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 (Ducati Team) 11th (2:03.445)
“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 (Ducati Team) 13th (2:03.677)
“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.”
