Mattia Casadei is the 2023 MotoE World Champion. The HP Pons Los40 team rider wins the title in his fifth participation in the MotoGP electric class, the first with world championship status and with the new Ducati V21L.
Mattia Casadei is the 2023 MotoE World Champion. The twenty-four-year-old rider of the HP Pons Los40 team becomes the new champion of MotoE, after Matteo Ferrari (2019), Jordi Torres (2020 and 2021) and Dominique Aegerter (2022).
Casadei won the MotoE title in his home GP, in Misano, thanks to first position in race 1, thus earning the required points to become World Champion with one race to go.
After a start to the season with a few too many mistakes and two crashes, at Le Mans and Mugello, Casadei changed pace and after the summer break he won five races out of seven, thus recovering a gap of 56 points in the standings from Jordi Torres.
The Misano GP not only awarded the title of best rider of 2023, but also that of the best team, won by HP Pons Los40, thanks to Casadei's 260 points and Nicholas Spinelli's 150.
For the HP Pons Los40 team, this is the third title of the MotoE in five editions of the MotoGP electric class; two championships were won with Torres before Casadei's title. Unfortunately, Sito Pons' team will not be able to extend this sequence of successes as the Spanish team will withdraw from the world championship at the end of 2023.
Casadei's career in MotoE begins in 2019, in the debut season of the MotoGP electric class. Casadei, eighteen years old at the time and the youngest rider on the grid, is the only rider of the Sic58 Squadra Corse team. At the time, the MotoE is equipped with the Ego Corsa by Energica Motor Company and Casadei finishes tenth in the general classification, behind Niccolò Canepa and ahead of Sete Gibernau. 2019 iss also the year of the first podium in MotoE for Casadei, in the home GP in Misano.
The following year the MotoGP calendar, of which the MotoE it's part, it's being turned upside down due to Covid. The season finale takes place in October, at Le Mans, and Casadei enters the French GP fourth in the standings and mathematically fighting for victory, with a 15 point gap. Perhaps due to too much pressure, everything went wrong that weekend for Casadei, who crashed in practically all the sessions. In the end he finished fifth in the general classification with two podiums, in Jerez and Misano and probably an important lesson on how to manage the pressure of a world championship.
In 2021 Casadei is still in Paolo Simoncelli's team and the season goes more or less like the previous year, with three podiums, one at Le Mans and two at Misano, and an overall sixth place at the end of the season.
Here the paths of Mattia Casadei and the Sic58 Squadra Corse separate, only in MotoE however, because in life Casadei remains a rider very close to Simoncelli's team. For Marco Grana, sporting director of Sic58 Squadra Corse "with whichever team Casadei races, he will always be 70% our rider".
In 2022 Casadei joins the Pons Racing 40 team, teaming up with Jordi Torres, champion of the MotoE with Sito Pons' team in the previous two seasons (2020 and 2021).
As they say, you never stop learning in life, and being on the reigning champion team is a good place to do it. Torres is also a very generous guy and helps Casadei to grow further. The Spanish rider exits the fight for the title very early, due to a crash at the start of the French GP in Le Mans, in which Torres was hit by another rider and suffered a broken tibia and fibula. Torres thus becomes a sort of coach for Casadei. Casadei's potential is there; his growth is already at a good level, and only the final steps are missing. The first of these arrives immediately at the second race of the season, at Le Mans. Casadei starts from Q1 in qualifying, sets the best time, moves into Q2 and takes pole position for the French GP with a thousandth of a second ahead of Aegerter. For the next step, you don't need to wait long; within a few hours and the first Casadei's MotoE victory arrives at Le Mans, always ahead of Dominique Aegerter, who will be MotoE World Champion that year. In 2022, with two victories (Le Mans and Misano) and four more podiums, the Italian rider comes close to reaching the final podium of the MotoE, finishing fourth by a few points.
2023 is the year the MotoE acquires World Championship status and switches from the Energica motorcycles to the new Ducati V21Ls.
It's important to adapt quickly to the new bike because the days of tests are few and with two races in each round it'essential to score points straight away.
Casadei's confidence with the new electric Ducati is not easy at the beginning. In his debut race, at Le Mans, Casadei starts seventh on the grid. In race 1 he crashes while race 2 goes better; the Pons team rider is fourth but Casadei is already 33 points behind the top in the standings. Second round of the season and crash for Casadei who crashes in race 2 at Mugello. After eight races, at Le Mans, Mugello, Sachsenring and Assen, the summer break arrives; Casadei is fifth in the standings at that time, 55 points behind championship leader Jordi Torres. The resume of the championship, at Silverstone, is the moment of the greatest gap for Casadei from the top of the standings: 56 points separate the Italian rider from the Spaniard after race 1. Precisely at that moment the comeback begins which will lead Casadei to become the world champion of MotoE 2023.
In the BritishGP, the HP Pons Los40 team rider wins race 2, the first success of 2023, followed by four more: two in Austria, one in Barcelona and the last in Misano. The weekend in Barcelona sees Casadei overtake Torres in the general classification. The Italian rider arrives at his home GP in Misano with a 21 point advantage over the Spaniard, and he immediately closes the dispute for the championship by winning race 1.
At 24 years old, Mattia Casadei thus becomes the fourth rider to win the MotoE, after Matteo Ferrari, Jordi Torres and Dominique Aegerter, and the first to do so with Ducati's V21L electric prototype.
Now for Casadei the dream is to get to Moto2; Unfortunately he won't be able to do it with the team with which he won the MotoE World Championship. Sito Pons' team, after 42 years of presence, withdraws from the world championship. If Moto2 remains a dream, Casadei has declared that he will stay in MotoE to defend the world champion title.
MotoE World Championship
The standings of the 2023 championship
Photos: MotoGP
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