Dani Pedrosa was back out on track today for the Phillip Island MotoGP practice session. Pedrosa completed 7 laps in the tough weather conditions and finished in 16th position.

Pedrosa is aiming to take part in the practice session tomorrow, but will first see how his fitness holds up and how his body reacts to being back on the bike for the first time in 2 weeks. With tomorrow’s weather forecast predicting more rain and wind, there is a good chance that Pedrosa may find it too risky to go back out and chance further injury.

Andrea Dovizioso finished the session in 6th position.

Both Repsol Honda riders give their reactions to the Phillip Island MotoGP practice below:

Dani Pedrosa: 1’51.210 sec, 7 laps, 31 km.
“The plan today was simply to check my condition on the bike – in these conditions I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks. What I can say is that I had some strength to move on the bike and put pressure on the handlebars which is good. However, I didn’t feel very comfortable with the leathers because they were tight and there was pressure – but even with that I could do some laps and tomorrow I will try again – we will go step-by-step. Now it’s quite painful but we will see how the pain goes through the night and tomorrow we will take another step. We knew it wouldn’t be easy but I just hope that the effort is worth it in the end.

To ride in wet conditions is more smooth than in the dry, but also more risky. The asphalt today was very very cold and here it’s a problem because on the right hand turns you don’t have any grip at all. The hardest point was braking, changing direction and in the right hand corners because I have to stretch my arms a lot – but I hope we can work a little bit on the leathers to make it more comfortable for tomorrow. Afterwards I went to the Clinica Mobile and they told me that now I need to relax the muscles. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow”.

Andrea Dovizioso: 1’42.271 sec, 26 laps, 116 km.
“It was an interesting session today and it was worth pushing hard because at this circuit we can have this type of conditions for the race, so we need to know what to expect. The problem was that the track conditions changed a lot during the session however. We used wet tyres for the whole time and at the beginning of the session when it was fully wet we were quite fast compared to the other riders.

On my second time out of the pits there was almost a dry line all the way round the circuit, but we didn’t try slick tyres because the temperature was really low and it would have been risky to ride on slicks before they got up to temperature. So we stayed on wet tyres even though they were very worn by the end of the session. It was very windy and at the end of the straight the bike wheelies a lot so it was an important test of the electronic controls. We still have work to do on the machine settings, but we understand the direction to work in tomorrow and I think we can move forward”.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback