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The other day we offered the first part of the interview with Ducati Corse sporting director Paolo Ciabatti. He had told us about how the stop to MotoGP will affect the championship, both from a technical and an economic point of view.
As promised, you can now read the second part, in addition to watching the full interview in the video you can find above.
We spoke about the future with the manager of the Italian team, i.e. the rider market…
Paolo, how will the rider market be affected by this situation?
“Yamaha moved quickly, Honda blocked Marquez for 4 years and I think Suzuki has decided to stay with Rins and Mir. We, as we already said, have some very fast riders at home, Dovizioso has been Marquez's only true rival in the last 3 years, so we decided to wait to see how to go on. There is no rush to decide immediately. Even the retainers of the riders in the future will have to adapt to a different situation; from this point of view, as we have not yet committed ourselves, this will allow us to move on the issue of retainers in line with what the future possibilities are, while perhaps on the other hand those riders who have already signed contracts will have to renegotiate them ”.
"I think that Dovizioso still wants to race, I'm not worried that he will retire"
Andrea Dovizioso has stated that he is not yet sure he will continue to race in 2021, are you worried?
“Right now, we have more time to reflect on our own life and this leads you to make considerations that, overwhelmed by your daily routine, you do not have any time or desire to do in a normal situation. I think Andrea still wants to race. A full year of stop, which we will all try to avoid, could also lead one to decide to quit, it might be difficult to keep motivation alive. Andrea has just turned 34, he is mature but a young enough rider to think of still racing for several years while remaining competitive, so I'm not worried. I think he will want to continue, and we will talk about it when the time comes, now it is too early. "
"Honda was brave to make a 4-year contract with Marc, but without him they wouldn't have won from 2013 onwards"
You could offer him a 4-year contract, as it has become the new standard...
"It's not the new standard, it's an unexpected and courageous decision that Honda made to keep the only rider who gives it the guarantee of being able to win a lot."
Is such a long contract more a risk for the rider or for the manufacturer?
“You have to know the conditions of the contract to be able to judge. Marquez has made a choice, for which I presume he has been well paid, knowing that he has bound himself for an extremely long period to the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world with which he has won over and over again in recent years. As for Honda, even though I know Puig will bring out the story of Doohan and everyone else, the truth is that without Marc it wouldn't have won a MotoGP championship from 2013 onwards, that's a fact, so they made sure the rider who gives a guarantee of success the most often, as it did even when the bike was not the best on the grid".
"A Ducati for Lorenzo? He is now a Yamaha rider and that's enough"
Did Lorenzo's decision to return to racing as a wild card surprise you?
"Not very much. Of course, if the season had started normally, he would have come to a Grand Prix on a track he loves but without the habit of all-out racing you have when you race every 15 days, so it would have been interesting to see what he could have done. It did not surprise me that he accepted Yamaha's proposal as a test rider, we knew that Jorge didn’t feel good with Honda and had also been injured. He had not completely abandoned the idea of remaining tied to our environment, so what better way than to get back on the bike with which he won his 3 world championships in MotoGP ".
If he asked you for a Ducati for 2021, would you have made one available for him?
“He is now a Yamaha rider. No, I'd say that's enough."
