Fabio Di Giannantonio rates his MotoGP season: “I think my level has been quite high”

Fabio Di Giannantonio’s 2024 MotoGP season presented a bit of a mixed bag, but the Italian still reckons it was a solid year.

Di Giannantonio ended the 2023 season with a victory in Qatar and a podium finish in Valencia, at least before the latter was taken away for a tyre pressure violation.

He’d seemed to be out of MotoGP before those end-of-year results, which earned him a ride with the VR46 Ducati team for 2024 alongside Marco Bezzecchi.

Although it was Bezzecchi who scored the team’s only podium in 2024, Di Giannantonio was much more consistent, finishing between fourth and seventh in all but one race in the first half of the season, before ending his season with two fourths in Australia and Thailand.

His early departure from the 2024 season was brought about by a practice crash in Austria. He was forced to withdraw from the race at the Red Bull Ring due to a shoulder injury, and later it was deemed that ending his season with two rounds to go in order to have surgery on that shoulder would allow him the best opportunity of starting 2025 as close to full fitness as possible.

When he was fit enough to race, Di Giannantonio’s performances were strong enough on a frequent enough basis to earn himself a factory-spec Desmosedici GP25 for next season, making him the only satellite rider to have a Ducati of the same specification as the factory team’s Francesco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez in 2025.

As a result, Di Giannantonio said he’s “going to give 8/10” as a score for his season, in a video posted to social media by the VR46 Ducati team.

“I think my level of riding this year has been quite high,” he explained.

“I’ve been really strong and consistent through all the season. But we always missed something to be on the podium, so 8/10.

His best race, he said, came at the same place as his first podium, scored in 2023: Phillip Island.

“Phillip Island, P4, because we gave a great show,” he said. “We were really fast, we had a strong pace, and we were really close to be on the podium.”