Bagnaia will move from Ducati to Aprilia
Francesco Bagnaia next season will leave Ducati after eight years to join Aprilia, thus continuing his MotoGP experience always on an Italian bike.
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The Noale factory has invested heavily in Bagnaia, to whom a four-year contract was offered, a long-term project. Aprilia’s technical director Fabiano Sterlacchini commented on Bagnaia’s signing with the Venetian company.
“Aprilia’s secret? Massimo Rivola – said Sterlacchini, reached by the Spanish outlet motosan.es – is very good at convincing people to believe in the Aprilia project. I have confidence in Bagnaia, after all he is a three-time world champion. He is currently going through a difficult moment, he is not in a fantastic phase like in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, but that is normal. Sometimes this happens in this sport and new stimuli and renewed energy can be found in a new project that represents a new challenge for one’s life.”
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The hope is that Bagnaia can prove to be ‘perfect’ for the RS-GP: “One of the main aspects of this sport is that, once you have a good bike, you have to push the rider to try to ride it perfectly – added Sterlacchini – sometimes it happens to have a rider who manages one part of the bike perfectly, but who, let’s say, does not manage the other part of the bike equally perfectly. And vice versa, there are other riders who, for example, do well in all the other parts of the bike, but precisely in the part where the previous rider did well, they do not do as well.”
