It was a difficult Catalan Grand Prix for the two Ducati Team riders today at Montmeló. Andrea Dovizioso finished the race in seventh place, after suffering a lack of grip on the rear tyre from the early laps, while Andrea Iannone, who was running well in sixth place and who had caught Lorenzo, had to retire on lap 17 after a crash in which he also brought down the Spanish rider.
Afterwards the Race Direction decided to inflict a penalty on the rider from Abruzzo who will now start from the last row of the grid in the next round of the championship, the Assen TT race on June 26th.
Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Team #04) – 7th
“Obviously I’m not happy with today’s result. In the race I felt there was something wrong on the rear tyre and together with Michelin we are having a look to study exactly what happened. I could feel the lack of grip since the warm-up lap, and at a certain point the drop of the rear tyre became too much and made it impossible for me to continue in those conditions. In any case our bike here at Barcelona wasn’t as competitive as it has been at other tracks and so now it’s important to understand what didn’t work in order to improve the things we are still missing.”
Andrea Iannone (Ducati Team #29) – DNF
“I am very sorry for what happened with Lorenzo because I was doing a good race with the limited grip I had. I was riding well and pushing hard, without making any errors, and had even managed to catch Jorge. As for the incident, I can only say that I could do nothing to avoid it: I braked at the same point as all the previous laps but he was very slow at that moment and unfortunately I made contact with him and we both crashed. It might seem that I came in too fast and that I wanted to pass him but that’s not the way it went and we got the confirmation of this by analyzing the telemetry data.”
