Will Ducati’s Lack of Team Orders Haunt Them in WSBK Title Fight?

Ducati has unequivocally been the best brand in MotoGP for many years, and the same applies to World Superbike albeit to a slightly lesser extent. In both series’ Ducati has had the fastest bike, and a bike that different riding styles could enjoy success with.

That’s not been the case for other brands, who at times have had one rider making the difference, be it Marc Marquez at Honda for several seasons, Jonathan Rea at Kawasaki and most recently Toprak Razgatlioglu at Yamaha.

But beating Ducati for Rea and Razgatlioglu in particular has been extremely challenging, although Razgatlioglu and BMW have managed to do that for most of 2024. Despite the M1000 RR being a very good bike, many still consider the Panigale V4 R to be the most complete bike in the Superbike class.

Since 2022 only Alvaro Bautista has consistently been challenging for wins and championships for Ducati, so team orders were never needed, but in MotoGP it’s at times resulted in big talking points.

In 2022 Francesco Bagnaia won the title but there were several races where he fought for victory with Enea Bastianini, and was beaten. That was towards the end of the season when Bagnaia was in a fierce title run-in with Yamaha’s Fabio Quartararo. On those occasions, Ducati chose not to deploy team orders until Malaysia when it became apparent that they wanted Bastianini to finish behind Bagnaia.

Bastianini obliged but Ducati had chances to enforce team orders sooner and did not do so. Granted, I’m not a supporter of team orders, but I will admit that there are times when they call for teams to use them.

In 2023 there were again times when Ducati could have favoured Bagnaia over Pramac’s satellite rider Jorge Martin, but the Italian company let the season play out without the use of team orders.

Heading into the Cremona World Superbike round last weekend, it was clear that Nicolo Bulega was, and still is, Ducati’s best shot at winning the title. However, in the final race of the weekend, he was beaten by Bautista, who overtook his rookie team-mate to finish second.

Prior to the event, Bautista was clear that team orders wouldn’t be enforced, saying: “This weekend, especially for Nicolo [Bulega], is very important because if he can have a good weekend, he can take the championship lead,” Bautista told WorldSBK.com.

“Normally, I agree with team orders in the case where one rider doesn’t have a chance to win the title. At the moment, both riders have a chance to win the title. I don’t want to help him or him to help me because we are fighting for the same thing and both riders have the chance to win it.

“In my mind, there is no chance to fight for the championship. First of all, I want to check my physical condition while riding the bike and I’ll try to go from less to more this weekend.”

Bulega is not just 13 points behind Razgatlioglu, who has missed the last six races due to injury. Bautista is 82 points down on Razgatlioglu with just three rounds remaining, so favouring Bulega at Cremona could and perhaps should have been the case for Ducati.

In MotoGP there was yet more drama as Bagnaia crashed out of the Misano Grand Prix, handing Martin a big lead in the standings. Bagnaia, who is Ducati’s reigning MotoGP champion and the more favoured rider over Pramac’s Martin, won the sprint on Saturday to close the gap. However, Bagnaia lost the lead to Martin early on in the main race before his team-mate Bastianini swooped through.

It was clear that Bastianini passing Bagnaia put the two-time champion on the backfoot as he needed to play catch up for the remainder of the race, before falling late on. Had Ducati signified to Bastianini not to interfere with Bagnaia, then the latter could have focused solely on trying to catch Martin who is his main title rival at this stage.

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