MotoGP Mandalika Test: Bagnaia focused on race pace, not yet at max potential

Pecco Bagnaia has been running under the radar during preseason MotoGP testing as the Ducati Lenovo rider sits comfortably mid-table.

Choosing to concentrate his focus on set up and race pace with the Desmosedici GP22 across the two days so far at Mandalika, the Italian, who is hotly tipped as one of the forthcoming season’s title challengers, was less than half a second adrift of Luca Marini’s benchmark on Saturday despite a less than favourable tyre option.

“I’m happy, I think we did a really good job today,” Bagnaia said as the action drew to a close on day two in Indonesia. “We were concentrating on doing more laps possible with used tyres and the pace was very constant and this was our more important thing today. Also the things we tried today were good so we did another step in front, and we also tried a time attack in the last run, but was not a perfect lap.

“We decided to use a soft front tyre, that was okay but not better than the hard in terms of time attack,” he explained further of his 1’31.725 effort at the close of play which placed him tenth overall. “We prefer to use the soft to have more hard tomorrow to do more laps with the correct tyre and in any case, I’m quite happy because with a tyre that I don’t like we did a good job.

“Finally, I think tomorrow we will do another step in front but we are more close. We close a lot the gap compared to the fastest rider that I think in this moment are the Honda riders. They are doing a good job, and we are very close to them. So I’m happy.

“I feel that today we were one of the strongest with the pace because this morning we work with the medium and with the medium I was doing ‘32.7, ‘32.8, ‘32.7 like this and was good the pace.

“This afternoon with more temperature