They came out and crushed Portimao this weekend. They did, in all fairness, not take the pole, but if you watch the pole setting lap, Marc Marquez very clearly got a huge tow around the fast sections of the track by that beast of Ducati Jorgé Martin was riding. The Dukes had an easy 5 mph top speed advantage. In fact, I need to see if I can find some trap speeds to compare. You can describe his pole a s shock I’d imagine.
I don’t really enjoy multiple seasons of single marque dominance in my racing. In fact, while I would never dispute his obvious talent, I had indeed gotten sick of watching Marc win race after race and championship after championship before his 2019 injury opened up the racing to the bigger field.
That being said, I will not be sad to see Ducati do well this season. When you compare Ducati’s budget and resources to Honda, they are barely even on the radar as a company. There has been an influx of money from the acquisition of the company by Audi, and thus the Volkswagen group. A lot of folks dont realize that Volkswagen Group is the seventh largest company in the world. Despite all this, Neither Volkswagen, or Audi runs the Ducati Corse team. It retains its autonomy, albeit with a lot more money that it had over the last ten years.
The whole team looked confident all weekend, but the obvious standout was Pecco Bagnaia. He just looked confident, and calm all weekend. Thats a strong contrast to the last few seasons, where he just looked a bit fish out of water at times, like the whole thing was little overwhelming. This weekend though, he looked like he knew how things were going to go all weekend.
I’m seriously looking forward to next weekend.
Cogito, ergo, zoom 