The Ducati Team started its work today preparing the Desmosedici’s setup for the Sepang circuit which, due in part to recent heavy rains, was in far from optimal condition in terms of grip.
Both Nicky Hayden and Valentino Rossi struggled, finishing the first day of practice in eleventh and twelfth positions, respectively. Both riders will work tomorrow to improve the bike’s behavior in the fast corners, where today they weren’t able to be as competitive as they would like.
Nicky Hayden:
“Conditions are very different from what we just had at Phillip Island. It’s pretty warm and sticky, though it can definitely be even hotter here. This is a completely different bike than we had here at the test, so it takes a little extra time to get a rhythm, and we only used two different sets of tyres the whole day. We’ve fixed some of the steering issues, which is good, but at the same time we’ve lost rear grip, which we really miss here on both corner entry and corner exits. We’ll try to sort that out tomorrow. We made a pretty good step from this morning, but we definitely need to try to do another step about like that tomorrow morning and go from there.”
Valentino Rossi:
“The track conditions are very different, worse actually, than when we tested here during the winter, because the asphalt was very slippery today. It was really bad this morning, just a bit better in the afternoon. That makes it difficult to make a comparison between then and today, but we certainly weren’t as fast as we’d like to be. We changed something with the rear suspension at the end of the session that helped to improve the feeling with the bike, but we haven’t made enough progress in terms of lap times. Tomorrow we’ll see if we’re able to do better with a bit more grip. It wasn’t bad under braking today, but I’m not able to be fast in the corners, especially the fast ones. I really hope to be able to use the hard tyres because that would be the right choice for the race.”
Ducati Team press release
