Earlier this year, newly-crowned MotoGP world champion Pecco Bagnaia’s former Ducati team-mate Jack Miller speculated that he believes that the 26-year-old Italian was carrying himself differently in the paddock – wearing the crown of champion not just with ease, but with a newfound confidence which he may have been missing in the past.
Bagnaia’s Portimao double to kick off the season backed up what Miller said. Then, admittedly, came an Argentina round with a mediocre sixth place in the sprint and a needless Sunday crash in the wet.
For now, however, it is nothing more than a speed bump, unlikely to substantially upset Bagnaia’s title defence. Only Marco Bezzecchi on a year-old Ducati is ahead of him in the standings – and of the three men Bagnaia had pinpointed as his biggest threats coming into the season, Marc Marquez and Enea Bastianini are sidelined through injury, while Fabio Quartararo is in the midst of a complicated adaptation period with an upgraded Yamaha M1 that is giving him more power but short-changing him on grip.
Bagnaia’s respect for Quartararo, arguably his defining MotoGP rival so far, has long shone through. Equally clear right now is a perhaps surprising compassion for Quartararo’s current situation – one that reminds Bagnaia of his own travails from last year.
“I know the potential of Fabio,” the Italian, a protege of seven-time champion Valentino Rossi, told The Race in an exclusive interview, “and I know the amount of strength that he is giving to Yamaha to be competitive again.
“I know the situation, I know that last year in the first three races I was more or less in the same situation, and I know the amount of strength that you have to give. I’m recognising that he’s giving a lot to be back again in the front.
“He started for sure not in the way they were expecting with the new bike. It’s not to consider him with a bad level, because I consider him one of the fastest riders, maybe ever. I recognise his talent.”
The difficulties that nearly derailed Bagnaia’s title campaign at the start of 2022 have by now been well-documented. “Sometimes,” he recalled, “it was a mix of bikes that were good and so competitive, and then other bikes I wasn’t feeling so well at the start. We needed many races at the beginning to develop, to improve on myself.
“We reached a level after seven or eight races, because even after I won in Jerez things were OK but I wasn’t understanding why when I was crashing. It was something difficult to understand, something difficult to improve. We did it after the summer break.
“This year is totally different. I have a lot of confidence in my bike, I feel much better with it, and for sure this is much better for my serenity.”
The interview came before his Argentina crash – one which will have tested his “serenity” and will continue to do so until he overwrites it with a good result, perhaps this weekend at COTA. Even still, there is clearly a baseline level of performance that will continue to soothe him – though he crashed at Termas, it was a fall from second place, and at no point in 2023 so far has Bagnaia looked drift of the pace he needs for a successful title defence.
“On track, I feel that I know we are competitive,” he said, “that if we work well we will be in front. This is something that last year I needed time to understand. Needed time to improve myself on this, because maybe sometimes I was a bit nervous and sometimes a bit too stressed. I was making mistakes.
“This year I feel more calm, I feel like I am in a better situation. I feel like compared to last year we started in a completely different way. And we know, all the team, that if we are working well we are fighting for a top position. This is all something that has helped me.”
But, even before Termas, there was already an acknowledgment from Bagnaia that there was still a certain inflexibility to tackle.
“Sincerely, I’m not the kind of rider who, if the bike is not perfect… I need a good bike. Not perfection, because I know that is impossible to achieve, but if the bike is not giving to me some great feeling on the front, because I need the front that is stable, then I need more time to be competitive.
“I’m not a rider like maybe Marc [Marquez], like Casey [Stoner], like Jack [Miller]. I need more feeling from the bike.”
The other thing that the experiences of the past year has done for Bagnaia is to give him some understanding and some perhaps surprising compassion for his rivals when they’re undergoing the same struggles he faced a year ago – something that applies more than anyone else to his biggest title rival of last year.
This has to be a big part of why he referred to Quartararo as a “more complete” rider after snatching the crown last year – and why he’s not comfortable considering himself among MotoGP’s elite.
“In this moment, I would never put myself at the top,” he stressed. “I always feel like you need to gain this achievement with results. Of course, we did results last year, but it was a different situation compared to the championships won by Marc year ago, or by Valentino.
“If you are a champion, you have to be competitive always, and we demonstrated to be competitive just in the second part of the championship, not the first.
“At this moment, I don’t want to put me in the same level as Marc, but I don’t put Fabio at the same level either. I feel like I’m at the same level of Fabio, that we are each very competitive, but to be like Marc we need to do another step.
“If we continue like this season, if we continue to work well, then yes, perhaps.”
However, it’s also hard to avoid the fact that becoming a true great of the sport – in the way of Marquez and Rossi before him – isn’t really an ambition of Bagnaia’s anyway, at least away from the circuit.
Always an outlier among his peers ever since he first rocked up to the MotoGP paddock, the quiet, softly-spoken and reserved Turin native hasn’t exactly got the towering personality of some of those he idolised growing up – and while he might want to match their on-track exploits, he also admitted that becoming that sort of character would involve giving up some of what makes him unique.
“It’s difficult to reach the level of Vale,” he conceded of the status of his mentor Rossi. “He was the first one, and it came natural to him. For me, it’s something that if I want it, I’d have to change myself – and I don’t want to change myself.
“I want to be myself, I want to continue being a closed guy like I am. I don’t want to start being an influencer for someone. I want to be myself, and in this moment that’s enough for me.
“If we continue like this, then for sure it [the fame] will grow, it will be higher. But I think I have to be prepared for it. It’s something that I appreciate a lot, but in a situation like Vale I don’t know if I would enjoy it. It’s sometimes important, something you have to be happy with because it means you’re doing a good job.
“I love having time with my fiancee, I love spending time with my dog. Maybe that’s something that will change if we continue working like we are doing, if we continue having results. It’s something that could change and that I could have to prepare for. “
