Bagnaia Reveals Huge Grip Issue in Silverstone MotoGP Sprint

Pecco Bagnaia had a tough weekend at Silverstone. Starting from a season-worst 16th on the grid, he went backwards in Saturday's MotoGP Sprint, finishing 17th, 23.7s behind race winner Jorge Martin.

Like factory Ducati teammate Marc Marquez, Bagnaia initially made up ground, only to suffer a "huge" loss of rear grip by the midway stage. "I cannot imagine something more today - no performance, no speed. The lack of rear grip was huge, and after four laps I started going backwards, not forwards," he said.

That left him struggling to keep pace. "In the last two laps I [rode] without touching the knee on the right side! So it's very difficult for me to be competitive," he added. "The target at the start of the weekend was to be in the top 10, but looking at my performance, it's difficult to imagine something better than 15th."

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Bagnaia also highlighted the performance of Gresini's Alex Marquez, who again bucked the Desmosedici trend by climbing to fourth. "The factory team today struggled a lot. Me and Marc were the slowest riders in the last laps," he said. "Luckily in the satellite team we have Alex Marquez who is doing a fantastic job... I really hope that tonight we will solve our problem."

That problem, Bagnaia confirmed, was tyre wear. "The right side was completely finished, but it's not a problem of the tyre, it's our bike that is not finding the grip," he said. Worryingly, Bagnaia estimates that switching from the soft to medium rear would only give him "four laps more". Sunday's grand prix is double the Sprint distance, at 20 laps.

He compared the feeling to Thailand. "Very difficult to manage because you cannot brakeg because if you start to put the weight more on the front the rear starts to slide. So you need to just let the bike [flow] like in the wet. And touching the gas is the smoothest thing you need to do, because if not, you lose the rear. Like Marc did, he explode the airbag for that."