Jorge Lorenzo’s two years with Ducati were challenging. The rider struggled to adapt and took time to deliver the desired results. By the time he succeeded, it was too late to stay with the team.
The Spaniard admitted to DAZN that he expected a faster adaptation but found the Ducati very different from the Yamaha, and his riding style was not the most effective:
– Maybe I thought the adaptation would be quicker. It was a stronger bike on the straights, very stable under braking, but it didn’t have Yamaha’s cornering ability, basically. I wanted to ride the Ducati like the Yamaha, and because of that, I wasn’t fast.
After a strong end to his first year, Lorenzo couldn’t carry that momentum into 2018, as he recalled: ‘At the end of 2017, I finished the season very strong. Ducati was happy with my performance and thought I would start 2018 even better. But the opposite happened. On top of that, I was unlucky to be involved in that triple collision at Jerez, taking [Andrea] Dovizioso out of the race, the was a title contender with [Marc] Márquez’.
According to the three-time MotoGP champion, Ducati’s patience began to wear thin, while Danilo Petrucci was delivering similar results but at a much lower cost. This led Lorenzo to move to Honda: ‘All of this made them start to lose patience. There was talk that Petrucci could replace me at that point. We were achieving almost the same results, but he was earning 10 or 11 times less than me. When I saw I was between a rock and a hard place, I picked up the phone and called Alberto Puig [team manager at Repsol Honda] directly. That opened up a whole new world for me. We signed with Honda, and no one knew about it’.