Alvaro Bautista “will be a more complete rider” after 2024 struggles

Alvaro Bautista believes that his struggles in 2024 will lead him to be a more complete rider in the future.

The Spanish rider, who won the WorldSBK title in dominant fashion in both 2022 and 2023 with Ducati, has won only two races in 2024, and languishes 122 points behind current series leader Toprak Razgatlioglu after the first eight rounds of the year.

Bautista’s season was set back from the end of last year. A crash while testing Ducati’s MotoGP bike in October left the two-times WorldSBK Champion with broken vertebrae, an injury which continued to have an effect into 2024.

“It was a difficult winter with my injury from last year,” Bautista told WorldSBK.com ahead of this weekend's inaugural Cremona Round. “I wasn’t 100 per cent clear on whether to keep racing because I had a lot of problems. I couldn’t sleep at night because I had a lot of pain.

“Nobody knew the reality of my injury, but it was one of the worst because, basically until July, I couldn’t sleep without pain. It was really hard.”

In addition to his own injury problems, Bautista came into 2024 struggling to rediscover the same feeling with the Ducati Panigale V4 R that he’d enjoyed in 2022 and 2023, in part down to the additional weight he has been forced to run this year as part of a rule change aimed at balancing performance between the championship’s lighter and heavier riders.

Although, in the short term, this has meant his results have suffered, Bautista believes that, in the long term, the difficulties he has encountered will help him to improve as a rider.

“In the last two seasons, I won the titles,” he said. “This season, with my physical problems, the new rules, and the problem I found with the bike, I had to learn and improve on other abilities that maybe, in 2022 and 2023, I didn’t use and now I have to use them.

“For the future, I think I will be a more complete rider.”

At one stage in 2024, it seemed this would be Bautista’s final season as a full-time rider. Since finding improvements in bike setup, resulting in a better feeling and improved performance, at the Czech Round in Most, Bautista has re-signed for the Aruba.it Racing Ducati team for 2025, meaning he will have the chance to prove he’s “more complete” next year.

The reference in this will not be Bautista himself but Toprak Razgatlioglu. The Turkish rider is currently leading the championship in his first season with BMW, and was on a 13-race winning run before he suffered a collapsed lung in a crash in practice at Magny-Cours.

For Bautista, Razgatlioglu’s performance this season has not been entirely surprising.

“Already last year, I said it wasn’t a bad decision to go to BMW,” Bautista said. “I saw a good bike and I thought, with the talent of Toprak [Razgatlioglu], he can be very competitive — maybe not as competitive as he has been.

“They also have a lot of concessions. In the end, they worked really well and it’s good to have more competitiveness in the championship.”

Having been champion twice already, it’s Bautista’s clear goal to be fighting with Razgatlioglu again in the future — both next season and even in the remaining races of 2024.

“If next year, I can arrive to my best level and the bike, I think we can be very close [to Razgatlioglu],” Bautista said.

“I also think that in the next rounds, if we get to our best level, we can be very close to him. If we compare my performance from last year with the [current] performance of Toprak, it’s very similar.

“With the performance we had last year, this season we could fight almost every race with him.

“For sure, it would be more spectacular because last year I went alone and this year, he’s alone.

“I think if you could mix both seasons, it’d be a good fight. Maybe you could see it in the next rounds, or next season.”