Last year, Fabio Di Giannantonio had a tough season in MotoGP. Despite it being his second season and staying with Gresini, clear improvements were slow to come… until he ended the season fighting at the front, even winning a race, despite the fact he had the future in serious danger. His chief mechanic was Frankie Carchedi.
The engineer was asked by Crash.net about the turning point for the Italian rider, and he replied: ‘To a lot of people, it sounded crazy, but I knew at Silverstone. Because if you go back and look at his time gap to Pecco [Bagnaia] early on. Then look at it again after 15 laps – just before he pitted for wet tyres – he’d closed the gap to Pecco. So he was one of the fastest and he’d gained that time despite having to overtake people…’.
Carchedi also believes that signs of a turnaround were seen at the German and Dutch GPs, although he classifies Silverstone as the real turning point: ‘When you start near the back, or in the case of Silverstone he got taken off early on, you are not going to come through to the front in MotoGP now. He knew it himself, «if I could just get qualifying…». And finally, that was the key. It’s about putting a whole weekend together. Because all of a sudden, from not making Q2 at all for the first ten rounds, we started making Q2 regularly by the end. And then it’s a completely different weekend’.
At the Australian GP, Di Giannantonio started from the second row of the grid and finished fourth, before starting from the top three and winning in Qatar… and coming close to the podium in Valencia from a further back position: ‘At Phillip Island, he was on the second row. Then he finally got a front row at Qatar and I don’t think he’ll have an easier race than that. But at Valencia, he started fourth row, and that was the difference in the race. Because again, we knew he had the pace to win, and I think he closed over three seconds on Pecco. Unfortunately, he needed one more lap’.