Francesco Bagnaia believes his third place result in the Qatar Grand Prix is the “best way” to start life at Ducati following his promotion to the factory outfit after a difficult 2020 campaign.
Bagnaia was announced at the Bologna-based squad toward the end of last term following Andrea Dovizioso’s Ducati departure, though the Italian came into ’21 with only a solitary rostrum result to his name following a tricky but promising sophomore season.
A dead-cert second place in the Andalusian GP was lost owing to an engine failure with just six tours remaining, while a knee injury sustained at Brno forced him to miss three contests.
A first ever podium on his return to competition at Misano was a great way to signal his comeback, though a debut victory was lost just a week later at the same venue after tucking the front running over an errant helmet tear off, his season failing to improve there-on-in after crashing out of four of the final seven encounters on his way to 16th in the riders points.
Bagnaia says his Qatar performance vindicated the work he had done over the winter period to be as prepared as possible for his factory team bow, adding he was happy to put his crash-strewn ’20 campaign behind him.
“I think we’ve started in the best way possible with the pole and this podium because if I look at last season I struggled a lot towards the end with a lot of crashes, so starting like this is good and I’m happy with the work I did at home this winter to adapt better to this bike and to improve by overall fitness.
“I’m very happy with the work done with the team during the test and we’ve prepared the right way for here, we have another race here next week so we have good data from the evening conditions as we only have FP2 and FP4 like this so now with this information we can improve for the second half of the race.”
The ’18 Moto2 world champion led 14 of the 22 laps in the Qatar GP from a maiden pole position but lost the lead late on to a charging Maverick Vinales, Bagnaia blaming his defeat on a lack of rear grip that took him by surprise after running into no such problems during testing.
“I started struggling with the rear grip, I wasn’t expecting it because in the test I was not having these kind of problems but the conditions today were different so I think it’s normal that the grip changes, I think if it (track conditions) was like yesterday my pace was enough to win because I stayed in the low 1:55s.
“This was the main reason I struggled more I think, but I can be happy with the work done to get my second MotoGP podium in my first race with this team so nothing better.”
