“Breaking Point.”
Welcome back to another episode of Dre’s Race Review! Forgive me for this one being a day light, I have a genuine excuse – It was my birthday on Sunday. Yes, I’m 33 years young as you read this. Sincerely, thank you all so much for the birthday love, it really does mean a lot that so many people care. <3
As for the racing thing, yes, we had the first MotoGP race back after the Summer Break, with Round 13 of the 2025 Championship heading back to Austria and the Red Bull Ring, and one of just four races on the modern calendar that Champion-Elect Marc Marquez hasn’t won around yet. Hmmm, I wonder what’ll happen this time. Let’s get into it.
The Woes Of Pecco
Once again, I’m breaking protocol here compared to my usual format, because I want to talk about Pecco Bagnaia first, and to do so, I have to bring Saturday into play given the weird nature of the weekend format.
Simply put, it was a race weekend that at first, looked promising. Bagnaia was cautiously optimistic on Friday. Top 3 in Practice, while also able to use the 355mm big Brembo brake package that back in Aragon, left him feeling better about his confidence on corner entry. It continued into Saturday, where Pecco qualified on the front row behind Marco Bezzecchi and Alex Marquez.
But it all went wrong the moment the Sprint race started. Pecco was one of two riders, Fermin Aldeguer being the other, who had a huge amount of wheelspin off the line, dropping from third to thirteenth, and Aldeguer dropping from sixth and ninth and nearly causing a big pileup on the run to Turn 1.
That wasn’t all thought – Pecco was stuck and fighting rear gunners for the first few laps, being bullied off the racing line by his old nemesis Jorge Martin. After a big braking wobble in Sector 2, Bagnaia parked his Ducati in the pits. The visible frustration as he replicated the Monka wheel reaction meme, kinda said it all.
After the race, he did what he’s had to do before – Do everything but directly say he thinks he had a duff rear tire, an uncommon but genuine continued problem with the Michelin’s. And while the french manufacturer was doing yet more damage control and said there were “no anomalies” with its tire, it did admit that a combination of extreme heat (50 degree track temp), and used tarmac was causing the surface of the tire to overheat, and causing issues, with further investigation promised for Pecco’s claimed defective wear.
Now, I know a lot of people will be using this to dogpile Pecco off the back of his subpar year, but who am I more likely to believe here, the man who I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, with a body of evidence to suggest Michelin has made faulty rear tires in the past, or the supplier, who have made mistakes multiple times, is quitting the sport in less than 18 months time, and has shot themselves in the foot by not trying to fix their compatibility problems with the bikes excessive amount of front loads?
The Grand Prix though, was a different story. Bagnaia started well, getting to second early and staying with Marc Marquez and Marco Bezzecchi in the early periods. But as the race went on, Pecco faded immensely, falling behind Pedro Acosta, Fermin Aldeguer, Enea Bastianini, Joan Mir and Brad Binder to finish eighth, 12 seconds off the win. At times, Bagnaia was straight up bullied off the apex of the corner and pushed off track, beaten under heavy braking, something the Italian is usually one of the best in the world at.
Then something strange happened. For the first time since joining Ducati back in 2020, Pecco snapped at his team in frustration. He said straight up: “I’m always focused, I’ve never lost my head,” he said. “But today I couldn’t accelerate; everyone was overtaking me coming out of the corners. I hope Ducati explains it to me, because I’m running out of patience.”
It’s easy to see why. After the initial optimism, he talked about the same issues that have plagued him all season. He was getting passed on corner exit, something that never happens on a Ducati. The winning time for this year’s race was almost exactly the same as last year’s, to within a tenth of a second, and yet he’s 12 seconds off his teammate, a GP24 and a friggin’ Aprilia.
I don’t care how you feel about Pecco Bagnaia and his legacy, he’s not 200 points worse than Marquez is after 13 weekends. But I think this is the conflicting nature of Ducati’s two main riders. Pecco is a pickaxe, he’s sensitive to a lot of feedback about how he rides his bike and if you knock him out of his confidence, his pace drops off. Marc Marquez is a sledgehammer, that even with issues on the bike, Marc will figure out a way to ride it quickly via sheer blunt force trauma. He did it with Honda for years, and he’s done so despite the GP25’s stability concerns that have left it vulnerable at times. And it’s a weakness for Pecco that’s being exposed at the very highest level.
When you’re a Double MotoGP World Champion, fresh off being beaten by a customer fair and square and now getting blown out in the teammate fight that was going to establish just how good he really is, it’s been a shellacking for the Italian. And after nearly a year of frustration, the first crack is starting to show in the Ducati/Pecco relationship. On any level, it’s not a great look that Marc is the only one making the latest Ducati work. It’s a good problem to have when you’re winning… but we used to say about Red Bull Racing too.
Meanwhile…
Across the garage, once again, everything’s coming up Marquez. Despite a crash in qualifying that meant he had to work a little harder than usual, Marc never really looked like losing. He took advantage of a small Alex Marquez error in the Sprint to ease past and then push the gap out to a second, winning his 12th Sprint of the season1.
The Grand Prix was a different story. Early on, Marco Bezzecchi was able to hold off Marquez and establish the early pace., Marquez tried an attack after a dozen laps and failed, not wanting to risk his tire, and try again later. He eventually got past after a heated battle with the Italian, but not before Fermin Aldeguer, who fell as far back as 10th, came roaring through the field to get into the leading group.
Now, by the time Marquez took the front, he openly admitted he had zone’d out (As much as you can on a 300bhp bike), and only re-engaged his pace when Aldeguer block-passed Bez with four laps to go. It was never really in doubt for Marc, and if anything, the surprise of Aldeguer’s pace actually helped him with his concentration, something the Championship leader admitted has slipped in races past.
Including the Sprints, 12 races in a row for Marquez, six GP wins in a row for the first time since his outrageous 2014 season, and finally, a first win in Austria for MM93. With it, 19 more points gained on his brother Alex, whose long lap penalty forced him back to 14th, and only coming back to 10th, lacking the speed to pass Raul Fernandez’s Aprilia. The lead? 142 points, and now, only the Top 10 in the standings are still mathematically in play. It’s quickly becoming a matter of when, rather than if. And as it stands, it could be Honda’s old stomping ground at Motegi where this could be wrapped up. Man.
Casey With The Good Rant
MotoGP had a shock announcement to make just days before this weekend started – That stability control was being introduced and expected to be run by all the teams as part of a regulation change, effective immediately. It’s become a standardised part of the bikes ECU’s and cuts power to the rear to the bike if they feel it’s sliding too much. The claim by the powers that be say that as a result, it should lower the risk of high-side crashes and because it was done in the interest of safety and there was a unanimous agreement between all five manufacturers, it was greenlit immediately.
Funnily enough, my Podcast co-host Cameron Buckley reckoned that the teams may have been running this anyway on the side (it’s been in the works for three years according to TNT’s Gavin Emmett), but because it was unpoliceable without hard evidence, the series has just mandated its usage and be open about it, like with F1 in 2001 when out of nowhere driver aids like Traction Control, Launch Control and automatic transmission returned. Like prohibition and weed, better legal so you can regulate it than don’t and it all goes under the table.
Casey Stoner was also here this weekend visiting the paddock, and no surprise, even got a full on media session too, and he was surrounded. Naturally, he was asked all about the regulations and the prototypes we have now, and he was good value for his comments:
“It’s always a very difficult, touchy subject, because the riders are going to want it one way, and then the engineers and the manufacturers are going to want it another. So there’s always this sort of argument, but as we’re not creating street bikes out of these ones, I don’t think we should be thinking about developing the electronics as far as they’ve gone.”
“And especially now, this weekend, they’ve brought a whole other level of electronics. Speaking to the riders, you can literally go and twist the throttle. You’ve got nearly 300 horsepower and you can twist the throttle and nothing happens. You’ve got the best riders in the world riding the easiest bikes to ride in the world, and I don’t see this as being anything that I’m interested in.
“You have no more control over how much slide you have. Already when I was testing, just before I stopped everything, I wasn’t allowed to use the clutch going into the corner, because it confused the system. So there’s no more element of skill with every aspect. You literally just have to brake hard, get it into the corner, and then all the guys are talking about now, they can just literally twist the throttle, press a button, drops it down. There’s just too much going on.”
Find the full presser where you can, Casey reckoned it’s partly why Marc Marquez has been so dominant, because he was the last man on the grid to ride MotoGP prototypes before the shape-shifter era, and why Dani Pedrosa can hop back on a KTM and immediately be competitive.
Me personally… I’m conflicted. There are facets of Casey I completely agree with. Yes, the sport has gone down the wrong path with ride-height devices and advanced aerodynamics. It’s become a very zero-sum game where the bikes are getting dangerously fast at 300bhp and 225mph,, and you can make a strong case that in combination with unfit for purpose tires, the series has actually become more potentially dangerous and caused more problems than it solved.
But I also understand that the sport is always going to be a battle between the engineering element that you pay them the big bucks for – developing the latest and greatest technology to make their bike that much faster, versus the human nature of wanting to see the best rider win, and seeing that struggle as they dance on the limit and chase perfection. As I’ve said so many times on this site, it’s human nature as Motorsport fans to always care most about the fleshy bit in the cockpit, or on top of the fairing, and that’s never going to change. Part of the reason why Casey retired at 27 was because the series was going away from the razorblades of the old 2-strokes he grew up with, to the relative butter knives of prototype racing, and being too much like F1.
Racers want that adrenaline kick and the difficulty that comes with the high. Engineers just want to go faster and push that technical innovation. It’s a tug of war that no-one ever wins, the current rulebook being the testament of that. Everyone knows deep down that it’s bad for the racing and better off going away, but it’s not happening until 2027 because why would Ducati agree to cut off their own hand that’s made them so successful? It’s not a fair fight. In a sport where hundreds work their fingers to the bone to produce the perfect machine, it’s the rider that takes the final credit. It is what it is.
The Lightning Round
One more thing from that Stoner presser, with the journos surrounding him (Credit to Mat Oxley for the pic). It’s a who’s who of brilliant names – Oxley, Emmett, Patterson, Wheeler, Khorounzhiy, etc. But it reminded me so much of Daniel Ricciardo’s return in 2023 and that presser for sad reasons. MotoGP’s a bit healthier in terms of women than F1 is but man, it doesn’t make it much less depressing to see.
And no, I’m not just saying this because the Motorsport Network laid me off a fortnight ago, it’s been this way for a while. When I covered the 2023 British GP for The Race, I could count the amount of black people in the media pen on one hand, and I had fingers left over. It saddens me there’s a better chance of them being an invited influencer to an event than an accredited journalist makes it there instead. Just remember friends, representation matters. Forgive me for bringing this up but after the Liverpool v Bournemouth racist abuse taking the headlines, I’m ultra-sensitive to this right now.
So did anyone have Marco Bezzecchi being the legitimate second best rider in MotoGP since July? Getting harder to argue that Aprilia doesn’t have something with the way they can challenge even Marquez at his best for a good three quarters of the race. Marquez’s astounding tire preservation in the back half of races is the last hurdle for everyone to clear.
Yamaha were the last four bikes on track in Austria, with Fabio only just managing a point in 15th place. With Fabio finally getting a test of the new Yamaha V4 after Misano in September, is there any doubt as to what engine they should be running next year?
Not the best weekend example for it, but hearing rumblings for the first time that Alex Marquez may get a Ducati GP26 next year. It’d likely be wise for Ducati to tie him down and make sure he’s getting top support, because at this point it’s clear that his 2025 form isn’t a fluke, he can perform anywhere on the calendar and that if Ducati don’t support him, someone else likely will.
And finally, Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure anyone?
The Verdict: 6.5/10 (Good) – I enjoyed this one. Not quite a classic, but Austria, even with mid curve chicane, has a knack of forcing riders into taking risks if they want to pass, and we got some really good fights in this one as a result, with a little late drama with Aldeguer’s comeback and Bagnaia slipping. See you in… Hungary?!
- No one had won more than five Sprints in a row until 2025 (Jorge Martin.) Marc Marquez has now won six in a row twice this season. He’s only three behind Martin on the all-time Sprint Winners list! (13 to Martin’s 16) ↩︎
