“I really thought it would be easier.” That is the sentence Fabio Di Giannantonio got out before his voice failed him entirely. The Italian rider was recording a farewell video for Valentino Rossi’s VR46 team, the outfit that took him in when almost nobody else in the MotoGP paddock wanted him, and three years of gratitude arrived all at once, on camera, in front of the crew he was about to leave behind.
A Rider Nobody Else Would Take
To understand why Di Giannantonio cried, it helps to remember where he stood at the end of 2023. Gresini Racing had just told him Marc Marquez would be taking his seat for 2024, ending his run with the team that had raised him from junior categories, and Diggia was staring at a MotoGP grid with no confirmed ride for the following season. Then, in the space of a few flyaway races, everything changed. He took his first premier-class podium at Phillip Island and followed it with a stunning maiden win at the Qatar Grand Prix, beating race favorite Jorge Martin in a race that flipped his career’s trajectory in real time.
Rossi’s VR46 team, built almost entirely around graduates of his own riding academy, made an exception for Di Giannantonio, bringing him in to replace Luca Marini, who was headed to Repsol Honda. It was the first time VR46 had fielded a rider who had not come up through the Rossi academy system, a detail that made the seat itself something closer to an adoption than a normal signing.
Three Years Inside the Family
What followed was a run that turned Di Giannantonio into Ducati’s leading rider in the world championship standings and VR46’s most successful signing to date. He sits third overall this season, a factory-supported effort inside a satellite team that has punched consistently above its budget. Earlier this year he broke VR46’s victory drought at Catalunya, doing it through a hand injury that would have kept a less determined rider off the bike entirely. Rossi, watching his protege-by-adoption win again, could only laugh afterward. “Are you sure you want to leave?” he asked, congratulating Di Giannantonio even as the Italian’s exit to KTM’s factory squad for 2027 was already an open secret in the paddock.
That contradiction, a team principal joking with a rider on the way out the door, tells you what three years inside VR46 actually built. It was not simply a business relationship that produced results. It was, in Di Giannantonio’s own words, a place that changed who he was as a competitor and as a person.
The Words That Broke Him
In the goodbye video released by the team, Di Giannantonio worked through his message in short bursts, stopping to compose himself between each one. “You guys have been an incredible team,” he said. “You are a crazy team. I’ve never felt this good in a team.” Then, after an embrace from VR46 team director Alessio Salucci, the emotion took over completely. “You guys gave me everything,” he continued. “All I am now. All the beautiful things that are happening to me are thanks to you. I was not this person, I was not this man, I was not this rider, and it’s really thanks to all of you.”
He closed with a line that captured what the move actually costs him on a personal level, even as it represents a clear step up on paper. “It’s been a crazy three years,” Di Giannantonio said. “I will always carry you in my heart. If I ever take a step forward, it is really thanks to you.”
A Factory Seat, Finally, Next to Alex Marquez
The 2027 move puts Di Giannantonio inside a factory team for the first time in his career, partnering Alex Marquez at KTM as the manufacturer rebuilds around the new 850cc, Pirelli-shod regulations arriving that season. For a rider who spent 2023 unsure whether he would have a MotoGP seat of any kind, a factory contract represents the kind of security that did not exist for him three winters ago. Pedro Acosta, another rider joining KTM’s rebuilt lineup for 2027, has already described the incoming group as “two great guys” building toward what he called a fresh start for the marque.
VR46 is not standing still either. The team is expected to field an entirely new lineup next season, bringing in Fermin Aldeguer from Gresini alongside WorldSBK title leader Nicolo Bulega, a changeover that will leave Franco Morbidelli, Di Giannantonio’s current teammate, as one of several race winners whose 2027 seat remains unresolved while a wave of rookies pushes into the premier class.
What the Tears Actually Mean
None of this is really a story about a contract. It is a story about what happens when a career nearly ends and a team decides to bet on the rider anyway, then gets three years of results as the return on that bet. Di Giannantonio’s move to KTM is, by any measure, a promotion. He will ride factory machinery for the first time, alongside a rider in Alex Marquez who has spent this season proving he belongs at the front of the field. But the video VR46 released tells a more complicated truth: that gratitude and ambition can sit inside a rider at the same time, and that leaving the team that saved a career does not erase what that team meant while it was happening.
Di Giannantonio will race out the rest of this season in VR46 colors before the switch becomes official. Every result between now and then will carry a strange duality, a rider chasing points for a team he is simultaneously saying goodbye to, in front of a paddock that watched him arrive with nothing and leave as one of Ducati’s most consistent front-runners.
The Academy That Made an Exception
Rossi built VR46 as an extension of his own riding academy, a pipeline designed to take young Italian talent and put it on Ducati machinery under his direct supervision. Every rider the team had fielded before Di Giannantonio had come up through that system, trained at Rossi’s ranch in Tavullia, shaped by the same coaching staff and the same racing philosophy from their teenage years onward. Bringing in an outsider who owed the team nothing, an arrival that only happened after Gresini had cut him loose, was a departure from how VR46 had always operated.
That gamble paid off almost immediately. Di Giannantonio’s Qatar win in 2023 gave VR46 a marquee result before the team had even fully established its own identity as a factory-supported operation, and everything he has produced from that race forward has made him the standard the rest of the roster gets measured against. Rossi rarely hands out that kind of trust to a rider who was not one of his own academy graduates, and the emotional scenes in the farewell video reflect just how far that trust extended over three seasons.
A Wrist Injury and a Number That Would Not Move
The Catalunya win that prompted Rossi’s half-joking question about Di Giannantonio’s exit did not come easily. The Italian rode through a hand injury that would have forced a less committed rider to sit out entirely, managing pain through practice, qualifying, and a full race distance before taking the checkered flag. That result did more than end a drought for VR46. It reinforced Di Giannantonio’s reputation as a rider who competes through discomfort rather than around it, a trait that KTM will be counting on as it rebuilds its factory effort around drivers capable of absorbing a difficult transition to all-new machinery in 2027.
The scale of that transition should not be understated. The switch to 850cc engines and Pirelli tires represents the biggest regulatory shift MotoGP has undertaken in more than a decade, and KTM is betting that a rider who has already proven he can adapt under pressure, physically and professionally, gives the manufacturer its best chance of avoiding a rocky first season under the new rules.
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