Andrea Iannone was in superb form on day 2 of free practice at the Losail circuit, the Italian rider setting the quickest time in both of today’s sessions (FP2 and FP3) and proving to have an excellent pace. His team-mate Andrea Dovizioso was not far behind either: after finishing fifth in FP2, he then moved up to fourth in FP3, three-tenths of a second away from Iannone.
As a result, both Ducati Team men go through directly into Q2, which will determine the first four rows for Sunday’s race, and which will start at 9pm local time (19.00 CET) tomorrow.
Andrea Iannone (Ducati Team #29) – 1’54.639 (1st)
“We finished the three free practice sessions with the best time and so for us today was a very positive day. We are working really well and our bike is going very strongly, so now we have to continue along this path and make further improvements. In FP2 we went very well with the hard tyre, then in FP3 we also tried the soft option, but it is still difficult to choose which one we will use for the race. For the moment I am calm and relaxed about the situation because also in the tests I always used the hard tyre and yesterday with the same choice of tyre we didn’t go bad at all. Tomorrow we will use the FP4 session to make the final decision.”
Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Team # 04) – 1’54.945 (4th)
“I am very pleased with all the work we’ve done and with the progress we have made in our performance: we made small steps but all of them have been in the right direction. We arrived at the third free practice session with a fast pace and above all with a good feeling with the Desmosedici GP, and this has always been my priority. We have always set some good lap times and in my final run I could have improved even more if I hadn’t made a little mistake in Turn 15. I am in any case satisfied because we are up there with the quickest riders and we still have a margin to improve, and with this pace now we can focus on the fine-tuning for the race.”
