Francesco Bagnaia is already plotting his path back to the top of MotoGP after being dethroned as world champion by Jorge Martin last weekend.
Bagnaia won eleven Sunday races in 2024, a number that put him in the top ten of the all-time list of top class Grand Prix victories, but the Italian is not interested in celebrating these numbers, just growing them .
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“To be honest, I’m not at a point in my career where I want to check those numbers,” Bagnaia said after last weekend’s Solidarity Grand Prix.
“I’m a very young rider and I think I still have eight to ten years ahead of me, so I will try to give my maximum performance, I will keep trying to be as fast and as strong, and keep trying to increase.
“The most important thing is to grow in terms of championship titles, and I will try.”
Bagnaia added that even though he lost the title in 2024, it was still a valuable year for him.
“I don’t consider 2024 a loss because I learn from my mistakes. “I know we lost the championship because of the mistakes and this is something I will improve,” he said.
“If we look at Marc’s statistics, he won two titles in a row, then he lost in 2015 and then he won four in a row.
“So you never know, and I will do my utmost to reach the maximum goal again.”
To get back to the top and regain the No. 1 plate he has held for the past two years, Bagnaia must learn from the mistakes he made in 2024 that cost him the title.
“The first thing I will have to learn is to understand the situations better, because it is true that three of these eight zeros came from strange situations,” Bagnaia said.
“The one in Portimao with Marc, the one in Jerez with Brad (Binder), and the one with Alex Marquez in Aragon.
“So I think it’s all three. It’s true that I was knocked out by other riders, but all three were situations that I might have avoided.
“The one with Marc, maybe try to wait a bit, but he was faster, so maybe wait and don’t cross the line. I say that, but when I race, I just want to get to the front more; but maybe next year I’ll try to improve that.
“The one with Alex Marquez, I was clearly four tenths faster, and I didn’t wait because he went wide, so I said, ‘Okay, this is my moment,’ and then he touched me and (the contact) made me crashed. The one with Brad, same thing.
“So I think I have to learn from my mistakes. The others were harder to analyze because I did the same things, just came in a little slower, and I crashed the same way.
“So they’re harder to analyze, but the things where I know I made a mistake are easier to learn and understand.”
The former world champion said his crash in the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix and his falls in the Malaysian and Catalan sprints were the worst mistakes he has made all season.
“The one in Misano (Emilia-Romagna) was one of the worst because I finished easily third,” he said.
“The harder one to accept is the one in Malaysia, to be honest, because I didn’t do anything wrong: I came in slower, and maybe that was the reason for the crash, but this one is the hardest to accept, like the one here (in Catalonia) in the Sprint.”
Bagnaia added that, apart from his obvious mistakes, he lost with an uneasy feeling at the Desmosedici at the beginning of the year.
“I think the worst part of the season, apart from the mistakes, was the first part, because I decided to go with new parts on the bike, which were the new forks and the new swingarm, and I lost time,” he said.
“It’s true that I won in Qatar, but until Jerez I struggled to be fast. Portimao was always one of my good tracks and I struggled a lot to be fast, Austin was tough.
“So I wasn’t happy, and as soon as we decided to go back to my standard (setup), I started getting faster and stronger, so everything was better from then on.”
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