Francesco Bagnaia reckons he “took a great lesson” from his struggles to find speed on the opening day of the Argentinean Grand Prix last weekend.
The factory Ducati rider was able to qualify only 14th for the Termas de Rio Hondo sprint after struggling to find a good feeling with his Desmosedici prototype across practice and qualifying, the Italian admitting that fact that he felt “nervous” ahead of the days running had seriously affected his ability to get up to speed.
Having been able to reset overnight – as well as making a set-up breakthrough in the Sunday morning warm-up session – Bagnaia was able to scythe through the field en-route to fifth by the end of the contest, the 2021 MotoGP vice-champion taking the chequered flag just 5.8 seconds adrift of race winner Aleix Espargaro having largely matched the Aprilia man for laptime when in clean air.
Bagnaia admitted that while he was left satisfied with his “great” fight-back through the field, he recognises that he needs to work on keeping calmer when things are not going to plan, something he feels his Saturday struggles will help no end.
“For sure this race will help us a lot for the future, I took a great lesson yesterday and would like to not repeat what happened because I was too nervous, and when you are nervous you can’t do the things you should be able to,” explained Bagnaia.
“The race was great, the only trouble we had was starting far back but the pace was quite good as we worked well in warm-up, it was very useful for me and we worked a lot and managed to find my feeling again so I’m happy.
“It was definitely a good race to really start my season, and we will try to get back to improving through every session in future events.”
Bagnaia also admitted to being too “greedy” to try and overcome the issues he was having with his machine, and that he believes his “potential was higher” in terms of grid position had he remained calmer.
“I apologised to my team (after Saturday) for what happened because they are there working a lot and I tried to be too greedy, so this is something that cannot happen again,” added Bagnaia.
“The bike also wasn’t great (in qualifying), but it was more me because even though it wasn’t working as well as today, but if I was calm the potential was higher than 14th so there was more things as well, but it’s better to have these kinds of situations early in the season to try and improve them.”
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