Danilo Petrucci (Mission Winnow Ducati) completed Day 1 at the VisitQatar Grand Prix in P4, but says his time attack wasn’t perfect, while he “can’t be 100% happy” with his race pace.
“So so. For sure my time attack was not perfect, I did a mistake on my first attempt, I was too fast in the first corner and I was not able to finish the corner,” reflected the Italian, who embarks on his first competitive weekend as a factory MotoGP™ rider in Qatar.
He continued: “Then I had to push to continue the lap to not cool down the tyre, so I haven’t had the best performance from the tyre in the first lap. But anyway I’m happy because the target was to be safe, I cannot be 100% happy with the feeling of the bike in race pace. For sure we are at 90%, but we have to work on the last 10% and really look tomorrow to get the first two rows to get the podium on Sunday.”
Despite his lap not being perfect, a top four position stands Petrucci in good stead heading into the final Free Practice session ahead of qualifying, with the earlier conditions set to make it difficult for the riders to improve on their FP2 times. This is something ‘Petrux’ was pleased about.
“For this reason today it was important to be in the top ten, tomorrow in FP3 we don’t know if the wind will be important. Especially with us, a lot of power, when the wind changes direction it’s a problem because the bikes are so powerful and immediately it does a wheelie and you have to pay attention to these things. And also on the setup of the bike. So it was important to set a good lap time, for sure the track was very very good today, no wind, the traction was good. We’ll see tomorrow.”
Catch Petrucci in action during FP3 at 15:15 local time (GMT+3), with the first qualifying battle of the year kicking off with Q1 at 20:00 local time.