Casey Stoner: Getting rid of Preziosi was Ducati’s "biggest mistake"

Stoner spent four seasons at the Italian team, but his tally of race wins decreased from 10 in his world championship year to 6, 4 and 3 before moving to Repsol Honda, with instant title success, in 2011.

Valentino Rossi took Stoner’s place at Ducati, but the seven time MotoGP champion was left winless during his two seasons on the Desmosedici.

Among those that paid the price for The Doctor’s woes was Ducati Corse general manager Filippo Preziosi, the technical ‘driving force’ behind the Desmosedici from its 2003 debut, who left at the end of 2012.

Ducati sank to a podium-less low the following season before signing Gigi Dall’Igna, from Aprilia, to take over its MotoGP project.

The first wins of the Dall’Igna era came in 2016 and Ducati has been a championship contender since 2017. But it still took until 2022 to finally seal the title, which Bagnaia then defended in 2023, when he headed an all-Ducati top three.

“I personally think still Ducati would have been more successful in earlier seasons,” Stoner told Gazzetta dello Sport, before explaining that budget constraints had masked Preziosi’s genius.

“When they got rid of Filippo [Preziosi], it was their biggest mistake. And I have no respect for the way this happened.

"This guy was very clever. In the years I was with him, whatever bike we started the year, we finished the year. We didn't ever get any new parts during the season.

“For the entire season, everybody else was updating and improving and we had the same exact package.

“So if we had a problem we had to find a way to fix it with the bike we had and this was always a challenge for me and my team.

“Then in the middle of the season, we would have the first test on the next year's bike. It was always an improvement and I always wanted to race that bike for the rest of the season, knowing that we could be half-a-second to almost one-second [a lap] faster sometimes.

“But we never had the budget to produce another chassis for me to race the rest of the season. So we were never able to do this.

“And of course, Gigi's done a good job. But it took a lot of time and a lot of budget to arrive there.”

Among the technical innovations introduced under Preziosi’s watch was the carbon fibre chassis, which Ducati stepped away from in its quest to try and make Rossi competitive in 2012.

Carbon fibre frame technology then made a return to MotoGP with KTM in 2023.