The second day of the Qatar Grand Prix finished again with top places for the Repsol riders. The improvement of Dovizioso was added to Stoner and Pedrosa’s great performance yesterday. The three riders spearheaded the free practices final classification, with Casey Stoner in first position, Dani Pedrosa second and Andrea Dovizioso third.
In this unusual first Grand Prix of the season (with night practices during three days instead of the usual two days) the Repsol Honda Team riders showed an excellent level of performance. After the first session held yesterday, the premier class participants had today two 45-minutes sessions.
In his first run, the Australian rider of the Repsol Honda Team just needed a couple of laps to ride under 1 minute and 56 seconds. The bar set by Stoner was unreachable for the rest of his rivals and only Dani Pedrosa was able to get close. The Spaniard was the only one to ride in 1 minute and 55 seconds in the first session, apart from Stoner, and he repeated that time in the second free practice held today.
Pedrosa became the reference in the second session, as he set a time of 1 minute 55 seconds and 193 thousandths that placed him in the lead of the overall classification. However, two minutes before the end Stoner reduced his time by 158 thousandths, finishing at the top of the times classification.
The starting order will be set tomorrow with the definitive qualifying session. This will be the first time in the season the MotoGP riders will push their bikes to the max to secure a good place on the starting grid, which is extremely important in this circuit.
Dani Pedrosa, 1’55.193 seg, 37 vueltas, 199 km. >> Audio
“We did a good job today, especially in the third session. We concentrated on doing a good lap at the beginning and then we were focused on the pace. I’m happy about how is everything going – even if there are still some places where we know we can do better and improve some tenths, so let’s keep concentrated to do that tomorrow. For the qualifying session our target is to be on the front row; here my best position on the grid has been a sixth place and I would really like to be on front row tomorrow. This afternoon we tried both tyres, hard and medium, and both worked well; my feeling is that the hard compound is better for the race distance even if the race is one hour later than practice today, and the softer compound is the best option for the qualifying session”.
Andrea Dovizioso, 1’55.740 seg, 37 vueltas, 199 km. >> Audio
“I’m happy with the work done during today’s two practices and of course of the third position though it’s not enough because Casey and Dani are faster so we will keep working hard to gain some tenths. Today the team did a great job to solve the vibration in the middle of the corner that we had yesterday. First we changed the front rim without any change in the set up and the vibration decreased. Then we also modified the set up of the fork, a middle step between 2010 and 2011. Doing this I had a better feeling but we also lost the good points of the 2011 fork, such as the stability in braking and corner entry. Tomorrow we will continue working on the fork set up and the target is to do a good qualifying session for a good position on the grid. The race will be a bit different, long and hard for the body. I’m confident that we can improve”.
Casey Stoner, 1’55.035 seg, 33 vueltas, 178 km. >> Audio
“We spent most of the second session tonight on used tyres to get a better understanding of where we are with them, we did a quick lap on race distance with these tyres so we’re really happy with this – in addition we completed around thirty laps on the front tyre which also worked well. We played around with the tyre pressure a little, but in general they seem to be very consistent from start to end. Today we had a few more things to try, in the first session today we didn’t make many improvements from yesterday and then in the second session we made a big step forward. I’m really happy at the pace we’re running, the way I’m riding and how we have the bike set-up”.
