Factory duo Marc Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia will not race Ducati's 2025-spec bike this coming MotoGP season as Ducati has instead made the shock decision to revert to last year's GP24 bike after five days of back-to-back comparison testing at Sepang and Buriram.
There has been a question mark over which engine Ducati would homologate for the next two years - thanks to the series' 2026 development ban - throughout testing, but it now seems as though it has opted not just for last year's engine but also almost the complete 2024 bike package, scrapping all of the 2025 work done so far.
The new bike failed to deliver the performance that Ducati technical wizard Gigi Dall'Igna had promised when it made its track debut at Sepang last week, instigating a raft of emergency actions within the manufacturer.
That included not just testing the 2024 bike back-to-back with the new one but also, according to The Race's sources in the paddock, secretly involved the series' three GP24 riders (Marquez's brother Alex, Bagnaia's VR46 Academy stablemate Franco Morbidelli, and rookie Fermin Aldeguer) trying out the new engine on the final day of testing at Sepang.
And the decision to switch back to the old engine has been paired with Ducati reverting its factory duo to the 2024-spec frame as well, at least for the opening rounds of the MotoGP season.
"We will call the bike the GP24.9," Bagnaia explained. "It will be very close [to the 2025].
"To be better than the 2024 was tough, and I think that all the others would pay to have something like this. From my point of view, I was quite sure - I have to say that I was a bit of a liar these days, because I couldn't say the truth. But I was quite convinced from the start that the 2024 was better.
"We worked, we tried to improve it, but from the first day in Malaysia me and Marc were in the same opinion, that the GP24 was better."
The decision to go with year-old machinery - and to make the unprecedented step to essentially now run the same engine for three years in a row - comes as a result largely of the rules freeze that will force Ducati to lock in the homologation in only a few weeks' time, with Bagnaia admitting to The Race that the situation means that the team had to act conservatively.
"We already risked in 2023, because in 2023 we had some problems during the test and finally in the last day I was feeling better - but we don't want any more to have this kind of thing," he explained. "From 2022 to 2023, honestly the 2022 was better!
“But [for this season] we just decided to go with the GP24 that was at the top."
