Speaking Ducati

The names of Jorge Lorenzo and Marco Melandri are preceded by an honorific few humans ever will be known by: Grand Prix World Champion. Lorenzo has a title in every Grand Prix class in which he has participated; Melandri won the 250cc GP title in 2002. Melandri has finished second in the MotoGP championship with multiple wins on a satellite machine. Lorenzo has 44 wins in MotoGP alone to his name.

Point is, these two know how to ride a roadracing machine.

Second point: Both of them are having their hindquarters served to them on a silver platter by their teammates.

The names of Andrea Dovisioso and Chaz Davies are well-known to race fans, but they are not rated nearly as highly as Lorenzo, who rides alongside Dovi in MotoGP, and Melandri, who joined Davies on the Aruba.it Racing Panigale for 2017. Dovisioso, the 2004 125cc GP Champion, has fewer MotoGP race wins than Melandri, despite riding for the factory teams of Honda and Ducati and starting more MotoGP races than Melandri. Davies has spent most of his career on production-based machinery, and his only World Championship came in World Supersport.

And yet, so far, Dovisioso has a win and a second in MotoGP this season, while Lorenzo has taken a single third place. Since the end of 2010, Ducati has three MotoGP wins; Dovi has two of them. In the Superbike World Championship, Davies has eight podiums to Melandri’s six, but only Davies has won (twice) while several of Melandri’s podiums have come in races where Davies has crashed.

Third point: All four of these riders race Ducati.

What is the difference between the race-winning journeymen and the struggling superstars? At its core, the difference is that Dovi and Davies have learned to speak the language of Ducati.

Learning this language did not happen overnight. And perhaps it only happened because Davies and Dovi were kind of forced to.

Dovisioso only spent his third season on the Repsol Honda factory team because he had a contract that required Honda to provide him a factory bike if he met certain performance criteria. Honda had signed Casey Stoner and wanted Dovi to go away. Dovi reminded Honda of its contract, and to its credit, Honda gave him a factory bike for 2011. But at the end of the year, with Stoner and Dani Pedrosa already signed and Dovi out of contract, the Italian had to shop around for work. Dovi spent a year on the Tech3 satellite Yamaha, but was getting older and factories weren't returning his phone calls. And when Valentino Rossi bailed on Ducati, it wasn't like riders were lining up to ride the machine that Rossi couldn't tame, the machine that had a reputation as a career-killer. Ducati needed a rider; Dovi needed a factory ride.

Here's what Dovi chose to do/was allowed to do that no other Ducati factory rider has since: He stayed with Ducati. Teammates came and went, but Dovi was a faithful partner to Ducati. And he showed that he was married to the factory, for better or for worse, at the beginning of 2015. Even after no wins, one pole and two podiums in 2013 and 2014 combined, Andrea showed up at the pre-season test at Qatar with a diagram of the desmodromic valve gear stenciled across the butt of his leathers, alongside his new married name, "Desmo Dovi."

From that point on, Dovi wasn't thinking about whether the Ducati was better or worse than other bikes. It was all about learning to ride the Ducati MotoGP machine that he had between his legs at that moment. He wasn't going anywhere else; this was the bike he had, and he had committed to racing this machine as best he could.

That meant learning the bike intimately, figuring out how to read the inputs from a bike that was so different than other MotoGP bikes that riders like Rossi, Melandri, Nicky Hayden and Cal Crutchlow never quite unraveled the language that the bike spoke. That meant learning to speak back to the machine in a language that no other MotoGP bike responded to. Over the years, Dovi and the Ducati have come to know each other, and Dovi can, it is fair to say, whisper into the bike's ear and convince it to do things that no other rider - even a rider as supernaturally talented as Lorenzo - can get the bike do.

Davies found himself looking for a ride after his BMW factory Superbike World Championship team disappeared after the 2013 season. And once again, the factory Ducati team wasn't exactly desirable for riders looking for race-winning machinery. After Carlos Checa won 15 races in 2011 to take the World Championship for Ducati, the outdated 1098R took Checa to only four wins in 2012, and the new Panigale was such a poor racebike that Checa scored no wins in 2013 and quit the sport.

Davies didn't immediately drag the Panigale into the winner's circle, but he did score four podiums in 2014. The next season was better, with 18 podiums and five wins, followed by 2016 with 11 wins for the Panigale. So far, Davies is the only rider to take a Panigale across the finish line first in Superbike World Championship competition. And if the first job of a professional racer is to beat your teammate, Davies has accomplished that beyond any question.

Davies and Dovi are in long-term relationships with the unique machines that come from Bologna. Each has developed an ability to communicate with their racebikes in a way that their new-to-the-relationship teammates haven't quite nailed down yet. Given enough time, there isn't any reason that Lorenzo and Melandri won't be able to match or exceed the performance of Dovi and Davies.

But right now, there are no two riders anywhere on the planet who speak better Ducati.