How Bagnaia made MotoGP history in Ducati's Red Bull-esque 2023

The numbers posted by Ducati in the 2023 MotoGP season knocked down every historical wall its rivals had put up in the past. From 20 rounds, Ducati riders scored 17 wins – the most of any marque in a single campaign. It scored 17 pole positions, 43 podiums in total, managed eight rostrum lockouts and won all three championships: riders’, constructors’, and the teams’ title with Pramac Racing.

From going 14 years without a riders’ title, Ducati celebrated its third a little over 12 months after Francesco Bagnaia scored the company’s second. The Italian’s completion of a back-to-back success came in a dramatic finale at Valencia, where a Ducati rider was guaranteed to win the championship whatever happened.

While it would be easy to chalk up Ducati’s statistics in 2023 simply to its sheer show of force in fielding eight riders, six of whom posted grand prix victories, its position as MotoGP’s dominator was the culmination of almost 10 years of work within its “new history”.

“I think that there is a history that after the arrival of [general manager] Gigi Dall’Igna, [and] we say new management, everything changed after 2014 and then we started with a new history in MotoGP with the new bike that we have been developing year by year,” says Ducati sporting director Davide Tardozzi.

“This bike is not a revolution. This bike is the evolution of the 2015. So, we arrived at this point where everybody is very competitive. We were in trouble when everybody said, ‘Only Casey Stoner can ride the bike.’ And now we’ve come to the point where we have eight riders and all eight riders are very competitive. And this is something that made us really proud about our job.

“I think in this moment we arrived to the point where we can manage the results considering we never stopped evolving the bike, because our competitors are honestly very tough and we are scared they can find something that can make them faster than us. But, in the end, we are happy about this situation.”

Any fears Ducati may have had about rival defeats never really came to much in 2023.

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Ducati locked out the podium on eight occasions in 2023, including at Misano, as the opposition rarely got a sniff

Aprilia won twice, its veteran Aleix Espargaro beating Bagnaia on the final lap of a British GP duel and romping to a home win a few weeks later at Barcelona. But Aprilia only excelled when either grip conditions were low so it could profit from the RS-GP’s excellent drive grip, or the circuit layout was fast and flowing.

Honda was the only other manufacturer to give Ducati a Sunday defeat in 2023. Alex Rins benefited from his riding style to mask the RC213V’s numerous drawbacks and claim his and HRC’s only grand prix win of the season in the US, albeit after Bagnaia crashed out while leading.

KTM knocked on the door a few times, but its only wins came in the new sprints, which featured at every round of the 2023 campaign. Even in the half-distance races, Ducati dominated, winning 16 of the 19 that were eventually run (the Australian GP sprint had to be called off due to poor weather), with KTM taking two and Aprilia the other.

Reigning champion Bagnaia made a strong statement of intent at the opening round of the season in Portugal. He won the very first sprint and backed that up with a grand prix victory to take a maximum of 37 points. The mistakes that plagued his 2022 title campaign and left him 91 points adrift at the halfway mark looked like they might have been eradicated.

Martin, on identical machinery, had been outscored by Bagnaia by 62 points in the first half of 2023 as he took his time to fully understand the GP23

But then he crashed while running second in the wet in Argentina, and his tumble out of the lead at Austin came with the odd excuse that he felt his GP23 Ducati was too stable. He quickly rowed back on this somewhat, but conceded at the end of the season that he still didn’t know why this crash happened.

A third non-score followed in round five in France when Aprilia’s Maverick Vinales tangled with him, leaving the Ducati rider with an injured foot. The damage to Bagnaia’s championship, though, was minimal. He left Le Mans in May a point clear of VR46 Ducati rider Marco Bezzecchi, who had won the Argentinian and French GPs on his year-old Desmosedici. Bagnaia’s two sprint wins and a second in the first five rounds did him a favour.

After France, though, Bagnaia’s results stabilised. He won in Italy, the Netherlands and Austria to add to his Portuguese and Spanish GP victories, and after the Barcelona sprint he was 66 points clear in the standings.

But in that Catalan GP in September came a potentially crucial moment. A heavy crash exiting Turn 2 at the start slammed Bagnaia to the ground and into the path of Brad Binder’s KTM, which ran over his left leg in a sickening incident. Bagnaia didn’t suffer serious injury, but his leg was badly bruised and the after-effects hindered him at the following week’s San Marino GP.

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Martin took advantage of Bagnaia getting back to full fitness after his Barcelona shunt, closing the points margin

At this point, Pramac star Jorge Martin stepped forward as Bagnaia’s biggest threat. Martin, on identical machinery, had been outscored by Bagnaia by 62 points in the first half of 2023 as he took his time to fully understand the GP23. A German GP win in June, in a duel with Bagnaia, was a signal of his intent. Having cut Bagnaia’s lead down to 50 points with a third at Barcelona, Martin profited from the factory Ducati rider’s injury woes by doing the double at Misano.

Over the second half of the season, Martin would ultimately outscore Bagnaia – who spent much of this portion chasing missing feeling on his bike’s front end – by 23 points as he ended the year with nine sprint and four grand prix victories. Briefly, Martin also overhauled Bagnaia in the standings.

Without question the faster of the two in the second part of the campaign, Martin went seven points clear after winning the sprint in Indonesia. That these two rode identical machinery added a complication. Their data was available to each other, and every advantage was exposed. But it’s this approach that has helped Ducati become so dominant in MotoGP.

Overconfidence, as Martin would later categorise it, led to two vital errors on the third-year rider’s part. Martin crashed out while leading by over three seconds in Indonesia in October. Bagnaia took the win, after starting 13th, and restored his points lead to 18. Then in Australia the week after, Martin once again led by over three seconds. But his decision to go against almost the entire field in choosing the soft rear tyre meant he plummeted to fifth as Bagnaia finished second, increasing the points gap to 27.

Martin responded emphatically in Thailand with a double win, but fears over tyre pressure penalties – he had been given a warning at Buriram for riding underneath the minimum limit mandated in the rules from the British GP onwards – meant his front Michelin was a bit higher than he wanted for the Malaysian GP. He finished over six seconds adrift of third-placed Bagnaia, who got an official warning for the same offence in that race.

With the gap slashed to seven points in the Qatar sprint, ensuring the title would go to the final round, a problem with his rear tyre led Martin to a season-worst finish of 10th in the GP, while Bagnaia came home second despite a near-miss with eventual race winner Fabio Di Giannantonio, the rider booted from his Gresini seat to make way for Marc Marquez in 2024.

While Martin was able to get a 21-point deficit down to 14 after the Valencia finale sprint, an off at Turn 1 while chasing Bagnaia in the grand prix and then a tangle with Marquez on lap six ended his hopes. Bagnaia was world champion. A seventh GP win of a season in which no race featured the entire 2023 grid together due to numerous injuries – something not helped by the addition of 20 sprints – was Bagnaia rubbing salt in his rival’s wounds.

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Bagnaia didn’t have to win the Valencia finale after Martin crashed out to assure him of the crown, but did so anyway

Dall’Igna says Ducati now wants to “imitate” the domination Red Bull showed in Formula 1 in 2023. Bagnaia is a seasoned champion and Martin clearly has the calibre, while the rest of its 2023 stable is brimming with – at the very least – race-winning potential.

There is one rider in that roster for 2024, though, which Ducati didn’t want but may well provide the total devastation it wants to inflict next year. After going through further surgery in 2022 to correct the right arm he badly broke in 2020 and become competitive again, Marquez was seriously let down by Honda in 2023. Apart from the win for Rins, who shredded a two-year deal with HRC to join Yamaha next year after feeling undervalued, Marquez’s third position in Japan was its only Sunday podium.

Injury from a collision in Portugal ruled Marquez out for three rounds. And the crashes kept coming in France and Italy while running in podium places.

A five-crash weekend in Germany left Marquez with more injuries, and he missed the German and Dutch races in June. A lacklustre test of the 2024 Honda at Misano thrust him towards his decision to quit – thought to have cost him € 15 million – a year early to race a 2023-spec Ducati at Gresini next season to simply understand whether he can be competitive again.

On his first ride of the Ducati in the Valencia test, Marquez was just 0.171s off the pace and had also been hiding an arm pump issue that was operated upon the following day. The smile was back and the fear in his rivals instilled…