicker of a bounce-back at Aragon has been extinguished with a limp showing in his home race, the Italian Grand Prix at Mugello.
Across sprints and full-distance races, Bagnaia entered the weekend on a streak of five successive MotoGP wins at Mugello - and he joked pre-weekend that being unable to fight for victory here would mean that he's definitively in trouble.
Though a fairly anonymous third in the sprint, Bagnaia did fight for the victory on Sunday - but the early burst of pace that enabled him to duel with the Marquez brothers disappeared and he was ultimately even relegated off the podium by Fabio Di Giannantonio.
"I wanted to stay in the front. Like always when you are racing you prefer to stay in the front," Bagnaia said of his strategy for the race.
"I was quite confident, the first part of the race, I was feeling good. And then after six laps the front started to drop. I needed to slow down because I was risking to crash.
"The problem is that this season it's always like this, I cannot do what I want on the bike, it's like I need to follow what the bike is asking to do, and when I try to do what I want I crash, or almost. I was almost on the ground in the last corner, when I tried to just do the same line as I did always.
"It's a shame. It's from the first race that it's like this. I maybe start well, then I do all the race watching the [Marquez] brothers, what they are doing, hoping for a mistake from them to maybe have a chance to overtake. But like this it's not possible.
"I'm there, stuck between seven-eight tenths [behind], then I try to push, I catch back, I arrive to two-three tenths, then I need to slow down again because the front is starting to understeer everywhere.
My races this year are like this, always."
Bagnaia had already anticipated some front tyre trouble coming into the race, and looked more hampered than the riders around him by how the front tyre was being affected by running in the pack.
He felt he was "in the same place" as Aragon, before the rear started vibrating in the closing stages and he had to yield to Di Giannantonio.
"I had a hole in the rear tyre that was very huge and wasn't helping, I needed also to slow down more."
The race ran counter to his optimism from Aragon, about both his race to the podium and a post-race test he'd described as "the most positive I had this season".
Already then he was playing down a victory bid at Mugello, describing it as "not realistic right now", but this was still clearly a disappointment.
What exactly is limiting Bagnaia remains a bit of a secret given how close the GP24 and the GP25 are in specification, but Bagnaia reiterated that he could not go back to the GP24 because the bike is "frozen" - hinting that the source of his trouble, as reported before, is in the slight engine redesign and how that's affected the balance.
He lamented that he "cannot do a normal slide". "I cannot do a controlled slide. I cannot brake like the two Marquezes, because if I do it, I lose the front. I'm a bit in limbo. Hoping that nothing happens.
"The rear is always in the air, sliding, a lot of shaking. It's like this. We're not finding any solution."
He had been positive about Ducati's 2025-spec front fairing at Aragon - which Di Giannantonio ran to the podium here, but Marc Marquez remains more tentative on - but didn't use it because "I'm having too many problems to start thinking about something different".
One thing that had helped at Aragon, or at least so Bagnaia believed, was a switch to a 355mm Brembo brake disc over the standard 340mm - though much cold water had been poured on the idea it was a cure-all in the two weeks since, and Bagnaia himself always sounded aware it was unlikely to be transformative.
He did not race the disc at Mugello because it did not fit the track layout. "For the temperature," he explained. "It's true that it was very hot, but putting the 355mm was a bit risky because the brake disc didn't reach the ideal temperature, so was un-constant."
Likewise, Bagnaia said he won't run it at Assen when asked about that by The Race.
The Dutch track is another of his favourites - and another one of Marc Marquez's 'weak' tracks - but Bagnaia's 110-point championship deficit looks beyond salvaging anyway.
"It's impossible to think about winning the championship," he concurred. "If I do races like this. If we are not changing something on the bike and the bike remains the same."
His mission for the rest of the season now looks to be making sure that it doesn't look totally "impossible" going into 2026, too.
