Did you know…?
– Andrea Dovizioso has had five victories this season. He follows Stoner as being the rider with the highest number of wins in one year with the Ducati.
– Dovizioso is 11 points behind Marc Marquez in the championship standings. For Andrea to become the provisional leader in Australia, he would have to win and Marc would need to finish 4th or lower.
– Out of 15 races to date this season, Dovizioso has won 5 times, the same number as Marquez. The other 5 victories have been shared between Viñales, with 3 wins, Pedrosa and Rossi with a win each.
– Ducati had four consecutive victories at Phillip Island between 2007 and 2010, which is the most number of times that the Italian motorcycle has managed to win continuously at the same track.
– Jorge Lorenzo has led 41 laps this season and is the rider who has led the most laps in a race in the last five GPs.
– Lorenzo has three wins at Phillip Island, two in 250cc (2006 and 2007), and one in MotoGP (2013); all of them starting from the pole position.
– Dovizioso was victorious at the Australian GP in 2004. His best result in MotoGP is third place in 2011 behind Stoner and Marco Simoncelli. Simoncelli’s podium there was his only podium in MotoGP.
– Danilo Petrucci’s podium at the GP of Japan meant he becomes the rider with the highest number of podiums in a season with a satellite Ducati.
– Phillip Island came to the championship in 1989, a race that local rider Wayne Gardner won. A year later he repeated the victory in front of his fans. From 1991 until 1996, the Australian GP took place at Eastern Creek, and since 1997 it has been held at Phillip Island.
– The Australian track has the fastest entrance to the front straight on the entire calendar, which together with the distance of the finish line, has caused more than one race to be determined by slipstreaming. Of all the victories achieved in this way, the most outstanding is that of Olivier Jacque drafting Shinya Nakano, which gave him not only the race win but also the 250cc Championship in 2000.
– The “flag-to-flag” rule, where riders enter the pits to change motorcycles, was implemented for the first time at the 2006 Australian Grand Prix. That race was won by Melandri.
– The layout of Phillip Island has a total of 12 corners with the curious characteristic that only six of them need slowing down for. It’s the circuit in which the brakes are used the least throughout the Championship, and riders are on the brakes for only 20 seconds per lap.
– The braking at the end of the finish line is the most critical of all, where speeds from 341 km/h are decelerated to 189 km/h in just 3.3 seconds over a distance of 231 meters.
