The debut season of Enea Bastianini at Ducati Lenovo Team started in the worst way with the Italian getting injured right away in Portugal. Now fully recovered and already showing some of the brilliance that led the Borgo Panigale manufacturer to bet on him in the last rounds, the year 2024 will be of extreme importance and where Bestia could even fight for the title, believes Carlo Pernat.
The agent of #23 recalled to Motosan the disastrous start of the season for Bastianini: ‘Honestly, if you remember well, [Luca] Marini crashed into him when he was in 2nd place in the first Sprint race. It was a very important year, the World Championship was at stake. He lost five GPs, then three more, and then another one, from Barcelona one, that’s nine Grand Prixs, which means 18 races. The new bike was not easy to ride in 2023, the new team with a different chief engineer, was not working on the development’.
Later, he remembered the injury that Bastianini had and that led to him being operated on: ‘The scaphoid fracture, which is one of the worst things, because for three months you can’t do any physical preparation, because if the scaphoid breaks again, the race is over. So can’t we judge a rider by these things? I’m sure that in the end, he will be the Bastianini that I think, because in Malaysia he had a great race, in Qatar he didn’t have the luck to enter Q2, but in the end he did three faster laps’.
Pernat then said he fully trusts that the 2024 season will be different, with “his” rider entering the fight for the title: ‘Anyway, I think he still is, honestly, I’m happy that he gave Ducati the confidence to put him in the factory team and I think 2024 will maybe be a good year, a year to fight for the World Championship’.
