Andrea Dovizioso returned to the top of the points standings in the MotoGP World Championship with a fifth-place finish in the GP of The Americas, which was held today at Austin in Texas.
The Ducati Team’s Italian rider, who started from row 3, scrapped with Zarco and Crutchlow for much of the 20-lap race, and after the latter crashed out, he attacked the Frenchman on lap 17 to take the chequered flag in fifth.
In the overall standings, Dovizioso now has 46 points, one ahead of Marc Marquez, who won today’s race in Texas.
It was a complicated race for Jorge Lorenzo, who started from row 2 after qualifying sixth on Saturday. After a difficult start, the Spanish rider moved up to eighth place by the mid-point but lost ground over the next few laps and finished the third round of the season in eleventh.
The next race on the MotoGP calendar will be the Spanish Grand Prix from 4-6 May at Jerez de la Frontera.
Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Team #04) – 5th
“Even though I struggled a lot today, I’m pleased to return to Europe leading the championship! This year I was hoping we were going to be a bit more competitive both in Argentina and here in Texas, but we struggled like in 2017. If however we look at the points standings twelve months ago, I came to Jerez a long way behind the leaders and now we are leading the championship. It’s true that the classification is very tight, but we’ve made a big step forward and even though the weekend began in a really difficult way for us, in the end we made the right choices of set-up, fairing and also tyres and we took home a good result, useful for the championship.”
Jorge Lorenzo (Ducati Team #99) – 11th
“For me it was a race to forget, and I’m very disappointed and sad. I was never able to lap with a competitive pace, I suffered a lot, as I feared, with used tyres and for this reason I had to slow my pace. Our bike requires a lot of physical effort on this type of circuit and opting for the hardest rear tyre didn’t help things at all. It’s a difficult moment and we have to analyze everything that has happened since the start of the championship, but I hope that starting from Jerez we will be able to reverse this negative trend.”
