The end of Ducati's 22-grand prix MotoGP win streak at Le Mans could easily be dismissed as a weather-induced aberration, but while the British Grand Prix is unique as well its outcome felt like it has to be examined as more of a bellwether.
Ducati finished 1-2-3-4-5 in the full-distance Silverstone race last year, and swept the sprint podium this Saturday. But on Sunday it was a Fabio Quartararo ride height device failure away from having no riders on the podium at all.
The last time that happened was also Silverstone, which is telling, but in 2021. Ducati's streak of consecutive podium finishes across sprints and GPs is now up to 119 races - but is the tide turning?
To get an answer, let's take a closer look at Ducati's Sunday 'mini-implosion', and the factors behind it.
In the moments between Marc Marquez's exit from the lead of the race and the red flag that granted everyone a restart, Ducati still looked the favourite to win the race.
Though its two fastest riders had crashed, Pecco Bagnaia was tucked in behind Quartararo and feeling quite competitive.
But both Marquez brothers and Bagnaia looked limited at best and totally off the pace at worst after that restart.
"We stopped for the red flag, we just changed the rear tyre, put in a new one - and from that moment nothing worked," Bagnaia lamented.
"I was sliding and spinning everywhere, no traction, everyone was overtaking me. I lost the rear in Turn 9 [Copse], went wide, then entering Turn 7 [Luffied] I just tried to lean and I lost the rear and then I crashed.
"It's already a difficult situation [for me with this bike], but with a problem like this it's even worse."
He wasn't the only rider to point to a switch of the rear tyre as being game-changing. Honda's Luca Marini felt it compromised his race, describing it as "my mistake, because in the allocation you have the assigned race tyre, you know which is the best tyre - maybe it would've been better to keep it, just one lap doesn't make a huge degradation".
But Ducati's rookie Fermin Aldeguer was one rider who did exactly that, and felt it left him hamstrung in the early going.
For the Marquez brothers, there was the obvious matter of their accidents - both of them having written off their favoured bikes and chosen tyre combinations in crashing out before the red flag, but also both admitting they probably didn't fully shrug off the knock in confidence.
"I don’t want to say it’s the tyres. I don’t want to say it’s the bike. And I don’t want to say that’s me," Marc Marquez insisted. "We need to analyse first of all. Because on the first race [start] I felt super good, but for the second one we changed the bike, we changed the tyres - and I was coming from a crash.
"So maybe I was also more stiff, and the bike was turning less for that reason. But it’s true that in a very, very bad feeling we finished on the podium."
Cold weather and cold wind at Silverstone in May made the front tyre situation precarious for many. The soft had performed well enough in the sprint on Saturday, but on Marc Marquez's side in particular it grained terribly towards the right side at the end of the distance.
Some riders - and more specifically some riders for some manufacturers - were clearly more confident about making it last than the others. For Marc Marquez, it was completely a non-starter with how the Ducati used the front and how his riding style in particular used the front. For some of his peers, including Alex, it was more of a marginal call.
"We'll never know," said Honda rider Joan Mir when asked whether the soft would've been better.
"The medium feeling was not fantastic, on maximum angle you have to be very careful with it because the grip is not fantastic - but braking straight the support is very good.
"For my style it suits better. For my style the perfect choice would be the hard, that we normally use in all the races and the feeling is fantastic. But we needed a couple of degrees more today to use it."
Therein lied a key differentiator - those who felt they couldn't run the soft had to commit to the medium, and that's not a tyre that's received particularly glowing reviews.
"I never liked it, also with the Aprilia," said KTM rider Maverick Vinales. "It's a tyre I always try to avoid."
His former team-mate Aleix Espargaro found it so disagreeable that, once his initial red flag-causing crash robbed him of his final soft front in the allocation, he parked his Honda after a few laps of trying to get the medium front to work.
Every Ducati rider ran the medium, and among the medium runners the Ducatis were the strongest - though not exactly by a huge margin.
1 Marc Marquez (Ducati) 38m21.966s
2 Franco Morbidelli (Ducati) +0.017s
3 Alex Marquez (Ducati) +0.095s
4 Luca Marini (Honda) +1.800s
5 Fermin Aldeguer (Ducati) +2.655s
6 Fabio Di Giannantonio (Ducati) +3.835s
7 Joan Mir (Honda) +4.391s
8 Maverick Vinales (KTM) +5.389s
9 Raul Fernandez (Aprilia) +10.246s
10 Brad Binder (KTM) +10.333s
11 Enea Bastianini (KTM) +32.296s
12 Lorenzo Savadori (Aprilia) +34.559s
DNF Pecco Bagnaia (Ducati)
DNF Aleix Espargaro (Honda)
Post-race penalties ignored for illustrative purposes
With the Marquez brothers and Bagnaia in strife, where were the other Ducatis that can be usually relied upon to complete a podium or a top-six lockout?
Aldeguer, as mentioned above, felt limited by his rear tyre, but also got caught out by the wind early in the race going into Copse - and also ended up with a bit of arm pump.
The wind has to be a major part of any discussion here. "Following the Ducatis, they seemed to be struggling a little bit more to maybe turn through the wind than we were," said Pramac Yamaha rider Jack Miller, formerly a Ducati man himself. "Obviously that's the downside to having that many wings on the bike."
A "pissed" Fabio Di Giannantonio, who had looked rejuvenated across Friday and Saturday, was floundering with what he felt was a loss of braking performance on his latest-spec Ducati at VR46.
"I feel like we missed an opportunity today," he said. "We'd done an incredible job all weekend long, but when we started the race I was not feeling good with the brakes - so I was not stopping the bike was I want or as yesterday. It was super difficult to brake not just hard, but to brake on my points. We were losing too much."
And while his team-mate Franco Morbidelli performed and finished fourth, there was perhaps more on offer for him too with a more straightforward weekend - given he had a confidence-destroying Friday crash, a grid penalty for impeding and a ride height device complication in the sprint.
Crucial context - and one that we will cover on The Race later this week, it being slightly outside the scope of this column - is that Ducati has had a famously complicated situation with its 2025 development. Whatever is new on the three factory-spec bikes compared to the 2024 design, there is currently little evidence that it is making them faster. So by default, you would argue Ducati has stood still.
Still, there's a bit of a feeling that maybe this wasn't quite a conventional defeat - and that even last year's Ducati should've still been plenty enough.
"We have to say that Alex, without the crash in the first start, was winning the race with a hand [tied] behind," insisted Bagnaia. "He was much faster than anybody else. Then he crashed and he needed to use the other bike - it doesn’t help the feeling."
But the verdicts varied on how worried Ducati should really be by an Aprilia winning ahead of (an LCR) Honda in a race a Yamaha was dominating before it failed.
"I think that Aprilia here has always been super strong," argued Di Giannantonio. "They did their first podium here [of the MotoGP era], they've won here. Quartararo did an amazing start and took the gamble with the soft front tyre, he was quite ready from the beginning. For us with the medium on the restart it was quite tricky.
"Also there was a lot of trouble - when it's like this, the races are a bit mixed. Let's say the Ducatis today, we were today...with a lot of 'punches', from all over the place. I think everybody at Ducati will be back fighting for the next one."
There was a similar, if slightly less nothing-to-worry-about, assessment from Marc Marquez.
"[It] depends on the conditions. As we saw last year, the race, it was just all Ducatis out there in the front, but today with those windy conditions, cold conditions, the tyre compound in the front - soft was too soft, medium was not working perfect, maybe for that wind.
"It was that mix of conditions that made it that you cannot ride at the limit. And then, as we see, many different manufacturers were [up] there."
But Marquez also pointed out that Ducati's rivals are "taking profit from those concessions, that advantage, that as the rules allowed them to keep improving, that makes the championship more interesting for the future".
And Bagnaia, despite his feeling that Alex Marquez should've dominated, felt the weekend overall must give Ducati pause.
"Without the problem of Fabio, it's the first race after I don’t know how many that a Ducati wasn’t on the podium. It's something to reflect on.
"Others are improving, and we are stuck - or even getting worse."
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