'Bagnaia is like a mosaic – every year he adds one or two new pieces'

“To me, Pecco is like a mosaic that you see in old churches – every year he’s able to add one or two new pieces to make the mosaic bigger.” So says Cristian Gabarrini, Francesco Bagnaia‘s crew chief since the twice-MotoGP world champion graduated to the premier class in 2019.

So which particular piece of mosaic does Bagnaia need to add as he faces the toughest challenge of his career?

He needs between one and two tenths per lap. At the season-opening Thai Grand Prix his race pace was a mere 0.09 seconds slower than winner Marc Márquez’s. In Argentina, he was 0.22 seconds down, because he’s never got on with Termas. And in the US sprint, he was 0.19sec down.

These are not big deficits. If we ignore Termas as his bogey track, Bagnaia needs to find eight thousandths of a second in each corner, so he hasn’t lost his mojo, he just needs to work scientifically to chip away at the gaps, like he’s adding the final touches to that mosaic.

And he says he’s getting there. “We are working to solve our problems session by session and I think we are getting closer to my best feeling,” he said at COTA.

Bagnaia isn’t a swaggering genius like Márquez – he makes his speed in different ways. He likes to tiptoe towards the limit, step by step. And no one knows better how he works than Gabarrini.

“Pecco is always growing and absorbing and always thinking and finding different ways, maybe just small differences, to find a tenth of a second here or there,” Gabarrini adds. “Now everything depends on the small details, so at a certain moment in certain conditions he may find it better to change a cornering line or change his riding style a bit.”

Right now, Bagnaia is focusing on one area of performance, which also happens to be the trickiest area where you can make the most time: peeling into a corner, gradually releasing the front brake towards the apex, while using the rear brake and engine-brake to scrub off speed and help the bike turn.

This is a knife-edge moment, especially since last year, when Michelin introduced its latest super-grippy rear slick, which shattered some lap records by a whole second.

Nearly always when you add performance you take away a little safety – the knife edge becomes sharper, so you can cut a faster lap time, but you may end up bloodied if you get it wrong.

This particular sharper knife edge is what made Bagnaia (and others) crash so much last season.

Márquez has the upper hand in this area, because he has almost supernatural feel and reactions. Ohlins suspension engineers tell me he’s one of the very, very few riders of recent decades that can tell the difference between suspension movement and tyre movement. So if he feels the front end compress a few millimetres, he can tell whether it’s the fork compressing or the tyre deflecting (squishing).

There is one important difference between the bikes ridden by Bagnaia and Márquez. A couple of years ago, Ohlins introduced a new front fork with a longer stroke. This fork allowed engineers to reset their bikes to delay the rear lifting during heavy braking. It also helps bikes turn into corners better, because it creates better geometry.

Bagnaia has tested and raced this fork but he doesn’t like it, because he prefers to bottom out his fork during braking, so that everything he feels at that moment is movement in the tyre.

This highlights that motorcycle racing is a very personal thing – every rider has his preferred tools to make him feel right and nowhere is this more important than in the front end, where feel is everything.

Obviously both Ducati factory riders have access to exactly the same hardware and software, so what does Bagnaia need to do to get his bike working how he wants?

It’s mostly making tiny changes to his engine-brake strategy – tweaking maps so the engine’s negative-torque works more or less, depending on speed, lean angle, rear-wheel load and so on.

These are the basics of engine-brake strategies…