For Márquez, Dall'Igna is not just an engineer but “a true leader”

This is the photo of an already iconic duo. Marc Márquez, eight times world champion including six in MotoGP, is now directly associated with Gigi Dall'Igna, the star engineer of the 2000s, father of the motorcycle which is now crushing the championship. After a year of transition on a satellite Ducati, Márquez joined the manufacturer's official team, a significant step in the path he has set out to hope to return to the top.

If he has already experimented with Dall'Igna methods in 2024 since the boss of Ducati Corse oversees the entire program, Márquez has never worked in the same stand as him, nor been directly under contract with the brand. This will be the case for the next two seasons and the guarantee of having the most advanced version of the Desmosedici also integrates it into a much closer exchange with the technical management in order to contribute to continually progressing the bike.

After a first test having laid the foundations of this new union, in Barcelona two days after the last Grand Prix of 2024, Marc Márquez was asked about the qualities of Gigi Dall'Igna, and he stressed seeing in him much more than a technical genius.

“Is Gigi Dall'Igna the best engineer? For me, Gigi Dall'Igna is the best leader. There are many good engineers, and there are certainly better and less good ones. But At the end of the day, you have to be a leader. It's not just an engineer who creates a part, you have to manage a group of people.”

“You can have a big budget, a lot of things, big installations, in the end it is the humans who control the information and the development. This human aspect must be controlled by someone, by a leader. In this case, the leader is Gigi and it works really well if he says right, everyone goes to the right and has no doubts.

“Obviously the way of working in the garage is very similar to Honda. The way of approaching a test, with the program, with the things we tried, it's very similar because the technical aspect was super good at Honda”, adds Márquez, who was an official Honda rider for 11 years.

However, he has already identified the differences between the two brands: “I noticed them, and we begin to understand why Ducati is where it is. Competition, and life in general, is action − reaction, and on Wednesday at 10 or 11 a.m., I already had messages on my phone to tell me 'we're going in this or that direction' These are things that I've never experienced. Next year, I'm going to change technicians again, it's not easy. we learn to to know.”

By joining the Ducati group, Márquez discovered a whole working method, initiated by Dall'Igna and today hailed as the basis of the brand's tenfold success. “The Ducati way of working is not just with the factory team, it is also with the satellite teams. All the information they receive has the same value, whether it is a satellite or factory team. When I talk about the same value, it's because they are interested in all these details and that's what makes the difference if we want to be good.” judges the Spaniard.

A new technical staff to discover

Working directly under the gaze of Gigi Dall'Igna will be one of the changes that Marc Márquez will face next season, but in fact it is almost all of his technical staff that is evolving. The Spaniard will notably have to find his feet with a new chief mechanic, after having been associated for a long time with Santi Hernández and having operated this year alongside Frankie Carchedi at Gresini.

“We are human and when we change technicians or a technician changes drivers, it always takes time to get to know each other,” he admits, talking about his new association with Marco Rigamonti. “But I think the fact that he’s already working in the factory team and they have all my data from this year will make things easier.”

“We will see what I can do over the next two years in the official team. I know that I will have a very strong teammate, who will be the main reference in the pit because he won 11 races this year, and was super fast on all the tracks. It will be very good and I will try to be super professional in the pit, try to work, to adapt to this style because I will change all the human staff again. But I think that. 'with the information and data we have from this year, everything will be a little easier.”