The Friday-Saturday journey of the two Ducati racers, Marc Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia, was quite the opposite. Marc Marquez had problems on Friday which caused him to start from 13th position but was able to return to the sprint race and get two podiums. While Pecco Bagnaia was fast enough in the training sessions, pre-qualifying and qualifying so he could start from the front row, the sprint race had problems. What’s the story?
Starting from Pecco First, as reported by Simon Caffar, Pecco seemed to have no confidence when using his second motorbike after the crash at the end of the second qualifying. The start was not good, he experienced an incident at T6 until finally he decided to enter the pit because he felt that the GP24 he was using was no longer safe if he was asked to speed on the track.
“As soon as I started my sighting lap, I felt something strange on the bike. And then on the warm-up lap I ran wide at turn seven in a strange way. I started the race and had a massive wheelie, and then it became very difficult to do everything.
“I almost lost the front in turn six before going wide in turn seven, because of the acceleration. My team has checked everything, but it’s not easy to understand when something like this happens. But my team is very good and they will get everything done. “I can’t say it right, but we will check everything for today,” said Bagnaia.
“Something went wrong, something didn’t go the way I expected, and that’s something that can happen. We had to change bikes after the crash this morning and the second bike was maybe too… I had to adapt a little bit.”
“The hope is to fight for the top two positions [on Sunday], because our pace is quite good. We will take the positives for the limit and my team is already working to use the same bike as the others. We know the potential is very high. “
Generally, the first motorbike and the second spare motorbike have very high setup details in terms of similarities. but I don’t know which area made Pecco feel that the second motorbike was quite different so he felt less confident during the Sprint race.
This was different from Marc Marquez, who struggled and did not appear to be in a relaxed state in the two sessions on Friday, which resulted in Marc’s poor starting position, namely P13. And this is because he and the crew have been trying a new GP23 setup since the start of Friday’s Le Mans session. “Yesterday we made a mistake with the team, using different set-up directions with both bikes for practice and then we were knocked out in Q1. And then in Q1 I wasn’t confident.”
And Marc continued by explaining that on Saturday he and the team left the new setup and returned to the basic setup. “The way is to go back to our base and of course understand where the other Ducati riders are going, especially Martin and Bagnaia. and what they do, because they know better than us. And we’re heading in that direction a little bit.
“And we also adjusted the electronics on this new base setup and for the sprint races we made a big step in that – the electronics – and this really helped me to be smoother.”
“For me, this way of riding a motorbike is more sensitive. Need a way to drive it. And if you look at the video yesterday (Friday), I was fighting against a motorbike. And that was the first time I fought against a motorbike. And I can’t ride like this because you don’t take advantage of the bike. “
The second podium is indeed spectacular, especially if you see him do it from position 13. A good start is one of the recipes. Apart from Pecco’s starting problems, you can see how Marc improved his position from P13 to 6th in just the first 2 corners of Le Mans. And Marc doesn’t want to be overly proud about winning this sprint podium
” This is the result of a Combination of concentration, luck, instinct. It was very difficult to make a difference at the start because every rider, every manufacturer started in a good way. However, for me, the most important thing was the pace after that which was something that didn’t happen all weekend. And in sprint races I can race at a constant speed, in a good way. And this makes me happier. Even if for example I finish in fourth or fifth position, but with that speed, it will make me very happy.”
