Di Giannantonio responds to critics: "I don't care what they say

The two podiums in Valencia allowed Di Giannantonio to end a 2025 of ups and downs with a smile: next year he wants consistency.

Expectations were high for the Pertamina Enduro VR46 team, which became a factory-supported Ducati outfit and entrusted a Desmosedici GP25 to Fabio Di Giannantonio. A fractured left collarbone in the first test at Sepang didn’t help, and the Roman rider then had a season of fluctuating results. He took 4 podiums in long races and five in sprint races, a total of 19 top-5 finishes out of 44 races, and 6th place in the final MotoGP standings with 266 points, 26 behind a Pecco Bagnaia who faded after the Austrian Grand Prix, aside from a few individual flashes.

Diggia’s season wasn’t a disaster, but his expectation was to achieve slightly better results. The GP25 proved a tougher bike than expected, and he wasn’t able to find the desired consistency. Certainly, finishing the championship with two podiums in Valencia was very positive and gives him confidence for 2026.

In Valencia he had the chance to assess his season and tried to see the glass half full: "I’m very happy with how I finished," Di Giannantonio told Motosan, "it was very important to end this season with a big result. I’m happy overall. We worked very hard this year and the results were very unpredictable, but we managed to stay united as a team, which is not a given. We never gave up. It went well because we managed to improve the bike and be a bit more consistent, especially in the final part of the season."

There was no shortage of criticism for not being more competitive, given that Marc Marquez did great things with the Ducati GP25 and the second-best MotoGP rider of the year was Alex Marquez on the GP24: "I don’t care what they say," the Roman rider responded, "I do my best, and that’s fine. We always gave our maximum; sometimes that meant being very close to Marc Márquez, who was unbeatable on track this year, and other times it meant being much further back."

Next year his goal will be to be a more consistent presence in the top 5: "I’ll try," he admits, "and I wanted to do it this year too, but unfortunately mid-season we had many race retirements for various reasons. That’s exactly what we were missing, because in the end I’m not that far from fifth place."

The experience gained in 2025 should help him be stronger in 2026, a year in which almost all MotoGP grid contracts will be expiring. It will be crucial to get results to secure a good seat for 2027 as well. It will be a very interesting market and, of course, Diggia aims to obtain the best possible technical package. It should be noted that in 2027 there will be new technical regulations and a new tire supplier, so no one can be sure what the pecking order on track will be.

Di Giannantonio also completed 47 laps in the Valencia test, where he finished with the seventh-best time and was satisfied, as Ducati’s updates provided encouraging feedback: "The feeling was good and it was very important to see that the work done by the factory is going in the right direction. In these tests it’s always a bit tricky to properly understand things due to the track conditions, but they are always very useful, especially for the engineers, to understand whether their research works on track as well. That was the goal, and we achieved it."

The Pertamina Enduro VR46 rider ended the season with positive feelings, which will of course need to be confirmed in the 2026 pre-season tests at Sepang and Buriram. With the Ducati GP26 he hopes to achieve better results; we’ll see if he manages it. In the meantime, like his colleagues, he has switched off and is enjoying a bit of a vacation.