Francesco Bagnaia’s Australian Setback: Ducati’s Struggles and the Wind’s Wrath in MotoGP Sprint

Francesco Bagnaia faces challenges in the MotoGP sprint in Australia: 'The positives turned negative.' The reigning world champion expressed that Ducati failed to make any enhancements to the bike for the sprint race.

Francesco Bagnaia from Ducati mentioned that the positives he experienced with his motorcycle on Friday at the MotoGP Australian Grand Prix deteriorated, leading to a challenging sprint where he finished in fourth place.

On Friday, Bagnaia was just slightly behind the championship frontrunner, Jorge Martin, in terms of speed during practice. However, on Saturday, he had difficulty maintaining that pace and ended up securing only the fifth position on the starting grid.

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During the sprint, he momentarily held second place but eventually dropped back to finish in fourth, 6.879 seconds behind the race winner Martin. As a result, he now trails by 16 points in the standings.

Bagnaia claims that Martin was toying with them during the sprint race, but he has a plan to enhance his bike's performance for Sunday's race.

Bagnaia admitted to motogp.com that he wasn't entirely content or pleased, acknowledging that achieving more proved challenging today.

"Starting this morning, I found it challenging to cope with the dry weather and the wind. Although the adjustments we made yesterday significantly enhanced my comfort, they didn't seem to be effective today."

"We experimented with various strategies for the competition."

"We modified the configuration slightly; as a result, the things that were working well began to deteriorate, while the issues we faced earlier in the day remained unchanged."

"We didn't make any improvements, and in fact, things got worse. However, I've figured out a plan for tomorrow, and I believe it could be quite effective."

"We need to hold off until tomorrow morning and give it another shot during the warm-up, ideally with dry weather so we can properly evaluate it. Right now, I believe Martin is significantly quicker."

"Today he participated in the game with our team. However, we will have to wait and see about his involvement tomorrow."

Bagnaia explained that to improve his competitiveness, he needed to address the issue of the wind, which caused him to drift wide in fast corners as the front wheel acted like a "sail."

He expressed the need for a bike that allows him to take tighter lines and reduces wind resistance, as he felt the front of the bike behaved like a sail when entering fast corners.

"When I went into the corners, it caused me to drift wide and lose grip at the front."

"It was rather challenging to shut down all the lines."

"I made an effort to catch up to Jorge, but whenever I pushed harder, I faced more difficulties. Therefore, I decided to pull back a bit and aim to finish as high up as I could."

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