Ducati: Pecco Bagnaia’s outburst after one of the worst weekends of his career

The 2026 British Grand Prix was one of the worst weekends of Pecco Bagnaia’s career. The Ducati rider struggled from Friday onward, finishing near the back of the pack in both qualifying and the Sprint race (17th), and ending his weekend at Silverstone with a retirement on the eighth lap while running in 15th place.

After the race, Bagnaia couldn’t hide his immense disappointment: “I don’t care about the crash; the problem is the difficulties I faced all weekend. I never had any speed; I always lost ground in specific spots where, even with the same throttle input, I couldn’t get any grip. That’s our problem. I can’t stop it, I can’t slow it down, and when I open the throttle, it slips out from under me. I never have any grip.”

Speaking to Sky, Bagnaia explained his race strategy: “I wanted to take a slightly more conservative approach at the start. I was improving my lap times a lot to fight for ninth or tenth place—no better than that. The crash was very strange; we can’t figure out how it’s possible for the front end to lock up like that coming out of a corner. We have to do better next weekend, because I never felt comfortable, and we can’t keep going like this.”

“This is too much; we all know very well that we can do better. The fact that the factory team is struggling so much on a track like this is a huge wake-up call; we need to work to improve because, in this case, I wasn’t the only one in serious trouble,” concluded the Piedmontese rider, a two-time MotoGP world champion, who had won at the British track in 2022, the year of his first title.