On the heels of one of the most dominant seasons a MotoGP manufacturer has ever had, Ducati has been weakened.
It's lost a trusty long-time ally in Pramac, it's been downsized to six bikes on the grid as a result, and it remains constrained by 'Rank A' manufacturer status - no wildcards, fewest test tyres.
None of those things are what worry its general manager Gigi Dall'Igna the most.
"The real problem is that other manufacturers have better riders," he said. "In the past you saw some bikes - for example, when Aprilia made a step from two bikes to four, and anyway the results were more or less the same.
"I don’t think that to have only six bikes on the grid, six riders, will be a real problem for us. The real problem is that [Jorge] Martin is leaving for another company, and also Enea [Bastianini].
"This is the real problem."
Ducati's rider roster is still spearheaded by Pecco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez - so it's doing alright! - but while both Martin and Bastianini won't have accepted a satellite deal, it can be rightly questioned whether Ducati's early-season move for Fermin Aldeguer has played its part in 'weakening' its roster, at least in the short-term.
Aldeguer, after all, now takes up one of its factory-contract slots for two years, and does so coming off a particularly disappointing Moto2 season. The stakes are now much higher for him to pan out as a prospect.
Buyer's remorse?
Ducati committed to Aldeguer coming off the young Spaniard's late-2023 run, in which he was winning race after race with stunning ease - with not even Pedro Acosta, presumably already in MotoGP prep mode at that point, able to mount much of a challenge.
But Moto2's switch from Dunlop rubber to Pirellis for '24 set up a Qatar opener in which Aldeguer struggled woefully for tyre performance, and though that was an outlier, it did sort of set the tone for a campaign that looked consistently below what was expected.
In '23 he had starred as one of two riders on Boscoscuro bikes. In '24 he was largely par-for-the-course as one of four riders on Boscoscuros - Ai Ogura, representing the Italian brand's new customer team MT Helmets, MSi, made hay instead.
The idea that this will have soured Ducati on Aldeguer before he even turned a lap on the Desmosedici was countered sharply by Dall'Igna though when asked about him and his season by The Race.
"For me, Fermin is one of the young talents of MotoGP - I am really happy to have him in one of our teams, and he has a lot of really good things and some things that he has to develop and understand better," says Dall'Igna.
"But I think that we can help him to do this. So I am convinced that in a couple of years he will be in the fighting for the championship."
Dall'Igna's assessment gels nicely with the observable reality that Aldeguer's final Moto2 season was both a disappointment and yet not as much of a colossal failure as one could be led to believe.
The glimpses of the Aldeguer capable of dominance were still there. He led 73 laps which is considerably fewer than Aron Canet's 110, but far far more than anyone else did, including champion Ogura at 20. His average race position was a comfortable third, adding further to the picture of a rider who simply underdelivered on his performance potential.
Moto2 average in-race position in 2024
Aron Canet - 4.5
Ai Ogura - 5.1
Fermin Aldeguer - 6.6
Alonso Lopez - 7.7
Joe Roberts - 7.7
Those in Aldeguer's orbit, including Ducati, will have the best idea of what it is that he has to "develop and understand better", but his 2024 certainly felt like a season in which he buckled under the expectations of being a heavy pre-season favourite and spiralled repeatedly.
But that can happen, and it can certainly happen to a 19-year-old. It should concern Ducati, yes, but there's a limit to it - because Ducati did not sign him to be the best Moto2 rider he can be, but the best MotoGP rider he can be, and not to be the best 19-year-old he can be, but the best version of himself in the coming years.
First touch with MotoGP
A great Moto2 campaign can put some serious credit in the bank - and your name in the history books, of course - but in modern MotoGP it only really matters until the first pre-season, which then only really matters until the first race.
Some will feel 2024 is evidence that Aldeguer isn't ready for MotoGP, but that readiness isn't binary. After all, Suzuki's bet that a raw Joan Mir could be polished up in MotoGP instead of sticking in Moto2 for more than his one decent season paid off in remarkable fashion in 2020.
Whether Aldeguer is a good fit for MotoGP is something we'll have to wait to find out. His first test, certainly, didn't really give a clear pointer one way or another.
He was the quickest of the rookies - which, on board a Ducati, is probably the minimum expectation. He had a minor crash - a totally normal part of the rookie learning process. He beamed with delight talking to media after his day was done, saying that "all is incredible" on the machine but that it would inevitably take a fair bit of adapting to.
"All Ducati staff and my team were happy," he said.
He was, with all that said, 1.761s off the pace, but is that a lot? Is it anything? Between 2018 and now, rookies making their collective test debut have averaged 2.350s off the leading pace on their first day. But that's a variety of situations, tracks and run plans.
There is almost no correlation between that headline number and future success or lack of it. The two who got closest were Bagnaia in 2018 (discounting his nine-lap 'gift' MotoGP test from two years prior), who was within a second, and Pedro Acosta, who was 1.2s off. Acosta had one of the best MotoGP rookie seasons in memory - Bagnaia really did not.
Dall'Igna's words show he retains very lofty ambitions for Aldeguer - and he and Ducati have certainly proven that they know what they're doing when it comes to talent evaluation. When Bagnaia had that slightly rubbish 2019 season, Ducati and Dall'Igna kept with him and trusted what it saw, soon giving him the nod to the works team.
There is no immediate urgency for Aldeguer to succeed because of that Bagnaia bet. Yet Ducati's rider ranks are weaker than they were a year ago, with its efforts in future-proofing effectively written off by the exits of Martin, Bastianini and Marco Bezzecchi.
It may well get a do-over - as we can't be totally certain that four pretty great riders, including Bastianini, won't hit the free agent market in the short-to-medium-term future. But if Ducati taps into the potential it still sees in Aldeguer, it won't really need them anyway.
