The two Ducati Team riders Andrea Iannone and Andrea Dovizioso ended the first day of free practice action for Saturday’s Assen TT round of the 2015 world championship in fourth and seventh place respectively.
In mild weather and on a dry track, the two Italians could only manage ninth (Dovizioso) and thirteenth (Iannone) in the morning’s FP1 run, but they both made a major improvement in the afternoon’s second session. Towards the end of the 45 minutes of FP2, both Andreas fitted soft rear tyres to move up the timesheets, and they ended up just a few tenths away from the provisional leader Dani Pedrosa.
Andrea Iannone (Ducati Team #29) – 1’33.699 (4th)
“We are working to try and understand where we can improve our performance. Assen is a circuit where the GP15 goes quite well, but we are still suffering in some parts of the track and so are aiming to improve the overall performance of the bike in every session. In any case, I am quite satisfied with the improvements made between the morning and the afternoon: I like the modifications we made to the bike and we were able to improve, so this is an important indication for the work we will continue to do tomorrow.”
Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Team #04) – 1’33.844 (7th)
“My feeling with the bike is quite good, but unfortunately this morning we lost a bit of time due to some small problems that prevented us from doing a lot of laps. This is a circuit where you struggle to get dialled in immediately, but despite this things are not going too badly. I still don’t have the feeling I’m looking for at the front and I am unable to be really effective in the middle of the corner, so we have to focus on these aspects if we want to improve. We don’t quite have the pace of the top three or four riders but tomorrow for sure we can make some further steps forward.”
