Tyre controversy, Pecco Bagnaia points the finger at the riders: "We got it wrong"

In assessing his race, the Ducati rider admits that an important mistake was made by everyone this weekend in Japan.

The trip to Motegi was not particularly positive for Francesco Bagnaia. In 2025 he dominated by taking pole position and winning both races; in 2026 it was a completely different story. He failed to reach Q2 in Qualifying, started thirteenth on the grid, retired from the Sprint due to a destroyed rear tire, and finished eighth in the race. He trailed his teammate Marc Marquez, the race winner, by a full 20.333 seconds.

The three-time world champion told Sky Sport MotoGP that he had the potential to do better: "A lot of difficulty, we tried to do our best. Some riders crashed and others had to serve long laps, so we took advantage of that a bit. I tried to keep Aldeguer behind me until the end, I didn’t have any more than that. I tried to be as consistent as possible, I knew there wasn’t anything more than this. During the race I tried different things to understand if I could do something different myself, because the effort I’m making is really big, and the data shows a big difference compared to those who are faster."

Bagnaia then went into detail about the issues that most affected him at Motegi: "I’m struggling to go fast. When I get to braking the bike doesn’t decelerate, and when I enter the corner I’m not in the right position. The softer I brake, the less it decelerates; it’s as if I always have to brake on the front wheel. That’s the only way to slow it down, but you can’t do that every lap for the whole race because you risk having a more nervous bike. The team worked well in terms of electronics settings and setup, but we can’t do more than this. We see a general lack of speed from the telemetry data." A very complicated situation.

Given that there were high-degradation issues in the sprint race, the soft rear tire was banned for the race and the Warm Up was extended to allow riders to try the hard, which had been basically ignored in practice and turned out to be the best. Bagnaia admits there was a misjudgment: "We were all very biased, because it was the Z tire, which usually offers less grip. A few years ago in Malaysia it gave us much less grip than the K, the one we use more often, so no one had the courage to fit it. It was brought as a backup tire, therefore not considered performant. No one had the cool head to try it. There was a moment in FP1 when we thought about doing it, then we thought it would make sense."

The Ducati Lenovo Team rider acknowledges that the riders, supported by their respective teams, should have acted differently: "We didn’t consider that the asphalt was new, and the hard compound was the same as the soft. It was a mix of factors and we were wrong not to try it right away, especially us riders." A useful lesson for the future.

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