How Ducati Ended A Decade And A Half Of MotoGP Hurt

How come Ducati spent so long in the MotoGP wilderness? This is the year-by-year story of how the factory went from hero in 2007 to zero, for 14 long years, and back to hero again in 2022

- Mat Oxley

DUCATI WON THEIR first MotoGP championship just five years after entering the bigbore four-stroke class in 2003. Casey Stoner's 2007 title suggested many more successes to come, but Ducati had to wait for 15 years before adding another MotoGP championship gong to their trophy cabinet.

Why did it take so long?

Ducati did not win the 2007 crown because they built a brilliant motorcycle but because it had a genius rider astride it, a lot of horsepower, and tailormade Bridgestone tyres, particularly its superb front slick. things started going wrong when MotoGP switched to spec tyres in 2009, so Bridgestone had to make one type of tyre to fit every motorcycle and the Desmosedici was very different from the other bikes. things became worse when Stoner left at the end of 2010. it was five-and-a half long years before Ducati even won another MotoGP race.

Only at the end of 2013 did Ducati start digging themselves out of this very deep hole when they stole the brilliant engineer, Gigi Dall’igna, from aprilia. Step by step, Dall’igna fixed the Desmosedici, firstly via a complete re-design, then by chipping away at the bike’s faults while maintaining its strengths.

Dall’igna’s fixes were radical. ‘when your riders arrive 30 seconds behind the winner, you have to take risks; you cannot be conservative,’ he says.

His creativity and bold reading of the rulebook produced all kinds of innovations that changed the face of MotoGP: downforce aero, mass dampers, holeshot devices, shapeshifters, Formula 1-style diffusers, and so on.

however, his final fix was human: honing the skills of Pecco Bagnaia from 2019. Dall’igna knew he needed a youngster he could mould into a perfect Desmosedici rider.