The director-general of Ducati Corse, Gigi Dall’Igna, is seen as the key to the success that the manufacturer currently has in MotoGP and the World Superbike Championship. One of his predecessors was Filippo Preziosi and under his leadership, Casey Stoner became world champion in 2007 in a very difficult context where Ducati was far from being the epitome of competitiveness and evolution.
The former rider now criticized the manufacturer for the decision to do without the Italian engineer, stating to the newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport: ‘Ducati would have been more successful in previous seasons than now. Their biggest mistake was getting rid of Filippo Preziosi, and I have no respect for how they did it. In the years I was with him, we never received any new parts during the season, we had exactly the same set, so if we had a problem, we had to find a way to solve it with the bike we had. In the middle of the season, we would test the bike for the following year: in the first tests there were always improvements and I wanted to compete with that bike for the rest of the season knowing that we were almost half a second faster’.
Although recognizing Dall’Igna’s merit, Stoner emphasized that all progress was slow and at the expense of a very large investment: ‘Of course, Gigi Dall’Igna did a good job, but it took a long time and a lot of budget to get where they are now’.
