The two Ducati Team riders will start from the second row of the grid for the Grand Prix of Japan, round 15 of the MotoGP World Championship, which will be held on Sunday at the Twin Ring Motegi circuit. Andrea Dovizioso clocked the fourth-quickest time of 1’44.322 in qualifying, while his team-mate Andrea Iannone ended the final 15-minute session in fifth place with a time of 1’44.436.
Both Ducati riders set excellent times in this morning’s FP3, in which they also turned in a good race pace, and the session ended with Iannone second and Dovizioso third.
In the early afternoon’s FP4 run, the Ducati Team’s Desmosedici GP15 bikes appeared on track with two extra new “winglets” fitted to the front fairing, the aim of which is to reduce the bike’s tendency to wheelie. The session finished with Iannone fifth and Dovizioso seventh.
Dovizioso and Iannone immediately put on the extra-soft rear tyre In the decisive qualifying session and went on to set their quickest times on their second run. They finished the day in fourth and fifth with a respective gap of 0.532 and 0.646 seconds from poleman Jorge Lorenzo.
Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Team #04) – 1’44.322 (4th)
“I’m a bit disappointed about my fourth place in qualifying, but I think that at the most we could have got a third place and nothing more. So for me that’s OK, because I also feel we’ve worked well throughout the weekend and we have a good race pace. We’re still missing a bit of pace to stay with Lorenzo, who is quite far away, but we are back to being quick and amongst the frontrunners once again. Now we’ll only get a better idea of how competitive we are in tomorrow’s race.”
Andrea Iannone (Ducati Team #29) – 1’44.436 (5th)
“I’m really sorry about the way qualifying went because for sure we could have done better, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to be particularly efficient today in my two runs. For the rest I am quite happy with the way the weekend has gone: we have worked well and we managed to improve in each session and this is positive in view of tomorrow. My race pace is not bad at all and I hope that we can still do a bit of fine-tuning in the warm-up to make my GP15 better for the race. “
