“Bagnaia is the first Italian to win the MotoGP title since Rossi in 2009”

Pecco Bagnaia’s 2022 MotoGP world championship success is important because he is the first Italian to win the title since Valentino Rossi in 2009. Italy is MotoGP’s most successful nation, with 21 world titles and 264 grand prix victories achieved by 25 riders, so an 11-year drought is significant. And, just as significantly, Bagnaia wouldn’t have got there, certainly by now, if it wasn’t for Rossi.

A decade ago, when MotoGP was dominated by Spaniards, Rossi and his close-knit gang of friends and collaborators established the VR46 Riders Academy, to mentor young Italian riders and challenge Spain’s hegemony. Bagnaia was one of the first to join, following his rookie GP season, the 2013 Moto3 world championship.

“I remember meeting Uccio [Salucci, Rossi’s right-hand man since he started to race in the 1990s] for the first time at Brno,” Bagnaia recalled after securing the crown at November’s Valencia finale. “He told me to smile more, because whenever he saw me I was angry or unhappy, because my results weren’t good. A few weeks later Uccio called my dad and they had a meeting. They discussed their new project for young riders, the VR46 Academy, so I became one of the first academy riders.”

VR46 had looked deep enough to see that Bagnaia had something, despite his failure to score a single championship point in 2013, and since then he’s had everything he needs to keep pushing forward.

The academy takes 10% of each rider’s earnings in exchange for everything from riding and training facilities to management, merchandising and even English lessons.

VR46 training includes a hard-fought weekly dirt-bike race at Rossi’s motor ranch, where riders risk everything, because they know that’s the best way to prepare for risking everything in MotoGP.

“We put a lot of pressure on ourselves and fight with each other,” explained Bagnaia, who is one of four VR46 riders on the MotoGP grid, alongside Marco Bezzecchi, Franco Morbidelli and Rossi’s half-brother Luca Marini. “Every Sunday we have a big race and it’s important for us – we want to beat everyone else in the group, so the motivation is very high all the time. Also at the ranch you understand how to use the gas and move your body to control slides.

“The passion in VR46 is incredible. It’s not just the influence of Vale and the other riders. It’s all the guys who work for us in the academy. If one day I say I want to ride pocket-bikes at the track, they organise everything. If I want to go to Portimão to have a test on my Panigale [a MotoGP-derived road bike] before the season they organise everything. They help me a lot to improve myself.”

“Every time Valentino was on TV we were cheering for him”

Although Bagnaia didn’t know Rossi until he joined the academy he’s been a fan all his life. One of the stand-out memories of his childhood is watching Rossi lose the 2006 MotoGP championship, by crashing in the season finale.

“Every time Valentino was on TV we were cheering for him,” says Bagnaia, whose father is a keen road rider. “I was so happy when Valentino was winning and I cried when he didn’t win the title in 2006.”

Bagnaia started racing at a later age than many, commencing his minimoto career when he was seven.

“My dad organised my first go on a track. We went to a rental pocket-bike track and my dad was scared because sometimes the bike had no brakes and other times the seat came off, so he bought a bike for me, a very used pocket-bike which I enjoyed riding a lot. It was red and I was cleaning it and looking at it like it was heaven.”

Five years later Bagnaia was European minimoto champion. In 2012 he finished third in the Spanish-based European Moto3 championship, behind winner Alex Márquez, Marc’s younger brother. That result got him his first world championship ride.

He won his first Moto3 grand prix in 2016 and moved to MotoGP after winning the 2018 Moto2 world title, first with Ducati’s junior Pramac Racing team, then with the factory team, from 2021.

Bagnaia’s riding style is similar to that of Jorge Lorenzo, who won the MotoGP crown three times between 2010 and 2015. The 25-year-old is glass-smooth aboard his 300hp Desmosedici, finding his speed through super-late braking and unerringly accurate, mega-fast corner entries.

This technique took a while to perfect – he spent 2019 and 2020 crashing out of too many races and even last season he fell in four of the first ten races, only taking the title thanks to a remarkable late-season surge.

Pushing so hard on corner entry is risky because it demands rider and motorcycle to be at 100%. Otherwise the front tyre will slide away and the rider will crash, unless he has the outrigger elbow skills of six-times MotoGP king Marc Márquez.

If MotoGP’s two previous champions – Joan Mir in 2020 and Fabio Quartararo in 2021 – are anything to go by, Bagnaia may struggle to retain his title. He has a new factory team-mate – younger countryman Enea Bastianini, who won four MotoGP races last season, only his second in the class of kings, aboard a year-old Desmosedici.

Mat Oxley has covered motorcycle racing for many years – and also has the distinction of being an Isle of Man TT winner
Follow Mat on Twitter @matoxley