Professor Pecco: brain over brawn
‘Gigi and Pecco are two brains working as one’
When Bagnaia arrived in MotoGP in 2019 he was already Gigi Dall’Igna’s chosen one, which is why he was assigned to crew chief Cristian Gabarrini, the man who guided Casey Stoner to Ducati’s first MotoGP title. At that time Ducati’s game-changing chief engineer was creating his new vision of a MotoGP bike, which caused huge aggro with his No1 rider Andrea Dovizioso.
Dall’Igna has shifted MotoGP into a new era in which the rider doesn’t just go out and ride how he likes to ride, he must ride the way the engineer tells him to ride.
Dall’Igna moulded Bagnaia into the perfect rider. The pair have formed a symbiotic relationship, two brains working as one.
The Desmosedici’s devices and downforce aeros don’t make the bike easier to ride, but they make it faster around a racetrack. Downforce makes bikes much more physical to ride, because they are glued to the road, so they feel heavy and awkward, but if the lap time is faster, the rider must put up with it.
Bagnaia’s killer skill is superlate braking and super-fast corner entry. This is why he crashed so much when he came to MotoGP, because he hadn’t refined that skill and kept losing the front.
Qatar was typical of the 27-yearold Italian. He finished fourth in the Sprint, then used what he’d learned in that race to turn things around for the GP, when there are double the points up for grabs.
And even though he used the same compound tyres for both races, he was as fast in the double-length GP. How? Because Pecco is all the Ps: professorial, precise, perfect and he prioritises brain over brawn. Yes, he made an aggressive move on Martin to take the lead, but that was to ensure fresh air, with no worries about tyre pressure. After that he was glass-smooth all the way. He knew he could go faster but had the discipline to resist, because if he’d pushed just a couple of tenths a lap harder he would’ve burned his rear tyre. Instead he managed the gap, living on the edge but making no mistakes.