Ducati MotoGP: how to mismanage a crisis

No other team in eight decades of MotoGP had performed quite like this. So, what did this tell us?

It told us a tale of bad luck and good luck – that Márquez chose precisely the wrong time to join the factory Ducati team, because for the first time in almost a decade it didn’t have the best motorcycle on the grid, and that Ducati chose precisely the right time to sign the (then) six-time MotoGP king, because for once it needed a genius that could ride a hard-to-handle motorcycle to victory. Just like Casey Stoner in 2007.

During these last nine months the hunt for the Ducati truth — the mystic sacred stone of Borgo Panigale — has sometimes felt like an epic journey, like Harrison Ford searching for the temple of doom.

This search for the truth was complicated by Ducati’s failure to give anyone — us, the journalists, and you, the fans — the vaguest hint about what was happening. And then it further muddied the waters with equivocations and contradictions.

In so doing, its PR department broke the two biggest rules of press and public relations…

PR rule number one: never create a vacuum of information

Why? Because nature abhors a vacuum, so that vacuum of information will soon fill with something and that something is bullshit.

PR rule number two: only lie when you absolutely have to

Why? Because if you tell the truth nine times out of ten, people will most likely believe you when you finally tell them the lie you need to tell.

“I’m just saying what people are telling me to say”

During 2025, Ducati’s PR crew didn’t only create a massive vacuum of information, which created a storm of conspiracy theories — Ducati was trying to destroy its twice MotoGP king Pecco Bagnaia in favour of its new superstar Marc Márquez and so on. It was also too economical with the truth, so when it did maybe tell the truth we didn’t believe it.

The same went for its riders.

“I’m just saying what people are telling me to say,” said Bagnaia at Mandalika.

Of course, riders often don’t tell the truth when discussing their technical matters, but when they admit to the media that they’ve been told by their bosses what to say, it suggests they’re fed up that they’re not being allowed to explain the situation by telling the truth, so they can move on.

No wonder Ducati ended up in such a mess, miraculously shifting the global conversation from the factory team’s dominance during most of the championship to its failures at the last few races.

The fact of the matter was this — the GP25 had a fundamental flaw that prevented Bagnaia and VR46 rider Fabio Di Giannantonio from riding consistently fast. Both were up one weekend, down the next. Especially Bagnaia, who went from a start-to-finish double at Motegi to finishing last in the Mandalika sprint the following weekend and crashing out of last place in the main race.

“It’s always the same feeling, just the performance is different,” said Bagnaia at the Valencia season finale. “When I’m riding I always feel the same: no stopping, no turning, no braking. In Sepang it was enough to lead the sprint [Bagnaia won the Sepang sprint], in Phillip Island it was enough to be last and here it’s enough to be 16th. It depends on the track and on the conditions — the feeling was never better… Once, in Japan.”

Di Giannantonio confirmed Bagnaia’s feelings.

“It’s always the front — the configuration of the 2025 bike doesn’t give a sincere feeling from the front,” he said at Valencia. “When you are fast at a track in a natural way it’s easier to get there and trust the bike. But when you need to work on the bike to find that trust and ride fast it’s really difficult and you’re just slower.”

Márquez may have romped to the 2025 championship — using his otherworldly talent to ride around the GP25’s problems — but even he had his moments when the bike caught him out, most notably at Jerez and Silverstone, where he suffered Sunday crashes.

After Bagnaia’s Mandalika sprint debrief I approached his team’s PR department. I told them it was ridiculous that they hadn’t given the media any indication of what was going on with the GP25, which had created this maelstrom of internet speculation, much of which cast Ducati in a bad light. If it had been honest with us from the start, none of this would’ve happened — the problem would’ve been identified and pretty soon the media and fans would’ve moved on to another subject.

The following morning a few of us were invited to speak to Ducati Corse boss Gigi Dall’Igna, off the record.

The scene inside Dall’Igna’s office — ranks of boffins tapping away at keyboards beneath whirring aircon units — was so cool that I couldn’t resist writing about it. During the meeting we were told that the root of the GP25’s problem was the bike’s ride-height device. I wrote my story accordingly, without quoting the engineer who told us that.

This is what off-the-record usually means, “Don’t quote me.”

A few days later Ducati’s PR team told me I was back in Ducati jail, where they’d first put me in 2022, which means my usual end-of-season chat with Ducati engineers was cancelled and I was uninvited to a Ducati media event during the Valencia Grand Prix.

No worries, I laughed, my methods were merely inspired by those used so effectively by Dall’Igna in recent years: achieve your goal by any means necessary, however controversial or unconventional.

Dall’Igna won races and championships by creating downforce aero, ride-height devices and other technologies that were hugely unpopular with rival manufacturers. My goal is to inform and entertain you, even though it sometimes makes me unpopular with PR people.

And anyway, I don’t believe the story about the 2025 ride-height device. The root of the GP25’s problem has to be the only part of the motorcycle that Ducati isn’t allowed to change, which is the engine, because no way would they have continued with a machine that was causing them so much embarrassment, unless they had no choice.

The GP25’s fundamental flaw was most likely too much engine inertia, so the engine kept pushing the bike forward even on a closed throttle, causing the rider to lose the front when he attacked corners.

Other manufacturers have made similar mistakes since engine homologation rules were introduced a decade and a half ago.

In 2017, Suzuki increased the GSX-RR’s crankshaft mass, hoping for friendlier throttle response, but it went too far.

“The bike didn’t stop, reduce speed or turn,” Suzuki rider Andrea Iannone told me last year. “In August we tested the bike with a 2016 engine. The bike stopped, reduced speed and turned well. I was three-tenths faster. We understood we had made a big mistake.”

How to explain the feeling of too much engine inertia? Imagine you’re braking into a corner with a stuck throttle, so the rear tyre is accelerating while the front tyre is decelerating. A recipe for disaster, for everyone apart from Márquez.

And the effect of too much engine inertia would change somewhat from one track to the other, although Bagnaia’s Motegi/Mandalika transmogrification still remains a mystery.

The good news for Ducati is that although engine specs are frozen for 2026 (because manufacturers need to work on developing their new 850s for 2027), it can equip its riders with any engines homologated for 2025, which includes their 2024 and 2025 engines, used in their GP24 and GP25 machines.

It really doesn’t bother me being back in Ducati jail, because all I’m doing is my job, as laid out by George Orwell.

“Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

And yet, being punished for doing my job does annoy me, especially because of Ducati’s behaviour in 2022. This followed my publishing a tyre-pressure sheet that proved it’d won that year’s Spanish GP by running Bagnaia’s front tyre below MotoGP’s minimum tyre pressure, which fattens the tyre’s footprint to increase grip.

For some years, rival engineers had been telling me Ducati was cheating on tyre pressures, so here was an official document that proved these suspicions.

Suzuki’s Alex Rins and Yamaha’s Andrea Dovizioso were also under pressure at Jerez, but neither Suzuki nor Yamaha reprimanded me. After all, this was an official document. Don’t shoot the messenger…

Unless you’re Ducati… During the subsequent French GP I was summoned into the factory team’s paddock office, where a Ducati executive abused me like I’ve not been abused since I was a kid. I should’ve punched him. He was unhinged. He had completely lost control. It was beyond unprofessional – 100% unacceptable.

I should’ve made a bigger deal about it at the time, but I think I was so shocked by what had happened that I wanted to try to forget about it and move on.

And never a world of apology, which suggests that Ducati’s PR department is not only arrogant and ignorant but also intellectually challenged, because it really shouldn’t go after journalists for minor indiscretions when half the media centre and most of the paddock know it is sitting on a much bigger scandal.