When Pecco Bagnaia utterly dominated the weekend at the Japanese Grand Prix, it was by far the most impressive performance of what has otherwise been at best a completely lacklustre 2025 season. But with victory in the sprint race at the Malaysian Grand Prix in very different circumstances, the double MotoGP champion has actually surpassed his earlier performance.
That’s quite the feat, too, given just how strong his weekend at Motegi was. Taking pole position and victory in both the sprint and main race, leading every lap of both, as well as bagging a fastest-ever race lap and all-time lap record, it was an incredibly dominant weekend in a season that up until that point was largely devoid of highlights.
Yet Saturday’s much more scrappy pole position and sprint win at Sepang is, to me, much more important in the grand scheme of Bagnaia’s slow return to form, given how different he looked.
In Motegi, he looked like 2023 Bagnaia, the guy who cruised to championship success on a bike that was normally on rails. Stable, smooth, and metronomic once he turned pole position into an early race lead, he was incredibly hard to beat both back then and again at Motegi a few weeks ago.
Sepang, though, hasn’t gone that waz, and it’s clear this weekend that many of the same problems his side of the Ducati garage has been battling are still there. The bike is unstable at high speed and hard to control on corner entry, leaving Bagnaia still fighting against it rather than looking like he’s cruising the way he does when everything is right in his world.
That’s reflected in Bagnaia’s own comments after the win, too. Motegi, coupled with a couple of disastrously bad weekends afterwards in Indonesia and Australia, did absolutely nothing at all to solve any of the issues, and instead just left the Italian even more confused than he was before about why he’s not able to ride the bike the way he wants to.
Yet in Malaysia, he believes that there’s been a much more logical path to Saturday’s result. Working with Ducati’s engineers on small but successful steps forward all weekend, it’s resulted in the first meaningful set-up changes that he’s been able to benefit from since before MotoGP’s summer break - and, he hopes, might show the path out of the black hole they’ve been in of late.
"I think it’s more concrete," he said afterwards when asked about it by The Race. "Japan was more the time of the season where I had the best feeling on my bike, more similar to last year. Here, not. Still not.
"Japan just confused us more, and today was more because we worked on the [bad] feeling from Indonesia.
"We’ve just done little things. Sunday in Phillip Island helped quite a lot because we started the race behind but my pace was quite good, and here we started yesterday in quite a good day but I was out of Q2.
"We did something on the bike today that helped, another step that was better, another step in the race that was better. We are building more performance, more speed, and maybe we are figuring out what is happening."
Bitten by past experiences this year, Bagnaia isn't 100% convinced yet the breakthrough will stick - but feels he has clarity as to how to go about things.
And, to him, the answer is still in adjusting the bike more to his liking - through giving the clearest feedback possible - rather than trying to ride around an ill-fitting package.
“Honestly, I’m not a good adapter,” he admitted, “to what I don’t like. This is my weak point, and even if I’m working [on it] it’s difficult to improve on this.
"So I’m just trying to give the most detailed feeling to the team [to make the bike suit me most], and I think we are working well.
“But it [the sprint win] is more because I felt well on the bike today than because I’m adapting well to it.”
