Damian Cudlin is in the Pramac Ducati hotseat as he deputises for the injured Loris Capirossi this weekend.

He finished today’s qualifying session in 18th place, ahead of Shinichi Ito, and has set himself the goal of improving enough to be able to get close enough to some of the backrunners to have a few battles on track.

His team-mate for the weekend, Randy De Puniet, qualified in 13th place but struggled with finding a comfortable set-up for his Ducati.

Damian Cudlin
“I have to be happy with the progress we are making. It seems every time I sit on the bike we manage to lower our lap times. This was my target for the weekend. Now we are getting to the point where the improvement will be smaller and more difficult to find, but we are starting to look in some technical changes to help me. I still believe that most of the gap is still coming from me as I am still learning the bike and the track. For tomorrow my plan is just to continue to improve and get closer to the others. It would be nice to have some fights during tomorrow’s race, this is what I am aiming for.”

Randy De Puniet:
“I tried to improve at the beginning of the second practice with used tyres but nothing was working too well. So we decided to go back to this morning set up and we managed to improve straight away. The positive thing is that I can ride in 1’47” low all alone and this gives me good hops for the race. I will surely use soft tyres as with the hard one I don’t have the right feeling to push more. A pity as I can’t manage to improve those 3 or 4 tenth of a second that would put me in third row.”

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