MotoGP, Petrucci: The Ducati seems like a boat here

For team Pramac, the first day of the Argentine weekend was anything but simple. On the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit, all the Desmosedici machines struggled except for the 2017 team Avintia bike entrusted to Tito Rabat.

The white and red Pramac units did better than the factory bikes ridden by Dovizioso and Lorenzo, but the positions that count seem a long way off. In the first session, Danilo had a crash – fortunately harmless – which left his body unscathed, but not his morale. If he took the tenth place time in FP1, in the second session, the Italian finished thirteenth: “I crashed because I was pretty much at the limit – Petrux revealed – Today was a decidedly difficult day. Despite the better conditions in the afternoon, for us the track continued to seem as dirty as it was in the morning session. Riding the Ducati here is a truly complicated ordeal.”

During the ride, Petrucci did not receive the necessary confidence from the Desmosedici: “We are struggling a lot – he explained – And every lap is different from the others for us. The bike never does the same things. It makes it hard when we need to give our techs the necessary information and especially when we are in the saddle. We are not competitive here like in Qatar. The tyres don’t work, the grip is poor and it feels like we are floating. On this track the Ducati sways a lot; it seems like a boat. It moves around and it’s hard to take to the limit. The GP17 works better than our 2018 here.”

Miller isn’t exactly jumping up and down for joy either: “It was a difficult day for us – Jack commented, exactly like his teammate – The track conditions were complicated but, luckily, I got into the top ten. I kept the same tires as the morning and the front had more than race distance on it; the rear was about done. However, the soft did not work at all for us and on the second lap, after I put it on, I almost went down.”

"Jackass" limited the damage: “I managed to put a lap together – the Australian explained – The track was really dirty and in the afternoon the wind picked up. We managed to hang onto a spot in Q2 trying a risky tyre solution, but that could turn out to be crucial looking at the forecast for tomorrow. The decision could have come back to bite us in the ass, but we were lucky.”