Dovizioso and Pedrosa end Qatar Test with different outcomes

The Repsol Honda team riders had varying experiences at the Losail circuit.

Repsol Honda rider Andrea Dovizioso finished today’s (Friday) MotoGP test in Qatar in a promising third place to complete a satisfying winter’s work for the Italian and his crew. This evening’s second testing session under floodlights ran from 6pm to midnight at the Losail International Circuit near Doha and was the final time the MotoGP riders will be out on track before the opening race of the season here in three weeks’ time.

Dovizioso was true to his word from yesterday and continued the impressive progress he and his crew have been making since the new-for-2010 Honda RC212V was unveiled in November last year. Dovizioso improved his lap times by close to one second tonight, bringing his best down to 1’55.880, which was good enough for third place on the timesheets and just 0.528s behind the top time. The Italian was pleased with the progress he made with fine tuning the bike set-up and weight distribution, and feels in good shape for April’s race.

On the other side of the garage things were a little less fruitful for Dovizioso’s team-mate, Dani Pedrosa, who, after making a positive start to the evening’s testing, wasn’t able take the subsequent strides forward he’d hoped for. Working with his crew to find a combination of chassis and suspension settings that would allow him to push to the maximum, the three time World Champion couldn’t iron out the handling niggles which held him back yesterday. After just 12 laps he was able to improve his pace to 1’56.935s early in today’s session - a lap time which remained his best when the chequered flag came out tonight. Pedrosa will be targeting a breakthrough early on when the MotoGP teams return to Losail for the first race of the 2010 season.

Andrea Dovizoso

“I’m really satisfied with these two days of testing because we took another significant step forward. I’m pleased to have the third fastest time today because we improved both consistency and pace, which is a result of the hard work done by Honda and by my team. Today we focused on fine tuning the bike set-up and also the weight distribution. At the end of the session we wanted to do a race simulation but the track was too slippery because of the high humidity. Still, we have reduced the gap to Stoner and we are closer to Valentino as well. Of course we have to keep on working hard, but I’m happy to face the first round of the season with the machine package we have achieved so far.”

Dani Pedrosa

“We started to make improvements early in tonight’s session, but after that we couldn’t make any more progress really and so of course I’m not satisfied with the results of this test. It’s obvious that we’re not where we want to be as we approach the first race, so we’ll just have do our best when we come back here and try to make the improvements quickly in the practice sessions. That’s it really. I’m still struggling with the bike moving quite a lot at the front and that’s caused issues at the rear. Because of this I’m also going too slowly through the corners. We have to stay positive and be glad that I’m going into this season fully fit, and we’ll keep working to improve things.”

Press release courtesy of Honda Racing