During the last four MotoGP weekends before Japan — Austria, Hungary, Barcelona and Misano — Pecco Bagnaia scored a total of 24 points. At Motegi he scored 37, leading both the sprint and the grand prix from start to finish, no one getting close to putting a move on him.

The turnaround seemed almost too good to be true, so what exactly has Ducati done to the twice world champion’s Desmosedici GP25? The truth is that we don’t know because the factory’s riders and engineers have taken a vow of silence on the matter.

Each time the 2022 and 2023 champion was asked how Ducati has transformed his bikes he dodged the question. “I’m just the rider,” he kept saying.

It’s a strange situation, because the lack of explanations from Ducati during recent months created a vacuum of information that was filled by some ridiculous conspiracy theories, most hilariously that Ducati had nobbled Bagnaia to ensure an easy ride to the championship for its new star, Marc Márquez.

The problems emerged the moment Bagnaia and team-mate Márquez rode out of pitlane during February’s first pre-season tests at Sepang.

The 2025 chassis featured a radical frame with much-reduced rigidity around the headstock, to reduce the problem of the rear tyre pushing the front, which caused Bagnaia and 2024 champion Jorge Martín to crash so much last season. Bagnaia tested a prototype during last year’s Misano tests and liked it. But the two-time world champion and Márquez seemed less sure when they briefly tried the frame during last November’s post-Barcelona tests.

“It feels like the character of the bike going into corners is a bit different, so I need to understand the new limit,” said Márquez at Barcelona.

Ten weeks later at Sepang, both riders found the new chassis to be unstable, so by the end of the three-day test they had rejected the latest engine and chassis, reverting to mongrel motorcycles that combine 2024 and 2025 parts.

“On the first day at Sepang, me and Marc had the same opinion,” said Bagnaia. “The ’24 chassis still a bit better — we tried to improve braking in the ’25 but could not. There’s still some margin in the ’24 bike.

“I was quite convinced from the start [of the test] that the 2024 engine was better. To make a better engine than the ’24 is tough – I think all the other manufacturers would pay to have an engine like this.”

The main problem with the 2025 engine was its negative-torque character – engine-braking, in other words – which made the bike difficult to control in corner entry, exacerbating the chassis issue. Ducati was able to change some internals to fix this before homologation but it didn’t have time to change the crankcases.

However, the factory team’s move to GP24.5s or GP24.9s – or whatever you want to call them – didn’t solve the problems.

Even though Márquez was in steamroller mode from the first races at Buriram, it was obvious that younger brother Alex was having an easier time on his Gresini GP24.

And it was more than obvious that Bagnaia was having a horrible time with his latest bikes. True, he was on the podium at least once at each of the first five grands prix, but he was always several tenths a lap behind his team-mate and Alex.

Somehow the balance of the bike wasn’t right, so when he braked the front tyre locked, unsettling the bike, and when he flicked into corners the front tyre tucked.

Meanwhile, Márquez was back to where he had been at Honda, using his otherworldly feel and reactions to control the locks and tucks.

“It is clear that what Marc is doing is difficult for another rider to replicate,” explained his new crew chief Marco Rigamonti. “A rider like Pecco can understand what Marc is doing on the bike but to do the same means changing how they ride and because they ride intuitively this means they would have to change everything. Maybe if you start at 14 years old you can learn…”

Ducati tried all kinds of fixes for Bagnaia but nothing worked, and race by race, his confidence shrunk, until he reached the bottom of his hole at Misano – a pointless ride in the sprint and a crash in the grand prix.

The day after, during the traditional Misano Monday tests, everything changed. Bagnaia had one bike in race trim, the other with Ducati’s latest changes.

“In the Misano tests, Casey [Stoner, Ducati’s first MotoGP champion] and Manuel Poggiali [Ducati’s rider analysist and former 125cc and 250cc world champion] worked together and they both said the same thing,” said Bagnaia. “During the race weekend they said Pecco’s bike is shaking like hell and it’s difficult to understand why. In the tests they again said the same thing – with one bike I was perfect, while the other I was shaking like hell.”

Ducati won’t tell us what it has done, so we can only speculate.

The only part of the motorcycle it isn’t allowed to change is the engine, because its engine specs were homologated on the eve of the season-opening Thai GP. Thus the engine was the obvious culprit. Perhaps the 2025 Ducati had new crankcases or engine mounts, to work with the 2025 chassis, which spoiled the bike’s overall stiffness or balance.

Bagnaia’s rejuvenation at Motegi suggests that maybe it wasn’t the engine that was hurting him, unless Ducati has found a workaround fix that had previously eluded them.

If it’s not the engine, what could it be? Another significant change for 2025 was an upgraded ride-height device, which drops the rear end even lower when riders accelerate out of corners, which reduces wheelies, allowing riders to use more throttle for better acceleration.

The ride-height device keeps the rear end low all the way down straights – which also reduces aero drag by flattening the downforce wings — and then starts to disengage when the rider brakes for the next corner. Perhaps this was Bagnaia’s problem. Maybe the device changed the balance and attitude of the motorcycle during the braking phase as it returned the rear end to its normal height.

Did Ducati return to a 2024 device at the Misano tests? And if it did, why did it leave it until round 17 to give Bagnaia what he needs? Perhaps Gigi Dall’Igna was convinced that the acceleration advantage offered by the 2025 device made it worthwhile turning the rest of the bike upside down to make the bike work with it.

If this was the case, no wonder Bagnaia’s Motegi mood was bittersweet.

“I’m super-happy about the performance of this weekend – happy and angry,” he said. “Because honestly if I was finding the solution earlier maybe it could have been a different championship. I enjoyed the bike a lot from the test in Misano – I was able to push and control the races. These are the races I prefer – when I start well, push and control.”

Will Bagnaia’s rebirth continue at Mandalika and beyond? Will he be able to beat Márquez again? Or will Márquez, freed of the need to score points, find another level? We will find out soon.

And will Honda’s Motegi speed translate to Mandalika and beyond?

Joan Mir‘s podium looked like a real breakthrough, because it was Honda’s first top-three in ‘normal’ circumstances since it lost Márquez to Ducati. This is taking nothing away from Johann Zarco‘s Le Mans victory and Silverstone second place, but Le Mans was wet and Ducati was nobbled at Silverstone by the front tyre allocation.

At Motegi everyone was on an equal playing field and Mir’s speed was Honda’s best since the Márquez era, apart from Zarco’s Silverstone speed. Last year its race pace was a second or more off the top. At the start of this season it narrowed that gap to six- or seven-tenths. At Motegi, Mir’s race pace was less than three tenths off Bagnaia’s.

True, Honda has done lots of testing at Motegi, but while that made a difference at the start of the weekend, it wasn’t a major part of its Sunday performance.

The latest RC213V looked good at Motegi. The bike wasn’t on rails like the Ducatis, but Mir looked comfortable, even when he was sideways into corners. And the bike was fast, topping the speed charts for the first time since anyone can remember.

Mir’s bike was the fastest on the back straight into Turn 11, averaging 196.8mph, a fraction ahead of test rider Takaaki Nakagami and the fastest Ducatis – Márquez and Fermín Aldeguer – at 196.2mph.

“Our potential here didn’t surprise me, the podium, yes,” said Mir after his first podium since Portimao in November 2021. “Because even in Misano we had good potential, but I got injured. This year we weren’t able to put a result together, we just needed a bit of luck.”

The 2020 champion has had a torrid time since joining Honda in 2023, after his previous employer Suzuki quit at the end of 2022. His annual crash rate more than doubled, from nine per season to 21, but he’s never given up.

“It’s been a very difficult period for me,” he said. “From the day we decided to move to Honda when they were in a difficult period we knew it could be a long time without good results, but I couldn’t imagine that it would be this amount of time. I never gave up, I always tried to see the positive things that were happening. Thanks to Honda – they deserve this.”

Motegi was a triple comeback: Márquez completing his, Bagnaia and Mir commencing theirs. And the podium celebrations couldn’t have been more perfect for the new champion: the entire Ducati team, celebrating its first grand prix one-two of the year and his old factory Honda crew, enjoying their first podium since Marc’s final Honda top-three at Motegi in 2023.