‘Pecco Bagnaia doesn’t look brave, but he is f**king brave!’

There was some speculation that the Bagnaia mascot that sat down with him during his post-race hotdog-eating theatrics was Rossi, but it wasn’t, because the nine-time world champion had left the track on Saturday to watch the Champions League football final at home and why would he want to come back on Sunday when pretty much every one of the three thousand people on the grid (OK, slight exaggeration) would’ve wanted a piece of him?

Whenever I see Bagnaia out of uniform I always think he looks like philosophy student, perhaps studying for his Masters degree at Turin university. He doesn’t look like he’d say boo to a goose, does he? But that’s one of the beautiful things about motorcycle racing – you can look as cute as a choirboy but inside rages a fire of mania that will have you happily fighting like a gladiator at 225mph, never mind the potential consequences.

“Sometimes you don’t see the braveness in the eyes,” says Kalex chassis designer Alex Baumgartel, who has worked with most of the MotoGP riders and built the motorcycle that took Bagnaia to the 2018 Moto2 title. “Pecco doesn’t look brave but he is f**king brave.”

Bagnaia looked like he had it all perfectly under control in the 23-lapper but his race was no cruise, because it never is. “I opened a gap at start because I didn’t want to give anyone chance to get close, but by the end my rear tyre was completely done and I had destroyed the right side of my front.

So how does Bagnaia make the difference at Mugello, where he also won last year?

Ducati’s eight riders all have access to each other’s data, so they know his secrets better than anyone.

“Here Pecco gains everything in the last corner – he gains two or three tenths there,” added VR46 Ducati teamster Marini, who battled for a podium finish, finally taking the chequered flag in fourth, only four seconds down on the winner. “In all the corners in the world he doesn’t lean so much in the lefts, because he goes so low with his body, so the bike is five degrees more up, so he has a lot of grip and even with less angle he turns better than you.”

Funnily enough, this is how Jorge Lorenzo explained his winning style on the Ducati in 2018 – and Ducati has always said that Bagnaia’s technique is very similar to the Spaniard’s, even though GP23 is quite different from the GP18.

“To make the lap time on the Ducati you need to take profit of all the stability the bike offers, so you enter very early to the apex and use no lean angle,” Lorenzo told me five years ago.

Of course, this isn’t possible for everybody. “If I try what Pecco does I’m so much taller than when lift myself up and go over to the other side of the bike I’m very slow,” added Marini.

Marini, still carrying a hand injury from Le Mans, had a great battle with Johann Zarco, who had a comeback the like of which MotoGP rarely sees these days: from tenth on lap one to third. The Frenchman made sure he got most of his passes done in the first five laps, before front tyre temperature and pressure became a problem.

Like everyone in the race Zarco was reaching frankly ridiculous speeds on Mugello’s main straight, his GP23 surpassing 225mph (362.4km/h), just short of Brad Binder’s KTM RC16, which set a new MotoGP speed record of 227mph (366.1km/h) during the sprint race, thanks to a new aero package, which reduced straight-line drag.

Zarco and Pramac team-mate Martin wore special liveries for their team’s home race based on Dante Alighieri’s 14th century Italian poem, which examines the state of the human while entering heaven and paradise. This was particularly fitting at Mugello, which can be both for riders.

“When we close our visors we kind of go into hell,” laughed Zarco. “Because going over 360 kilometres an hour every lap doesn’t feel like paradise!”

KTM’s RC16 seems like MotoGP’s second-best bike at the moment, but the best Binder could manage on Sunday was fourth, four seconds off the podium, and two ahead of team-mate Jack Miller, who lost a duel with Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro by nine hundredths of a second. Espargaro rode with a foot injury sustained in a bicycle crash on Thursday, although he instead this didn’t bother him on Sunday.

At Mugello, the RC16 didn’t always seem to work as well through the track’s fast corners as it does in slower turns, where Binder and Miller can ride is more sideways. Mugello it’s all about maintaining momentum, not skidding into corners and sliding out of them.

“Going into all the esses here the bike worked through the first part, when I was on the brakes and loading the front tyre,” explained Miller. “But when I changed direction and rolled through the second part of the esses I didn’t have the load on the tyre and kept running wide. It’s just a set-up thing we have to work on.”

Bezzecchi had a grim day, two weeks after his first dry-weather MotoGP victory at Le Mans, struggling with front grip from start to finish. He ended up eighth, just ahead of Enea Bastianini, riding his first GP of the year after getting hurt in the opening sprint race at the Portuguese GP.

Honda and Yamaha had another disaster of a weekend. Yamaha’s 2021 MotoGP champ Fabio Quartararo qualified and finished second at Mugello last year – this time he qualified 15th and finished 11th, for once behind team-mate Franco Morbidelli, who was the first non-European motorcycle. Both were 17 seconds behind the winner, a gargantuan difference of seven tenths a lap. No wonder that after the race Morbidelli says he has no desire to stay with Yamaha next year.

Motorcycles have a relatively tiny amount of grip, through two very small contact patches, so the best performance comes from good part-throttle behaviour, so the rider can open the throttle gently, then more aggressively as he lifts up the motorcycle onto the fatter past of the rear tyre, where there’s more grip.

The YRZ-M1’s engine makes more peak horsepower, but it produces its power more wildly, so the bike becomes unstable as rider opens the throttle and the rider loses exit speed as he controls the shakes and wobbles caused by the rear tyre scrabbling for grip. That’s why Yamaha is in an even deeper hole than last year, when Quartararo could at least rocket out of corners, using the M1’s superior corner speed.

Honda is in an even deeper hole than Yamaha. It’s top finisher at Mugello was Takaaki Nakagami in 13th, the Japanese limping around after an earlier get-off at the 90mph Arrabiatta 2 corner. Meanwhile LCR team-mate Alex Rins was in hospital after breaking a leg in the sprint race, while Repsol Honda newbie Joan Mir didn’t even make it that far, breaking a finger in a practice fall. The 2020 champ has already crashed more this year than he did during the entire 2022 season.

Which leaves Honda hero Marc Márquez. He qualified on the front row, after Bagnaia had slowed down to argue with him and then unwittingly towed the Spaniard around for a super-fast qualifying lap that would’ve been impossible without the champ’s help.

In Sunday’s race the six-times world champion couldn’t help but try to achieve the impossible, fighting with Ducati men Marini and brother Alex Márquez for a podium finish, until he ran wide at the last corner, onto the dirty part of the track, lost the front and crashed. This time Marquez didn’t quietly walk away from the scene of the crime, but instead turning around to remonstrate with his fallen motorcycle.

Of course, there are already rumours that the 30-year-old Spaniard is looking to change manufacturers, but his current Honda contract doesn’t expire until the end of next season.

If Honda does want to keep the greatest talent on the grid the company surely needs to try something radical with its RC213V. Tweaking here and there and trying a replica Kalex chassis obviously isn’t enough.

One of the main reasons KTM has closed the gap on Ducati this year is that it’s hired a bunch of Ducati engineers who bring with them all kinds of winning secrets. Maybe this is what Honda needs to do – look further abroad for expertise.

Finally, Saturday’s sprint race was an odd one for me. I watched it in the Mugello media centre while also watching the Senior TT on the Isle of Man. Such are the joys of modern technology.

I had thought that the Senior would end several laps into the sprint race – so I could simultaneously watch the oldest and newest forms of motorcycle racing. How cool would that be?!

But of course I was wrong. TT lap speeds are so crazy-fast now that Senior winner Peter Hickman was coming down the Mountain for the final time, chased by great rival Michael Dunlop, whom he beat both on corrected time and on the road, as Bagnaia and his rivals were lining up on the grid.

Dunlop had won the earlier Superbike TT but made some suspension changes for the Senior, hoping to further up his pace, but the changes didn’t work. No one knows what those adjustments were, because when a journalist asked Dunlop what he was doing to his bike he answered, “Would I ask you what kind of knickers your wife is wearing?”.

We need some Irishmen – or women – in MotoGP!