After a start to the season with more errors than desired and expected from Ducati’s leader in the MotoGP World Championship, Pecco Bagnaia reached his maximum cruising speed starting at the Dutch Grand Prix , at which He arrived with a disadvantage of 91 points that he has been cutting, since then, until reducing them to only 2 with respect to the leader of the contest, the French Yamaha rider Fabio Quartararo.
To achieve this, Bagnaia won four consecutive races (Assen, Silverstone, Spielberg and Misano), was second in the next (Aragón) and after a crash in Motegi, returned to the podium in the last race, held in Thailand (3rd), adding a total of 136 points.
In that same stretch of the season, Quartararo only managed to get on the podium once, in Austria (2nd), adding three zeros (Assen, Aragón and Buriram) and finishing fifth in San Marino and only eighth in Silverstone and Motegi to add a total 47 points out of 175 possible, which indicates that the Yamaha has left 128 on the way.
Despite this huge difference of 89 points against, Quartararo maintains the lead in the championship (219 against 217) ahead of a Bagnaia who, if he continues with his current pace of comeback, could easily lead Australia .
Despite the fact that the numbers are clearly favorable to the Italian in this part of the season, Bagnaia does not want to trust himself at all, nor change the way of approaching the races that has taken him to this point.
“After the Thai Grand Prix I came back home for a few days and now I am ready to tackle these important back-to-back races in Australia and Malaysia,” explains Pecco in the usual preview before the grands prix.
Like the rest of the grid, Bagnaia has not raced in Australia since 2019 due to the pandemic. In that race, held on October 27, the Italian finished fourth at the handlebars of the Pramac team’s Ducati, just behind his teammate Jack Miller, then in Pramac and now in the official formation, who beat him by 55 thousandths at the finish line, after Marc Márquez and Cal Crutchlow, a race in which Quartararo did not finish the first lap when Danilo Petrucci took him ahead.
“I’m excited to be back at Phillip Island , a very fast track where I think we can do well,” Pecco said.
The Italian does not want to do numbers, but he knows that if he finishes in the top four, always ahead of Fabio, he will be the new leader of the championship.
“Now we are two points behind Quartararo, but this does not change our mentality: we have to stay focused, work well from the first practice on Friday and look for victory in the race”, he values.
Despite being on a meteoric streak, Bagnaia has flirted with errors more than he would like throughout the year, with up to five zeros (Qatar, France, Catalonia, Germany and Japan), in addition to the Indonesian race, in which only added one point (15th), a number of lost points that, under normal conditions, would leave any driver out of the fight for the title.
“Now more than ever it is key not to make mistakes,” he admits, knowing that rain and cold are usually the protagonists on Phillip Island.
“We’ll see how the weather goes. In the last grand prix I had a good feeling in the wet, but in any case we have to arrive ready to face the race in whatever circumstances they are”, settles the one from Turin .
Photo de: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
