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Our MotoGP correspondent Simon Patterson’s coverage of eventual champion Pecco Bagnaia’s drink-driving incident in the summer proved particularly divisive. Here, Simon reflects on the controversy and how it was handled on all sides
Throughout the second half of the 2022 MotoGP season, the thing that has drawn most of the ire regularly directed my way on social media has been my relatively frequent references to the fact that newly crowned champion Pecco Bagnaia was convicted of drink driving during the series’ summer break, and that he escaped completely without any form of professional sanction.
Months on from his Ibiza car crash and weeks after the Italian lifted the crown at Valencia, have my opinions changed anything? Yes and no. Not because I now think that Bagnaia deserved to escape scot-free or anything like it, but rather because the more I’ve considered it, the more that I’m almost certain that the fallout from it was less his own fault and more to do with the way that the whole thing was managed by his employers at Ducati.
Firstly, let’s be straight: Bagnaia did something wrong when he decided to drive home from a night out at an Ibizan club while well over the legal limit. I’ve seen plenty of people since then try to make excuses for him but, as far as I’m concerned, there are none.
Drink driving can kill people, plain and simple. In Bagnaia’s home country, 2400 people died in car crashes in 2019, and 10% of all crashes involve drivers over the limit. That’s potentially hundreds of lives taken through recklessness – and while Bagnaia was lucky that he and his passengers escaped without injury, it might not have taken much to become another statistic.
That’s why I challenged him in the next press conference in which he faced the media, at Silverstone for the British Grand Prix. Unfortunately, he was unable to look too serious when questioned about it, and I was then shouted down by his Ducati team-mate Jack Miller, in a rather unusual defence of someone who had broken the law and, in my eyes, failed to show much in the way of remorse.
A brief apology had been issued on social media, then subsequently deleted. Ducati didn’t even release a statement of its own, instead directing enquiries towards Bagnaia’s own post. Series bosses Dorna and the FIM felt that the matter didn’t deserve anything in the way of professional sanction.
It’s hard to believe that would have been the case in other sports. Motorsport UK (the national governing body for all four-wheeled racing) has a blanket ban on any racing activity for as long as any drink driving suspension lasts. Other athletes have lost the chance to compete thanks to their actions behind the wheel – yet Bagnaia escaped scot-free.
And, really, in a world where athletes (whether they want to be or not) are role models to impressionable children, it’s hard to argue that should be the case. Perhaps even more so in the case of a sport based on engines, for a company that runs its very own ‘don’t drink and ride’ campaign in conjunction with Italian spirit manufacturer Amaro Montenegro.
In fact, that campaign was really the perfect vehicle for Bagnaia’s redemption, too, because while some were calling for professional sanctions against him, maybe the right course of action wouldn’t have been to suspend him for a few races but rather to make him make amends through his profile, by sticking him in front of the cameras for a few days of unpaid work as the new face of that campaign.
Really, though, just announcing that internal disciplinary action had been taken (perhaps hinting at a salary punishment or similar) and a briefing from his press officer to start out that Silverstone press conference with a sincere apology instead of leaving it to the media to bring it up would have been enough to satisfy most that Bagnaia was aware that his actions have consequences beyond just being unable to drive a car in Spain (on the road, at least; MotoGP sponsor BMW had no problem releasing a video of him racing the M3 Touring he won for being the series’ best qualifier around the track at Valencia).
