Since the start of the 2022 MotoGP season, the battle for rookie of the year has a close-fought thing, with Marco Bezzecchi the leader so far but both Moto2 champion Remy Gardner and surprise package Darryn Binder also delivering decent performances to keep that fight very much alive after five races.
One rookie who hasn’t yet managed to deliver much of substance though is Fabio Di Giannantonio, who is still to score after his first handful of races and ended last Sunday’s race at Portimao in the pits after a technical problem on his Gresini Ducati robbed him of at least having the chance to fight with Bezzecchi and Gardner for points.
However, while he might be disappointed with his year so far, the 23-year-old at least can take solace from one thing: he knows the cause of what has been a relatively disappointing start to the season after initially showing very strongly when he made his MotoGP testing debut last November at Jerez.
Di Giannantonio was struck down with food poisoning at the first pre-season test of 2022 at Sepang back in February and missed the final two days in Malaysia, before flying directly to Indonesia’s new Mandalika Bay track for three more days, where the aftereffects of his illness continued to haunt him.
As a result, he believes that he started the 2022 season at a considerable disadvantage to his rivals – and is therefore still playing a significant amount of catch-up when it comes to dialling in a successful base setting on his 2021-spec satellite Ducati.
“This winter I lost two days in the beginning in Malaysia, and when I got to Indonesia I was still not 100%,” he told The Race at Portimao.
“By the end, I destroyed all the winter preparation. I’m building the set-up, the confidence on the bike race by race – but for sure when there is a race, everyone expects a result. I expect them too, but in MotoGP when you don’t have the feeling it’s difficult to make results.”
The start to the season has been somewhat slow, unsurprisingly given the lack of running he’s making up for, with time on track still being spent not working on perfecting his riding style and fine-tuning the bike but rather on searching for a comfortable and confident base setting that he can use as something to build from.
“We’re not in a good, good position on the set-up side,” Di Giannantonio admitted. “We’re still trying to find a bike that allows me to brake really hard and we’re working really hard on the electronics side to have a good exit from the corners, a smooth exit.
“We are also working on our side a lot to build the set-up for me, because I think at the moment I am still too far away.
“Because of this, we are still too far from the results at the end of the race because the feeling is still too far.”
But there is a crumb of comfort ahead for Di Giannantonio, who perhaps has his first chance since the Mandalika test to properly dial in his setting coming up in the next few days.
MotoGP takes to the track at Jerez for the first post-race test of the season next Monday, giving Di Giannantonio the opportunity to utilise eight hours of open pitlane time to try and fix some of what he has been missing so far this year.
