Ducati arrived at Silverstone with the reigning champion, the best-resourced garage in MotoGP and four bikes inside the top ten of the championship. It left Saturday's Sprint with one point from its factory team and a problem none of its riders saw coming.
Marc Marquez ran fourth in the opening laps. He finished ninth, 0.027s from scoring nothing at all. Pecco Bagnaia started 16th and went backwards to 17th, 23.7 seconds behind the winner. Fabio di Giannantonio held third early and dropped to fifth. Only Alex Marquez, on a year-old Gresini-run GP26, went the other way.
The cause was graining on the soft rear - and, crucially, graining that had not appeared all weekend.
"I'm disappointed because we experienced a new feeling in the sprint race, that on the practice we never had that drop on the rear tyre," Marc Marquez said. "I was not the only one; many riders had it, but I was the one that suffered more because it started super early. Already on lap four I started to feel a massive drop, and then I just tried to survive and finish the race."
He was explicit that this was not ordinary wear. "It's not tyre degradation, it was graining. And when you have graining, it's like the rubber is not working in a correct temperature."
The champion also made a cold points calculation mid-race, having decided the risk of hanging on was not worth what it paid. "When I was in that seventh position, sixth position, I was suffering a lot, risking a lot to have a crash, and the difference in points between sixth or zero is only three, four points."
One of those moments went further than a scare. "I had a massive shake with that rear tyre and the airbag deployed, because I was already on the floor. But then the airbag deployed, but luckily I stayed on the bike."
Bagnaia's account was bleaker still. Already starting from a season-worst grid slot, he described a bike that stopped working entirely.
"I cannot imagine something more today - no performance, no speed," he said. "The lack of rear grip was huge, and after four laps I started going backwards, not forwards. In the last two laps I rode without touching the knee on the right side."
He was blunt about where the fault sat. "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." And on the factory garage specifically: "Me and Marc were the slowest riders in the last laps, so difficult to imagine what to do."
Bagnaia's comparison point was his own team-mate's satellite rival. "Luckily in the satellite team we have Alex Marquez who is doing a fantastic job, super strong, super fast, and is the one that making the difference compared to other Ducatis."
"My rhythm was really good at the beginning. I thought that I could have something more compared to the two guys in the front," he said. "But then after the fourth lap I started to lose the rear in the entry to the corners. So it was really difficult then to manage the situation, and I went into survival mode. A pity."
That it caught him at all was the surprise. "Usually I'm one of the best riders to keep the tyres. So it got me, honestly."
His verdict on Ducati versus Aprilia was one he says he has been repeating all season. "For sure, as Ducati, we need to improve. I continue to say this from the beginning of the year. I continue to say that Aprilias are doing a better job than us." He located the difference in corner entry: "They have this little better entry of the corners that allows them to be more relaxed on the throttle and then manage better the tyres."
Alex Marquez's fourth place, meanwhile, came down to having hit the problem early enough to learn from it. "I had this problem already this morning on the FP2 second run that I was super-slow and having this problem," he said. "So, I think that was the best training for the race."
He still thinks he got the tyre call wrong, and that Ducati collectively failed to consider the alternative until Michelin raised it on the way to the grid. "I did the mistake that I never put the 'option' of the medium," he said. "Then I was with the guys and said 'Why not the medium?' And then we started to think about it, but it was too late."
"On the papers, soft and medium are very, very similar tyres," he said. "Left compound is the same, right compound is the same family, only one step harder, so it's not a big difference between tyres."
Bagnaia's estimate of what the harder tyre buys him was four laps. The race is twice the Sprint distance.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/ducatis-silverstone-collapse-we-never-had-that-drop). Visit for full coverage.*