Danilo Petrucci is eyeing up the Spanish GP as a prime opportunity to perfect his set-up on his RC-16. The Tech 3 rider has had a difficult start to life at the French team, managing to finish among the points just once in three rounds, but he sees Jerez as a chance to change his fortunes.
Returning to a track at which he is quite familiar, the Italian feels that the Circuito de Jerez - Angel Nieto will help kickstart his 2021 season.
“I’m very happy to ride my bike again at a different track. Jerez is a quite difficult, but very interesting circuit," he said. "Normally, we always test there a lot and due to the nature of the track with many slow and many fast corners and also hard braking areas, it’s the ideal place to work on the bike.
“Therefore, I hope we can continue to improve our setup there in order to be faster. I’m really looking forward to riding in Jerez and I will do everything to improve our position and the bike in general."
It is a sentiment shared too by Tech 3 boss Herve Poncharal, who feels that they will need to draw on recent experiences to find the necessary improvements.
“We had two races back-to-back in Jerez last year and we have some interesting data from 2020. Hopefully, both Danilo and Iker Lecuona will feel more at ease on the bike,” said Poncharal.
"We've got to work with the package we have, with the tyre allocation we have and clearly, we could see especially with Brad Binder (Red Bull KTM Factory Racing) in the last race, that our package with the current tyre allocation can work well.”
"I also know that we have a test on Monday following the GP, which will be very important as we could only test in Qatar prior to the season. I know that KTM, Michelin and Tech3 have quite a few things to try.
"Finally, we hope it will be the real start of the MotoGP™ season for the Tech3 KTM Factory Racing team.”