Ducati Team’s Andrea Dovizioso powered to a splendid pole position this afternoon in qualifying for the Japanese Grand Prix, which will be held tomorrow at the Twin Ring Motegi circuit. The Italian, who had also been quickest in the morning’s FP3 run, then went out in Q2, in which he set a time of 1’44.590 in his second exit. Today’s pole is the second of the season for Dovizioso, his seventh in MotoGP and also the seventh pole of the 2018 season for Ducati.
The Japanese GP will get underway tomorrow afternoon at 14.00 local time (07.00 CET) and will be held over a distance of 24 laps.
Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Team #04) – 1st (1’44.590)
“My qualifying session went very well and I’m happy with the feeling I had during my pole run. We’ve got a good pace, but so has Marquez and not only him. I think we still have to improve something if we want to fight for the win tomorrow, so we’ll analyse the data to see what the tyre wear is like, because probably we’ll be able to adopt a different strategy than in the last two races, where we had to save the tyre for the final few laps. We went strongly both with the soft and the medium, and we haven’t decided yet which one to use. I want to thank my team for their great job, because with a few small modifications we were able to make a big improvement and in qualifying I did a really great lap. This morning my aim was to set a time of 1’44.6 and I ended up lapping in 1’44.5!”
