After missing the 2023 Japanese GP, Enea Bastianini is looking forward to the GP in Motegi, a race he admits he’s sorry to have missed – due to injury – and one of his favorites, where he’s going with the aim of analyzing the ‘other Ducati’, although he still can’t predict whether he’ll take a more aggressive stance in the races, as he did in Indonesia, or return “to his style”, a little more “calm”.
In his preview of the Japanese round, the Borgo Panigale rider began by saying that he is ready to return to the circuit: ‘I missed the race I did here last year, it’s a good track and I think it will be good for Ducati, but it will be important to learn here in the first session with the other Ducati riders, so that I can be much faster in the second, but I’m ready. It’s one of my favorite tracks and I want to be competitive’.
On the subject of whether he had said before that he would have to risk a lot with a view to the championship and whether he would now return to a more balanced approach and within what is normal for him, the rider began by answering cheerfully: ‘Next question’, before stating: ‘I risked a lot at Mandalika because the first part of the race didn’t meet my expectations’.
He continued, recalling more specifically the events of the past GP: ‘Well, after my pace improved and my confidence with the bike was incredible, I thought I could fight for the win, but maybe the gap – to the second-placed rider (Pedro Acosta) – was a little bigger and I took a risk, because it was also important for me to take that risk to try to win the race, that victory, and in the end I fell, but that’s part of the game’.
The way he will outline his strategy and his approach, he says, will be studied later: ‘In the next few races I have to be competitive and score as many points as possible. I don’t know what the approach will be, I’ll have to look at that before the race’.