Ducati's sporting director spoke with GP One about his team's main opponent, namely the reigning World Champion, Marc Márquez.
Ducati has been playing for the title for two years thanks to Andrea Dovizioso and the latter even allows it to lead the championship at times during the season. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, there is always Marc Márquez to be crowned and deprive the Italian manufacturer of this famous title that it has been waiting for since 2007.
Paolo ciabatti, Ducati's sporting director, has a lot of respect and admiration for the Spanish rider, but aims to beat him this season: “I believe that Marc Márquez is an extraordinarily talented driver. He has greatly raised the level of this championship. He won five world titles in six years, including one in his first year in MotoGP. This shows how exceptional he is. The fact that we managed to beat him seven times this year and six times last year, even in some clinches, must make us very proud. Regardless, we are here to win the title and we will work hard with all the resources we have to achieve that. We understand that this will be very difficult because Honda is the largest manufacturer in the world and Márquez is probably the greatest talent on the modern motorcycling scene. It's an ambitious goal but it's the only one we have. »
Si KTM admitted to having already made an offer to Márquez and being very interested in having the seven-time World Champion in his ranks in the future, Ciabatti is more reserved about a possible arrival at Ducati : “If we took Marquez out of the equation, we would have already won two world titles. It would be easy to add that if we had Marc with us, we probably would have done two doubles... but that's counter talk. Marc is very young, he feels very good in his team and he obtains exceptional results, but you should never say never. At the moment we have two years ahead of us during which he will be our main adversary and we have to think about ourselves. We are convinced that Andrea is able to fight on equal terms with him, he has already proven it. We must avoid making mistakes because Yamaha and Suzuki will also be very competitive. We also have to count on Danilo Petrucci progressing as much as we want and taking points from our opponents. »
