Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
The Rise and Fall of Ducati’s GP25
What comes around goes around. Apparently. Inspiration for those on the back foot, a caution for anyone riding high.
It looks like it might be going around in MotoGP. Even as Honda and Aprilia upset Ducati’s stranglehold by winning consecutive races, Ducati themselves seem to have taken a misstep. Their 2025 (and by regulation also 2026) bike is inferior to the one it replaces. Giving supposedly second-string riders an advantage over the select factory favorites.
There’s more. While it was Bezzecchi’s Aprilia that prevailed at Silverstone, two weeks after Zarco’s surprise Honda win at Le Mans, the victory should have belonged to the other down-at-heel Japanese factory. Yamaha’s Quartararo had seized total control after a third consecutive unexpected pole, exploiting an adventurous soft-tire gamble to gallop into the distance. Victory seemed assured, until his R1’s freak failure—the rear ride-height device failed, a first-ever problem for the essential mechanism.
These upsets to Ducati’s seemingly total control came as both factory riders, Marc Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia, continued to experience problems that had plagued them at the preceding six races.
For Marc, a crash—his third this year (USA, Spain and now Britain) and all were all from potentially winning positions. Manfully, he’s blamed himself rather than the bike. But is he being over-generous? Let’s remember he continued to win title after title on a Honda that was becoming less competitive year by year.
Bagnaia’s battles with the same GP25 are even worse. He can’t get settled, can’t get the Desmo to let him ride as he wants. Braking and corner entry have been a bulwark of his success, but not this year. He, too, has suffered far too many crashes; the one that ruined his Silverstone was his second in a Sunday race, but his sixth of the year, which equaled him with Marc.
Until the French GP, Ducati had accumulated 22 consecutive race wins, every round since last year’s British GP. This equaled Honda’s record of 1997/’78 and put them firmly ahead of MV Agusta (20 wins, 1968/’89). It was particularly poignant that Zarco’s Le Mans Honda win stopped Ducati from taking the lead.
To be fair, it was in fluke conditions. The race was thrown into confusion by bike changes, along with long-lap penalties, as the cost of riders changing bikes midway through the start procedure was exacerbated by a drying track that prompted a last-minute switch to slicks.
Zarco gambled on local knowledge and took the chance to stay on wets. The weather obliged, the rain returned, and he took Honda’s first win since Rins at COTA in 2023.
Given the circumstances, this wasn’t enough to prove that the beleaguered racing giant’s troubles were over, but it was the highlight of a pattern of distinct improvement. There can be no doubt but that, after a spell of getting seriously left behind, the big guys are coming back.
All the above also applies to Yamaha. Their winless drought dates back to the middle of 2022, and again, it was their conservative stick-in-the-mud engineering that gave space for the much more adventurous Ducati to seize the high ground. Yamaha hasn’t changed much on the bike—the game-saving V4 is still in the future. But they have done enough to steady the ship and re-emerge as serious contenders.
It’s all far enough away not to frighten Ducati, whose technical advantage, gained through constant innovation in aerodynamics and chassis technology, remains considerable.
What should worry them is that their new bike isn’t as good as the old one—a clear, if not actually massive, technical reversal.
It emerged at the first preseason tests at Sepang, where both factory riders decided they didn’t like the GP25’s latest engine. It had more power, but was less friendly, particularly in terms of engine braking and corner entry. They switched to an engine spec more like last year’s. But it wasn’t as simple as just going back to last year’s multi-successful GP24. For obscure reasons, probably because the overall engine architecture was sufficiently different, the new chassis had to be retained.
As the season has progressed, it has become increasingly obvious that the older bike is superior. One proof comes from Alex Marquez, who has twice led on points and claimed a first win. He struggled somewhat on a GP23 last year, the same bike that erstwhile Gresini teammate Marc used for three wins. Alex’s best was a single third. Now on a GP24, Alex reliably matches and now and then beats not only Bagnaia but also his older brother on the nominally superior (or at least newer) GP25.
Meanwhile, rookie Aldeguer, also on a GP24, backed up a pair of podiums in France with regular top-10 finishes.
Can Ducati’s resident genius engineer Gigi Dall’Igna find a way to reverse this worrying trend? CN
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