English
Italiano
After nine years and three titles won in the MotoGP with Yamaha, Jorge Lorenzo changed his mind in 2017 and bet on Ducati. A choice that didn’t give him the results he wished for, so he decided to switch teams after only two seasons and embraced Honda’s project, before retiring at the end of 2019. But what led the five-time champion to join the Borgo Panigale team?
“It wasn’t really for the monetary offer. I switched to Ducati because I knew it would be the best bike. It was a bet like Hamilton's, when he left McLaren for Mercedes and people thought he was crazy,” Jorge confessed to Izaskun Ruiz, in the fourth episode of the DAZN series, “Cuatro Tiempos”.
Year after year, Ducati has become ever more competitive and, in 2022, it broke the long fast it was suffering since 2007, the year Casey Stoner won the World Championship with the Desmosedici GP. With Francesco Bagnaia’s win, the constructor in Bologna established itself as a point of reference for the Top Class, scoring the Triple Crown with victories in the Drivers, Teams, and Constructors titles. The foundation for what Lorenzo sees as a possible long domination for the Borgo Panigale constructor.
“I see a rather red future in coming years. They’ll have the best bike for many of the next four to five years,” Lorenzo commented. “Dall’Igna is two steps ahead of the others in terms of innovation and technology. Inside the garage, they work as if they were a Formula 1 team and, little by little, Gigi has put together the pieces of the puzzle. Every year, they’ve become ever more competitive, and now they’ve managed to have eight very good riders and, above all, three that are mature enough to be very fast and constant.”
“His way of working is different from the others. This is his great advantage,” Jorge Martinez said during the episode, supporting his fellow countryman’s opinion. But the current GASGAS Aspar Team Manager argues that the true strength of the Italian constructor is the troop deployed by Ducati, which provides its bikes to Pramac, Gresini and VR46, as well as to the riders of the official team: “Ducati has the advantage of having eight bikes. Maybe the regulation could intervene to change things.” Could the many riders on the grid be the key to Ducati’s success? Lorenzo disagrees and stressed: “Maybe, with a lesser advantage, but they’d win even if they had four or six.”
