Ducati announce crucial engine decision for Pecco Bagnaia, Marc Marquez

Ducati team boss Davide Tardozzi has confirmed that the Italian marque’s factory riders will race with the 2024 engine for the next two MotoGP seasons.

While Ducati has looked strong all pre-season, a question mark has hung over the decision it would take on what engine to race with in 2025.

With the GP24 already a strong base package, having won 16 of 20 grands prix last year, the GP25 engine has to be a clear step forward given the two-year engine freeze coming into effect from this season.

While both Marc Marquez and Francesco Bagnaia said on Wednesday at the Buriram test that the 2025 engine is competitive, the former did admit it has some “very weak points”.

With the risk too great to homologate an engine for two years it isn’t sure about, Ducati has elected for Marquez, Bagnaia and VR46’s Fabio Di Giannantonio to race the 2024 motor.

“It has been taken and the engine for the 2025 and 2026 season will be the 2024,” Tardozzi said.

“As I said yesterday, Gigi [Dall’Igna] doesn’t want to take any risks.

“It will be a big effort for our guys at home to build up engines for our three [factory] riders for the first race, but Gigi has taken this decision. I think we will have those engines.”

Ducati to use old chassis and aero?

Ducati is now also facing the possibility of starting the 2025 campaign with its 2024 chassis and aerodynamics package too, with the marque set to retry these items at the post-Spanish GP test.

“It’s a real possibility,” Tardozzi added on racing with the 2024 chassis and aero.

“I think that the final decision on fairing and chassis will be taken tonight and I think we will postpone - having frozen the engine - to the test of Jerez the other new items that we have here and we would like to test again.

“There are some things that belong to electronics and suspension. That’s the 2025 parts that are on the bike right now.”

With all of Ducati’s six bikes now racing with 2024 engines, the factory will have to work hard in the coming weeks to get all of those units made - though this is something Tardozzi isn’t worried about.

“As I said, it will be a big effort for the guys to build up those engines,” he said.

“But if we decide to do this it will be possible. I think that 2024 bike is very difficult to improve.

“We tried hard but finally we didn’t find what we though and now we’ve taken the safest decision as possible for the riders.”