Factory Ducati MotoGP rider Enea Bastianini will seek medical clearance to return to racing at this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez after a successful superbike test on Monday.
Bastianini has been sidelined since a clash with VR46 Ducati’s Luca Marini in the Portimao sprint race a month ago meant his first race in works Ducati colours ended with a shoulder blade fracture.
Monday’s run at Misano is the second time Bastianini has tested his fitness on track since the injury, but the first outing resulted in the decision that he wasn’t ready to try to race at Austin in mid-April.
This time the 10-lap run ended with what Ducati described on social media as “positive feelings”, encouraging Bastianini to head to Jerez where he will undergo medical checks on Thursday to determine whether he is fit to race.
After weeks of doing rehab and working hard to recover from his injury, @bestia23 took to the track again at Misano today! Enea did 10 laps and had positive feelings. He will fly to Jerez and undergo a medical check on Thursday to determine if he is fit to race at the #SpanishGP pic.twitter.com/FUnCJjYiLV
— Ducati Corse (@ducaticorse) April 24, 2023
Bastianini’s likely return to the grid comes at an intriguing moment for his reigning champion Ducati team-mate Pecco Bagnaia and the 2023 MotoGP championship fight.
Given the headaches Bastianini had given Bagnaia in 2022 when on a year-old Gresini Ducati, many expected that he would be an immediate threat to Bagnaia’s supremacy in the factory team once promoted.
The early-2023 evidence was that it certainly wouldn’t happen immediately, though. Bastianini ended pre-season testing feeling only “70-75%” ready for the season as he found the 2023 Ducati required a different riding style. Unconfident with the rear of the bike, he was having to compromise his corner-entry speeds to ensure fast corner exits.
In their only competitive head-to-head as works Ducati team-mates so far, Bagnaia qualified just under three tenths of a second faster than Bastianini at Portimao as they lined up second and sixth respectively.
On pure speed, Bagnaia has looked capable of dominating the season.
But his progress in Bastianini’s absence has been stuttering.
While he won both races at Portimao and the Austin sprint, he crashed out of second place at a wet Termas de Rio Hondo then did the same while leading in the dry in Austin’s main race.
That prompted Bagnaia to admit that he is not at ease with the 2023 Ducati either, for the unusual reason that he finds it “too stable” for him to properly sense impending crashes, its sheer technical quality making it difficult for him to feel the necessary affinity with it.
So rather than returning to face an ultra-confident reigning champion team-mate sitting on the kind of probably insurmountable points lead Bagnaia would have had without those two crashes, Bastianini’s likely comeback will happen with Bagnaia ‘only’ 53 points ahead of him, under pressure after back-to-back errors, and questioning himself and his bike.
Bastianini must prove both his fitness and that he’s made enough progress since testing to actually be able to maximise the GP23 himself.
But when he left Portugal a month ago injured while Bagnaia dominated, Bastianini’s 2023 title bid looked over already.
Now it’s not quite so clear-cut.
