The rider market has been crazy for 25 season, as you know the technical boss Market has been quite wild we’ve talked a fair bit about those but there’s there’s also an important Side Market that sometimes gets a little bit ignored and that’s the the crew chief Market, we’re not going to go into every crew chief move for there have been plenty between teams and between Riders as a consequence of various Rider moves.
Mark Marquez is getting his third ever Moto crew chief, Mark Marquez who has spent his entire career basically with Santi Hernandez at Honda and even before Honda before Moto GP then switched to Frankie last season, is now switching again to Marco Rigamonti who Ducati already had on the books as a Works team crew chief.
Rigamonti a longtime Ducati man has been crew chief at pramac to various Riders. At the very start of his career he went briefly to Suzuki, he is a crew chief who has not won a World title In Moto GP yet but the more important thing even you know besides the credentials it’s how significant of an adaptation it is for for someone like Marquez.
Marquez would have tried to maintain crew chief continuity, for him, it’s fair to say that Mark Marquez got lucky almost with how well he clicked with Frankie. When they started working together, there was obviously a very quick bonding process where they immediately headed off with each other they immediately found that they worked in a similar way.
It was one last thing for Marquez to have to worry about essentially because he just bonded with his Crew chief right away, didn’t have to think about it again and then they started winning races, I’m not saying by any means that this isn’t going to happen with Rigamonti but it’s a different process, he’s a different character this is something where characters and personalities play into it.
We might get to the start of the season and these two guys have been texting and messaging and calling all winter and they feel like they already know each other and they’re ready to start working together. Or it could be a bit more difficult it could be a bit more different, it’s got to be one more thing that especially the people in Ducati are just thinking how long is this going to take, is this something that’s going to hold up, Mark Marquez getting back to the level we need him to be at or not.
Carchedi still does have a very important role at Ducati, he has been placed with the afore mentioned rookie Fermin Aldeguer. Of course directly contracted to ducati, he has not had the greatest of motor 2 Seasons to put it lightly but still retains the faith of the Ducati apparatus, we’ve heard from Gigi Dall’langa about his arrival and Gigi has pretty much said that the expectation is still to mold Aldeguer pretty quickly into a motoGP front runner and even Championship Contender.
Carchedi has has a quite a good record helping turn Riders into the best version of themselves, Frankie has a very particular way of working where he seems to spend a lot of time focused on getting his Riders comfortable. That’s something that really works in in taking the best out of them really quickly, he did it with Mark Marquez in 2024 back to race winning form but you know this is also a guy who has taken Carl Abraham to the front row starts in Moto GP
He has a really impressive career, he seems to be able to jell really quickly with Riders, he seems to be able to extract good things out of people and in terms of a teacher, as someone to learn from Ducati have done a really good job by making sure that Fermin Aldeguer gets to spend his MotoGP rookie time with Carchedi who will be aiming to repeat essentially what he did, when he plucked rookie Juan Meir into Suzuki and took him to MotoGP success.
if Carchedi just gets Fermin Aldeguer to late 2023 Fabio Di Giannantonio level, it’s already a massive success. if they’re knocking on the door of podiums it’ll be an incredibly successful rookie season for them and they’re going to be realistic about their targets but it’ll be interesting to see what they can achieve together
That is good