Only three riders will get to race a latest-spec Ducati Desmosedici this season: Marc Marquez, Pecco Bagnaia and Fabio Di Giannantonio. The Italian youngster tells us why his ride to the top has been such a rollercoaster
If you were racing motorcycles in the 1960s and wanted to taste grand prix glory you had to ingratiate yourself with the cantankerous Count Domenico Agusta and have him bless you with one of his red and silver MV Agustas. If you were chasing biking’s biggest gong in the 1990s you needed to impress HRC warlord Youichi Oguma into arming you with a Honda NSR500.
If you want to win next year’s MotoGP crown there’s only one man who can help you do it: Ducati Corse wizard Gigi Dall’Igna, who may furnish you with the only tool up to the job, a Ducati Desmosedici GP25.
Of the many thousands of hungry young racers on this planet, only three will get to race these 300-horsepower, 360km/h missiles in 2025: six-times MotoGP king Marc Marquez, 2022 and 2023 champion Pecco Bagnaia and a thrusting young Roman called Fabio Di Giannantonio.
This is a striking turnaround for a rider who’s spent much of the last few years desperately trying to pull his career out of a terminal dive.
From underdog to contender
Di Giannantonio has always been a bit under the radar. You see some riders on their way to MotoGP ages before they get there – the reputations of such riders as Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez preceded them, so you knew they were coming. Not Di Giannantonio, who, by the way, is a very easy-going interviewee and speaks excellent English. We only get lost in translation once, when we’re talking about his earliest days, when his hotelier mum and dad bought him his first motorcycle.
“My first bike was for my sixth birthday – a red minimoto with dee no sores stickers,” he says.
Sorry, with what?
“Dee no sores.”
Erm… Oh, you mean dinosaurs!
“Yes!”
The 25-year-old Italian’s journey to the top has been less spectacular than Marquez’s and Rossi’s and fraught with obstacles: two race wins in three years of Moto3, one victory in three seasons of Moto2 and only 20th overall in his 2022 rookie MotoGP campaign with Gresini Ducati.
Thus Di Giannantonio wasn’t far away from losing his ride at the end of 2022 and he was certain he was finished in 2023, when Marquez quit Honda and was aiming for Di Giannantonio’s Desmosedici ride.
“2022 was a disaster, a complete disaster, for many reasons,” says Di Giannantonio. “I was a rookie and also my staff in the garage were MotoGP rookies – my crew chief, my data analyst, so it was super-complicated.
“It was like we were trying to understand things from each other but we were all rookies. When it’s like this and you are competing against teams like VR46 and the factory Ducati team, it’s impossible!
“In MotoGP you need the complete package. You, the bike and the team staff must be as one. Everybody has to do their thing: the rider must be competitive, the bike has to be good and the crew chief, data analyst and engineers must be experienced, with lots of knowledge.
“If you don’t have all these pieces together you will finish last, because MotoGP is so tough now. If you do have all of this you can be good, but to be the best you need to be in another league, you need to be perfect in everything.”
Di Giannantonio’s first MotoGP contract was a one-plus-one, which means you may get signed for a second season if you’ve done enough to deserve it in the first. And one top-10 finish in 2022 wasn’t really enough.
“But the team boss understood what had gone wrong, so Gresini gave me the opportunity to make another contract with a crew chief with a lot of experience, so I restarted with Frankie Carchedi.”
Brit Carchedi had guided Joan Mir to the 2020 MotoGP title and was out of a job when Suzuki quit the championship at the end of 2022.
Di Giannantonio’s reaction to the news that he would be working with Carchedi gives some idea of the emotional commitment racers give to their all-consuming jobs.
“When I heard the news that Frankie was coming I started to cry in my motorhome. I cried for, like, one hour because I was super-happy, because I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. So 2023 was my real rookie season and it started with good results. I was in the top 10 quite consistently. I was there and making progress.”
Di Giannantonio was getting faster and faster, demonstrating that he deserved his place on the grid. And then the rumours started.
The rollercoaster ride
“I was doing good things, honestly, then all the speculation started and life started to be tough again. From early July Gresini told me that it was going to be really complicated to stay with them for 2024. Then we heard rumours and finally in late July we understood that Marc was coming to the team for 2024.”
Marquez had been with the factory Honda team for 11 seasons but wanted out because its RC213V project was in disarray. The MotoGP king knew that if he wanted to win again he needed a Ducati Desmosedici. And the only available Ducati seat was Di Giannantonio’s.
All’s fair in love and war.
“Mentally it was so tough because it was a rollercoaster – not a high-level rollercoaster but a low-level rollercoaster,” he laughs, because his MotoGP career hadn’t yet reached a high altitude, so it was more like he was bunny-hopping across the MotoGP landscape, desperately trying to avoid a crash-landing and the end of his short premier-class career.
“I became super-focused and had huge help from my staff – my mental coach, my trainer, my manager, my assistant. We said, ‘Okay, let’s focus and enjoy’. Don’t put extra pressure on myself because there’s already lots of pressure, so just enjoy it and really focus on my riding, getting better, day by day. That was the key to improving in every session and in every race. Then we would see what happens at the end of the season.”
The final third of Di Giannantonio’s 2023 season was a masterclass of focusing on your goal and blocking out the noise that’s all around. Six grands prix to go and he scored his first top-five finish. The following week at Phillip Island he climbed a MotoGP podium for the first time, and a month after that he took second in the Qatar GP sprint, a few tenths behind Jorge Martin.
Di Giannantonio had arrived. But he was still out of a job.
“On the Saturday night in Qatar, after my podium in the sprint, I was 100 percent sure I would be at home in 2024. I was done.”
Then another plot twist.
The next day Di Giannantonio and his Desmosedici GP22 won the Qatar grand prix, defeating world champion Pecco Bagnaia’s GP23. But he was still out of a job.
“When I won the race I knew I was going to be staying home the next year but at least I’d won a race. Then on the Tuesday I got a message from Valentino (Rossi) and my manager got a message from Uccio (Salucci, VR46 team boss). Valentino said, ‘Hey, we need to speak’, and then the hope became a bit more, day by day.”
A last-minute lifeline
Rossi’s VR46 Ducati team had lost Luca Marini to the factory Honda squad, where he would replace Marquez, so there was a 2024 Ducati seat going after all. One moment he was plummeting to the ground again, the next he was out of the dive and heading for the heavens.
But hold on, calm down – a deal had yet to be done – so Di Giannantonio arrived at the 2023 Valencia finale still unsure of his fate.
The last race of the season is always followed by the first tests of the winter. MotoGP riders who are changing teams usually get special leathers made for the tests, because they can’t wear their old leathers on their new bikes, and contractual obligations (most contracts run to December 31) prohibit them from running their new colours, so they come up with a nice design that reflects their future.
Di Giannantonio still had no future, so he turned up at Valencia with a plain black set of leathers, still unsure whether he’d be riding at the tests.
“I asked my guys to make a test suit with no logos or nothing, so I could either use it at the test or keep it at home for the rest of my life.”
Finally, on Saturday evening, on the eve of the final race…
“In the VR46 office I signed the contract. It was, like: Wow! Unbelievable!”
Once again, Di Giannantonio had pulled out of the dive at the last moment. But how did he keep his head through this turmoil?
“One good point I have is that I can switch my brain. The world can be destroyed outside, but when I put on my helmet I can switch. This is tough to do, really tough, and I struggle to do it, but I do it. Usually.”
Unfortunately, Di Giannantonio’s 2024 season didn’t start as well as his 2023 campaign had ended, because his VR46 GP23 didn’t work so well with Michelin’s 2024 rear slick.
This was a problem, because Di Giannantonio needed top results to deserve a latest-spec Desmosedici for 2025. Once again he was losing altitude, heading for the ground.
“The goal for 2025 and for the next years was to ride a factory bike, because for my growth I need a factory bike to try to improve my skills and my results.”
He came good just in time, finishing an excellent fourth at Assen, behind the GP24s of Bagnaia, Martin and Enea Bastianini. And he had some luck when Martin and Marco Bezzecchi announced they were leaving Ducati for Aprilia, so Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali brought a factory contract to the next race, where Di Giannantonio signed on the dotted line: he would remain at VR46 for 2025, with a GP25 and factory staff dedicated entirely to his needs.
“I can’t wait to be part of the Ducati development project, because as a factory rider you can choose your own direction with the bike, so I expect to be in a strong position. I hope to be in the same position that Martin has been in.”
If next year is anything like this year – and it probably will be – Ducati’s latest Desmosedici will be just about unbeatable in MotoGP. Finally Di Giannantonio can see all the way to the very top of MotoGP. Only two problems – Marquez and Bagnaia, MotoGP’s strongest riders of the last decade, will also ride GP25s.
Over the past three years Di Giannantonio has spent many hundreds of hours examining their data – all Ducati riders have full access to each other’s data, to help them improve – so what has he learned from his fellow Desmosedici riders?
“I look mostly at Pecco’s and Marc’s data. I’m a good braker, but it’s Pecco’s manoeuvre during braking that makes him perfect – how he prepares the entry and therefore the exit of the corner. So I study him and I study Marc. When Marc is in Marc-mode, like at Aragon (where Marquez won his first races since 2021) he can squeeze the front tyre more and trust it more, especially in left-handers, so I need to learn that from him.”
Most of all, Di Giannantonio will keep working, because although natural talent is a wonderful weapon it’s not everything – and it’s useless without hard work, laser-focused dedication (basically erasing everything from your life except racing) and the capacity to smash yourself up every now and again and continue trudging towards the summit, no matter how much it hurts.
“I’m a good worker and this helps me perform. I’ve always trained hard – a lot of motocross, especially in the winter – and then as I grew as a rider I picked up my level of training even more,”he says. “Now I understand that I arrived at a level that wasn’t good for my mental health, so now when I train I try to enjoy it and try not to think about racing or the next race – let it go, don’t stress!”
You may not have heard much about Fabio Di Giannantonio before now – you’ll most likely be hearing a lot more about him in 2025.