Why Lorenzo won't relive Rossi's Ducati nightmare

Six years apart, two Yamaha-contracted riders clad in black stepped onto unbranded Ducatis at Valencia, in the week after the final race of the MotoGP season. Valentino Rossi was out of the door again two winless seasons later, but Jorge Lorenzo's days in red look destined to be much happier.

Rossi's 2011-12 spell at Ducati is an unfortunate footnote on his otherwise glittering career. Having won seven titles in 11 years with Honda and then Yamaha - bringing success to the latter - he backed himself to go to Ducati and make things work.

He was replacing Casey Stoner, who won the 2007 title in his first year with Ducati but 'only' won races beyond that. As it turns out, the 'only' translates into Stoner carrying a recalcitrant bike to places it did not deserve to be.

In his Ducati years, Stoner was the only rider capable of understanding the bike and making it go quickly. Team-mates such as 2006 world champion Nicky Hayden and Marco Melandri struggled, with results on the other side of the garage few and far between.

Rossi went to Ducati vowing to win titles when Yamaha refused to back him over upstart team-mate Lorenzo. It was supposed to have been his crowning achievement: championships with three manufacturers, including one from his native Italy.

But it was a nightmare, and the signs were there from the outset. On Rossi's first day at Valencia at the end of 2010, he was 15th fastest and 1.7 seconds off the pace.

What followed was only sporadic podiums (three in 35 grands prix), zero wins and seventh and sixth in the championship. The romance was over and he went back to Yamaha as quickly as he could, conceding years later that it was a mistake to leave for Ducati over 'number-one' status.

This year, people have talked a lot more about that spell than they have previously, based on Lorenzo's early announcement that he's leaving Yamaha - effectively last weekend, officially on December 31 - to join Ducati, and his 2016 slump.

Lorenzo has only ridden Yamahas in MotoGP. He made his debut in 2008 and nine years in royal blue has netted three championships, 44 race wins and 39 poles. But, like Rossi, the prospect of a fresh challenge was tempting. Some serious coin would surely have helped as well.

Talk rumbled on all year. Will it be a success? Can Lorenzo's style work on a different bike that's not a Yamaha? And is the Ducati good enough to be that bike? Can he avoid a repeat of Rossi's miserable two seasons?

In no particular order: yes, yes, yes and yes.

Lorenzo had a big week at Valencia, on his Yamaha farewell. During the grand prix weekend itself, he was peerless. He found the warm and sunny Spanish conditions and the tyres brought by Michelin to his liking, to generate that grip and confidence he needs to carry corner speed.

It also helps that he loves Valencia as a circuit, having won there three times already in MotoGP. He was devastatingly quick in qualifying, and then bolted on Sunday to lead from start to finish. It was a classic Lorenzo performance, aided by Marc Marquez's slow start, but you felt Lorenzo always had something in the bag. And he needed the result, too, having not won in nearly six months.

Victory was a fitting way for Lorenzo to say goodbye to Yamaha. Less than 36 hours later he was back in the pitlane, but in the Ducati garage, wearing unbranded leathers and about to ride a 2016 Desmosedici decorated only with his trademark #99. (Side note: if you look closely enough at that, he has ditched the halo above the first 9 and now sports a pair of devil horns.)

Like the race weekend, Lorenzo's first two days on Ducati duty could not have gone much better. Not that he can talk about it yet, but the smiles were obvious. Everything was going to work out.

Lorenzo was the first rider out on Tuesday when the test started at 10am. It was part sign of intent, part necessity, as his clearance from Yamaha only covered this week's test, but he was straight down to business.

Despite the cold conditions, one of his arch nemeses in 2016, Lorenzo logged an initial five-lap run while all of the other full-timers stayed in their garages.

By the end of the day he had done 60 laps. He spent all but one lap on Tuesday on the 2016 bike, turning a late installation tour on the new machine, before giving that more attention on Wednesday.

His pace progressed steadily on the first day, including a big, chunky gain of about a second around lunchtime, before improving again to finish third-fastest. After another 66 laps on the second day he was eighth, but the times were not super-important in a test, especially this test.

"The lap time could be better, but if we want a better lap time we have to work in a different way," Ducati boss Gigi Dall'Igna surmised. "We didn't work for the proper set-up for him, but we selected a lot of materials and I'm quite happy about that."

There was a lot of methodical work, such as making gradual changes to his seating position, and building a rapport with his new crew chief, Christian Gabbarini, who was Stoner's right-hand man at both Ducati and Honda.

Lorenzo recorded the second-highest number of different runs across the two days, 24, behind new team-mate Andrea Dovizioso, Scott Redding and Suzuki tester Takuya Tsuda on 25 each.

This was about Lorenzo learning his new surroundings, and getting comfortable. Comfort was evident halfway through the first day - Lorenzo was attacking the corners with his usual pinpoint precision. The Ducati was giving him what he wanted.

"Looks like he's got a Yamaha underneath him, with a bit more power," Aprilia rider Sam Lowes remarked after a trackside visit on Wednesday, when he was sidelined following a crash on Tuesday.

Lorenzo topped the speed traps on Tuesday and was second on Wednesday, but those figures can be misleading. For instance, Alvaro Bautista led on day two on his Aspar Ducati, and was 14th on the timesheets.

That Ducati power was, though, obvious on Sunday during the race, when Andrea Iannone was keeping Rossi and Marquez at bay in the fight for second. While Marquez was eventually able to skip past, both the Yamaha and Honda riders endured the frustration of sneaking ahead of Iannone into a corner, only for the Ducati to blast by again on the next straight.

After Friday practice for the GP, Iannone was asked where he was losing time to pacesetters Lorenzo and Marquez. In a strangely Iannone way, his answer was succinct and telling: "inside the corners", before adding "when you want to turn with high speed and with a lot of angle, it's very difficult".

Ducati won a pair of races in 2016 - its first since Stoner's last season in '10 - but there is an argument that it still underachieved. One win was Iannone's on the dragstrip-esque Red Bull Ring, the other with Dovizioso in the rain at Sepang. The '16 bike was clearly another step forward for Ducati, but still had its limitations.

This has been a focal point in preparing the 2017 machine. The changes are not outwardly obvious, but do include revisions to the engine mounting and a slight rotation within the bike.

After the test at Valencia, Dovizioso said things had improved a little bit in every aspect - "more comfortable, everywhere" - and that "the engine is a little bit smoother". Improvements to the way the bike turns were not immediately obvious, Dovizioso said of the new package.

Their arrival will only add to technical maestro Dall'Igna's impressive work. He joined Ducati from Aprilia after Rossi left, when the team was in all sorts of difficulties in late-2013. Dall'Igna identified the problems, pointed the ship in the right development direction, then instilled an engineering culture to see the journey through.

He arrived too late to influence the GP14, but did introduce the mid-year GP14.2 update, and from that to the GP15 and this year's GP16, there has been clear progress at every step. The table below tracks the 'super times' of Honda, Yamaha and Ducati in MotoGP, since Rossi joined Ducati in 2011.

This data, calculated by Forix, is based on a manufacturer's fastest lap time for each grand prix weekend - compared to the outright fastest, represented as 100% - then averaged out over a year's events.

Ducati's MotoGP progress

Tracking the outright pace of MotoGP's three leading manufacturers

As good as Dovizioso and Iannone are as MotoGP riders, the nagging 'what if?' as the bike improved was always how the Ducati would fare with one of MotoGP's big guns on board. A Lorenzo, Marquez, Rossi or - now - Vinales.

Ducati wanted a name and it signed one in Lorenzo. It follows the coup of getting Stoner back in the fold, admittedly only as a test rider, late last year.

Dall'Igna knows Lorenzo from his 125cc and 250cc (pictured below) days, when the Spaniard was on Derbi and Aprilia bikes. Lorenzo called him a "genius" earlier this year; when he could discuss his Ducati move, Dall'Igna repaid the favour. There is an understanding and trust between the two.

One challenge for Ducati will be how it adapts to the ban on the Dall'Igna-inspired winglets. They helped give the red bikes MotoGP's class-leading acceleration, in conjunction with some smart work - in both 2015 and '16 - with the new control electronics. With the stripped-back ECU, Honda lagged from the outset and Yamaha's gains seemed to stagnate.

Ducati stuck with the winglets during the test, saying it was to provide an accurate benchmark with what happened over the race weekend. It remains to be seen what effect their removal will have, as even from Ducati there have been slightly mixed messages. Dall'Igna played down the impact on pace; Dovizioso said the difference in the feeling on the bike was "quite big".

Pramac satellite rider Scott Redding started work on his 2016 Desmosedici in the test and said that "with the wings you could be a bit lazy, almost". Especially with Ducati power, life without them poses more of a challenge keeping the front wheel planted - the old electronics' anti-wheelie settings used to help with that.

"We're trying to adapt the bike a little bit to try to sit less on the rear, but then you're going to lose in other places," Redding said after day one.

Part of Redding's challenge next year will be that his bike was designed around winglets. When Lorenzo gets back on a Ducati on January 30 at Sepang for the start of winter testing, he will surely be running without winglets. But he'll be on a bike designed to run without them.

What's more, it promises to be seriously quick. Lorenzo looked at home on both the 2016 and '17 machines, and Michelin's ongoing development - in its second year, and towards performance again after some early-'16 scares - is set to swing things back away from tyres he does not like.

Two wins does not make a season, just as two days of testing in the middle of November does not make a championship bid. On the early evidence, though, that will come for Lorenzo and Ducati.

What's less debatable is that Lorenzo has joined Ducati at the perfect moment, whereas Rossi in hindsight could barely have timed things worse in 2011. In the years to come, that they both moved from Yamaha to Ducati will be where the similarities between the two champions' stories end.