2024 will undoubtedly be an unforgettable year for the Gresini team, among the undisputed protagonists of the season along with Marc Marquez.
It was a bold move for an independent team to welcome a rider of the caliber of the eight-time Spanish world champion to the team, but one that certainly paid off.
So much so that it allowed Marquez to finish third in the championship with a GP23 and secure a place on the official Ducati team for next season.
Hard to let go of the 31-year-old after such a year, as even his chief technician Frankie Carchedi acknowledged in the Crash.net podcast.
"What was the feeling inside Gresini and Marc's reaction after that last race? Just happiness and sadness at the same time," he admitted," He took an unbelievable risk, working with people he had no idea about, in a team he had no idea about, on a bike that's a year old.
The same from our side at Gresini. Yes, they signed an eight-time World Champion! But there is always an element of risk in everything and I think the final feeling was of real happiness.
But sadness also, because everybody has put a lot of work in, especially if a rider has never ridden for that manufacturer before.
You get everything and then, before you know it, you're sort of starting again with someone else."
The Catalan champion's presence, however, did not seem to have increased the pressure in the Faenza team's pit box any more.
"The only time I ever stood back and went 'woah' was probably the Valencia test, when I arrived in the morning and there were literally about 200 people outside the box.
But to be honest, when you start working you forget about everything else.
No matter who it is, you want to achieve the same thing: to finish as high as possible," the crew chief said, going on to talk about the team's chances of fighting for the title after Marquez's two wins at Aragon and Misano.
"Marc had his own goals. We had our own goals. In the future, I'm sure his goals will be different," he noted. "This season was more about understanding every aspect of the bike.
Every rider, no matter who they are, has strengths and weaknesses. Like I said, the most pleasing for me was the improvement in the fast right corners at the end of the year.
At the start of the year, we were losing maybe three or four tenths in corners! It was quite a lot. So to be that good by the end, in an area that I'm sure he'll still say is his weakness... he's in a pretty good position for the future, put it that way!"
What allowed him to improve so much? "For sure we developed the bike over the year. How much that helped and how much was Marc understanding how to get the best out of those kind of corners is difficult to say," Carchedi replied, "All I can say that it's an area where we really struggled for at least the first half of the year, and in the second half of the year we made massive steps."
The chief technician then commented on Marquez's riding skills, relating them to those of the other Ducati riders.
"I'm not saying we've quite reached the levels of Formula 1, but you can't compare Verstappen with Russell, for example, because everyone is in different cars.
So for us, it was always the other GP23s. That's a very fair comparison. In fact, we almost achieved what we wanted until the last weekend.
Because we finished as the first GP23 in every race we didn't DNF until the Barcelona Sprint, where Alex finished ahead of us," he concluded, "But that was our number one target.
Obviously, you always want more. You want to beat everyone else. But that's the realistic comparison. Then what he does on the bike.... I've laughed about it with Marc, especially in recent few weeks.
It's taken me a long time to understand how he does the lefts, because he is on another level. I've now understood what he does and how he does it, but whether you can explain it and someone else can do it is a different story!
I'm sure other riders have seen his data and tried to replicate it, but it's one thing understanding what he does and another thing replicating it!"
