Ducati-Valentino Rossi, Ciabatti makes a revelation

Ducati sports director Ciabatti: “The Valentino Rossi years hurt the team.”

In an interview with Motorsport, Ducati’s sport director Paolo Ciabatti traced the various steps that brought Ducati to the top of the world after years of fasting from Stoner’s World Championship: “In Ducati when I arrived it was coming from two difficult years, with high expectations on the Valentino Rossi/Ducati partnership that did not bring the desired results. That left a lot of wounds in the organization, at all levels. We had to let some people go at the end of 2013. In fact, if I look back at that year, I wanted to quit in the middle of the season.”

The direction was not clear: “The media was very negative with us, we had no clear technical direction, we continued to struggle after the Valentino Rossi years.” An important figure in the rebirth was Gigi Dall’Igna: “We had to get someone who could manage a technically complex project like MotoGP, and Domenicali convinced Gigi to leave Aprilia. Since then things have been much better.”