Pecco Bagnaia abandons 2025 chassis; admits he must analyse Marc Marquez’s data

Francesco Bagnaia admitted he must assess Marc Marquez's data after a troubling day of testing in Buriram.

Engine, chassis and fairing problems meant Bagnaia endured a more frustrating day than factory Ducati teammate Marquez.

"Today was a difficult day," Bagnaia confessed on Wednesday.

"We had to do a lot of work to solve some problems we had in several areas.

"Fortunately on the other side of the garage they made some progress so we will analyse their data, and that makes me confident.

"My team did a great job as usual and now we draw a line, and tomorrow we pick up where we left off."

Bagnaia has Ducati chassis trouble

Bagnaia revealed that he is focusing his attentions on Ducati’s 2024 MotoGP chassis, rather than its updated 2025 version.

The Italian brand introduced a new chassis for 2025 at last year’s Barcelona test. Bagnaia’s initial impression of it was positive in Spain, but last week's test in Malaysia complicated things, and at the Buriram MotoGP test this week the Italian has abandoned it, at least for now.

“Honestly, we will focus more on it [the 2025 chassis] in the future,” he said.

“[Now] we are more focused on other things on the bike, like is normal, because the time is very short and we have to decide on more important things.”

After the Barcelona test last year, Bagnaia was happy with the new chassis, but he explained that his opinion changed slightly in Malaysia.

“We arrived in Malaysia, the new frame was working well, but we had some issues with it, and we just decided to take it [out] and re-test it maybe in the future.”

Read more: Marc Marquez: 2025 Ducati MotoGP engine “has very weak points”

Pecco Bagnaia on 2025 fairing

While Bagnaia seems to be heading with his Ducati Lenovo teammate Marc Marquez in the direction of the 2024 Desmosedici engine, and appears to be sticking with the 2024 chassis, too, he is persevering with the 2025 fairing, even if he’s not entirely sold on it.

That perseverance continued in Buriram, where the circuit is a good place to test, according to Bagnaia, because of its low level of grip.

“I think so, because the level of grip is very low,” Bagnaia said of the Buriram International Circuit.

“Also, we have a [tyre] casing that is different [from standard], but it’s not giving to you much grip, so yes.”

It was only Bagnaia who rode with the 2025 fairing on the first day in Buriram, and the Italian had problems that he didn’t go into detail about; but he said that they affected his ability to give constructive feedback to the Ducati engineers, including about the new fairing, meaning evaluations will have to continue on Thursday.

“In this moment, I think it’s also crucial the fairing, because you can change it just one time during the season, and the 2024 was working well,” Bagnaia said.

“But today I did some laps on the 2025; it wasn’t very clear because during those laps I was having other issues, but we managed to try to find a good thing about it.

“I wasn’t that slow, because honestly without doing a time attack with this fairing I was just 0.8 seconds [away] compared to doing a time attack, so that’s not that far, but we have to be more focused on it tomorrow.

“We have to start more or less from zero tomorrow to have some more feedback.”

He added: “It will be super-important to do a long run [on Thursday], but first of all we have to give more feedback to the team, because today it was very difficult to give some feedback because it was an unfortunate day.”