Paint it black: Aprilia thrashes Ducati at Mugello

Many fans complain that there are no more bitter rivalries in MotoGP, that the riders are all too chummy with each other, so the racing doesn’t quite have that burning edge it had when Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo, Marc Márquez and others were slugging it out for glory.

There’s some truth to that. But what about the manufacturers?

There’s probably never been a more stinging battle of the brands in MotoGP than the current Ducati versus Aprilia hostilities. The feud was in full effect on home asphalt last weekend at Mugello, where Aprilia locked out the front row for the first time ever and took first and second in the race, Marco Bezzecchi and Jorge Martin leaving Ducati’s Pecco Bagnaia trailing in their wake and strengthening their position at the top of the riders’ championship.

Sure, Honda and Yamaha battled for the MotoGP championship for many decades, but there’s never been that hostility between them that exists between Ducati and Aprilia. There’s always been a kind of Japanese honour that exists between the Japanese factories.

Not so much with the Bologna and Noale factories. Ducati and Aprilia really don’t like each other. And, believe me, the egos of some factory bosses are at least as big as the egos of some MotoGP riders.

So, what’s it all about? It’s like football: Man Utd v Man City, Liverpool v Everton and so on. Former Italian MotoGP greats Gilera and MV Agusta were the same in the 1950s — MV stole Gilera’s engine designer, like Ducati stole Gigi Dall’Igna from Aprilia.

You just know that Ducati bosses were raging when the factory Aprilia team celebrated its first Mugello victory in pitlane with Bezzecchi’s and Martin’s pit boards reading “Casa” and “Nostra”, Italian for “Our house”, a very pointed affront to Ducati, which has long considered Mugello to be its own holy of holies, with seven victories from the last Italian GPs.

And you only need to take a quick look at the team’s bikes in pitlane for evidence of another Aprilia diss on Ducati – its RS-GPs feature stickers on their leg wings that poke fun at Ducati.

Leg wings were first introduced last season by Aprilia. They are aerodynamic downforce devices that create more rear grip and stability during braking. They have played their part in Aprilia’s renaissance, which may just be why Ducati (according to people in the know) tried to get them banned last winter.

The stickers are inspired by Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream – a face howling in terror, with Aprilia leg wings for ears – and they are saying “Who’s afraid of the leg wings?”. In other words, they’re a dig at Ducati.

Of course, there is a huge irony to Ducati trying to ban an aero device, since it was the Bologna brand that started MotoGP’s aero war a decade ago. The leg wings have now been copied by Honda, KTM and… Ducati.

Back in 1990, when ‘King’ Kenny Roberts owned Yamaha’s factory MotoGP team, he attached Honda-baiting stickers to Wayne Rainey’s YZR500s. Of course, this was Roberts’ sense of humour, not Yamaha’s, who would never dream of doing such a thing.

The 1990 season was MotoGP’s year of the highside. A combination of spiralling two-stroke power and Michelin’s latest grip-then-no-grip rear slick had way too many riders getting flicked skyward, then stretchered to Dr Costa’s house of pain, MotoGP’s Clinica Mobile.

Honda engineers christened the performance bug that created these highsides, the A-Zone. Then HRC bosses proposed that the four-cylinder 500s be replaced by 375cc triples for safety’s sake.

Roberts insisted that while Honda’s super-fast NSR500 kept taking riders into the A-Zone, Yamaha’s friendlier YZR didn’t. Thus, the stickers he fixed to his bikes included a graphic of a rider getting flicked to the moon, with a cross through it and the caption, “A-Zone friendly”. Honda wasn’t amused.

Anyway, I digress.

While Ducati engineers quietly work away at bridging the gap to the Aprilia – and who knows, they may be back on top this coming weekend in Hungary – I hear that the company’s top management isn’t taking Aprilia’s dominance so well. Not surprising because Ducati bosses are used to destroying their MotoGP rivals, taking the last four riders titles and the last six constructors’ titles. No empire lasts forever…

Ducati’s Desmosedici has dominated MotoGP for so long because the bike is very powerful, has great point-and-squirt performance and benefits from the huge amount of performance-enhancing data generated by its five riders: Marc Márquez, Pecco Bagnaia, Fabio Di Giannantonio, Alex Márquez and Fermin Aldeguer.

However, Ducati has lost its way since it produced the sublime GP24 for the 2024 season – last year’s GP25 and this year’s GP26 are trickier motorcycles.

Meanwhile, Aprilia has forged ahead with its RS-GP – so far this year, Aprilia has won five grands prix to Ducati’s two. This process – from finishing last in the constructors’ championship year after year to leading it in the 2026 title race – began in 2020, when engineers replaced the bike’s 72-degree V4 with a 90-degree V4 and Aprilia owner Piaggio hired Massimo Rivola from Ferrari’s F1 project. In other words, a combination of brilliant engineering and project management.

At Mugello on Saturday morning, the RS-GP became the fastest bike in MotoGP history, when Martin clocked 229.16mph (368.6km/h), but the bike’s strongest points are its chassis and downforce aerodynamics.

Where the RS-GP really beats the Ducati is in corner entry – the RS-GP can enter corners faster and turns better. This is especially helpful at Mugello, with its high-speed corner entry and numerous esses. This also brings knock-on benefits.

Bagnaia led Sunday’s Mugello race, shadowed by Bezzecchi, who waited for the right moment to pounce, then disappeared out front. Meanwhile, Bagnaia ran out of rear tyre and succumbed to Martin in the final stages.

The 2022 and 2023 MotoGP champion once again complained of excessive rear-tyre degradation. This is the knock-on benefit of the Aprilia’s turning prowess – the Desmosedici doesn’t turn as well as the RS-GP, which forces Ducati riders to use more rear tyre to help turn the bike, hence the higher wear rate.

Mugello has been Ducati’s happy hunting ground for many years. Saturday was the first time in 15 years that there wasn’t a single Desmosedici on the front row and Sunday was a rare Mugello defeat.

Expect the Ducati/Aprilia feud to get even more entertaining next year.

One reason Aprilia wants Bagnaia to join Bezzecchi in its factory team from 2027 is that it wants a fully red, white and green Italian team: Italian factory owned by Italian automotive giant, represented by two Italian riders. Meanwhile, Ducati is owned by German car giant VW/Audi and will have two Spanish riders – Marc Márquez and Pedro Acosta.

Aprilia brand ambassador and four-time 250cc world champion Max Biaggi has already goaded Ducati by saying Aprilia is the only Italian manufacturer in MotoGP. We will be hearing more of that next year.

Whatever the beef between Ducati and Aprilia, their domination of MotoGP has made the championship all-Italian (never mind Aprilia’s slur). So what explains the domination of Bologna and Noale in MotoGP?

Eighty of the last 81 dry-weather grands prix have been won by Ducati or Aprilia, the majority, of course, by Ducati. That’s a remarkable success rate of 98.8% from two of MotoGP’s five manufacturers. The other three – Honda, KTM and Yamaha – have therefore won 1.2% of the last 81 races between them, which, to be exact, is Alex Rins’ 2023 COTA victory. KTM won its last dry race at Barcelona in 2021, Yamaha at Sachsenring in 2022.

This is a remarkable achievement by two relatively small motorcycle manufacturers who produce a little over 100,000 machines between them. So what makes Ducati and Aprilia so great, what magic stirs deep inside their Borgo Panigale and Noale race departments?

In fact, to truly understand their domination, you need to understand that this isn’t strictly a Ducati or Aprilia thing, it’s an Italian thing. To be precise, it’s an Italian university thing.

MotoGP isn’t so much ruled by Italian manufacturers as by graduates of Italian university motorcycle vehicle dynamics degree courses. This is an area of learning that’s the key to MotoGP performance, where the Italians are way ahead of everyone else.

This is why Ducati and Aprilia currently enjoy such an advantage over their rivals, because without the latest vehicle dynamics and electronics know-how, you’re going nowhere in MotoGP.

Their MotoGP operations are populated by dozens and dozens of Italian university graduates, from universities all over Italy, but mostly in the north: Ancona, Bologna, Milan, Modena, Padua, Rome, Turin, Udine and so on.