Enea Bastianini’s debut season with the Ducati Lenovo Team got off to the worst possible start, with the Italian getting injured in Portugal. Now fully recovered and already showing, in the last few rounds, some of the brilliance that led the Borgo Panigale manufacturer to bet on him, the year 2024 will be one of extreme importance and one in which Bestia could even fight for the title, believes Carlo Pernat.
The #23’s agent told Motosan about Bastianini’s disastrous start to the season: ‘Honestly, if you remember, [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 missed five GPs, then three more and then another, Barcelona one, that’s nine Grands Prix, which means 18 races. The new bike wasn’t easy to ride in 2023, the new team with a different chief engineer wasn’t working on the development’.
He then recalled Bastianini’s injury, which led to him having surgery: ‘The scaphoid fracture, which is one of the worst things, because for three months you can’t do any physical preparation, because if you break the scaphoid again, the race is over. So you can’t judge a rider on these things? I’m sure that, in the end, he’ll be the Bastianini I think he is, because in Malaysia he had a great race, in Qatar he wasn’t lucky enough to get into Q2, but in the end he did three fastest laps’.
Pernat then went on to say that he fully expects the 2024 season to be different, with «his» rider entering the title fight: ‘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 battle for the World Championship’.