English
Italiano
After finishing Monday behind only Nicolò Bulega, Andrea Iannone took second place in the day's standings again in Tuesday's test session at Phillip Island, which saw the afternoon affected by a downpour of rain. Not exactly the day the Abruzzo rider would have liked, but he is trying to look at the glass half full ahead of the start of the season. "I don't know why but this year two is a magic number, even if runner-up is the first of the losers," Andrea commented at the end of the day, "I don't know if that's good or not, in any case we are positive and we think we can improve."
Despite twice finishing runner-up in the timesheets, the Go Eleven rider was not completely satisfied with how these two days of testing went.
"I'm not satisfied, because yesterday we made a lot of mistakes, we had a lot of problems in the box and we basically lost the whole day. Today, however, we worked well and improved a little bit on the bike, so I am happy. Although we needed this afternoon to try the last ideas we had in mind and instead we lost this session as well because of 20 minutes of rain - he noted - We are not lucky with the weather, because in Portimao I didn't ride for two days, while on the last day in Jerez it was wet. This year it was not possible for me to try what I would have liked."
Regarding the problems Iannone had yesterday, he added, "Everything is fine now. Yesterday we had two new bikes and as everything was new we had some problems with the valves, the exhaust and those kinds of things. Stupid things, which, however, made us lose a lot of time to change everything."
The Ducati rider is worried about the time lost during these tests, but is still trying to look at the bright side. Namely, the fact that he hit the second benchmark without looking for the time.
"The truth is that I didn't even mount the qualifying tyre, either yesterday or today, and many people tried it. These are all things that, on the one hand, are good, but on the other hand they mean you have no experience, you haven't tested it, and you don't know what to expect. If you waste time, then you pay for a lot of things," he noted, "We didn't mount the tyre long ago to hide our form, but simply because we didn't have the time to do it. So I'm not completely happy, because we didn't get to try a lot of things that we had in mind to try and we don't know if they are going in the right direction or not. We have some ideas, but we cannot start on Friday with the ideas we have to improve some aspects, because that would be too risky. We have more or less a good base with some problems. That's why it would have been interesting to try some things. We didn't succeed, but it's still worse: I'd rather be Iannone than one of the last five in the standings. I have to look at the glass half full."
What is still missing for Andrea to feel perfectly comfortable riding the Panigale V4R?
"It's not that I don't feel comfortable, I feel we can be more competitive by sorting out some aspects. So far we've been able to work pretty well in the box, so we'll see," pointed out the Abruzzo rider, who doesn't want to get too open about whether he has a better chance than in 2024 to consistently fight for the top positions: "Right now, on average, it's going a little better, but I don't know. Always doing second place would be perfect."
Not even the idea that Jorge Martin managed to become MotoGP champion with a satellite team seems to give Iannone more confidence that he can repeat the feat in Superbike.
"In the end the sponsor changed, but it was still an official Ducati team. Martin always had official support and he deserved the championship because he was always fast and made fewer mistakes. But in my opinion we can't really make a comparison, because there the structure was equal, while we are a true private team," he underlined, "I 'm not making excuses, but there was half of Ducati working inside the Pramac team: the pits were united and it was a team supported by Ducati to all intents and purposes. Whereas we this year, now at least, we only have Simone Toso who is a Ducati electronics technician, to help our new electronics guy to gain experience."
The Maniac is keeping his expectations low and does not want to set too ambitious goals for this start of the championship.
"Our ambition is to fight for the title? I have never said that. A rider always wants to win otherwise he wouldn't even race, he would do something else in life, but you have to be realistic: in my opinion we will start from more or less the same level and it will be important how we react, how good we are at taking advantage of the sessions we have and how ready we will arrive at Race 1," he said. "Of course, if we look at the way we took advantage of these two days of testing, I will have done maybe 60 laps in two days and the others in one day. We used the time worse than the others and with these references we cannot aspire to win a World Championship. However, in life you should never take anything for granted. We are all starting from scratch, we have important goals and we will try to do our best to improve on last year."
The Go Eleven man then commented on the possibility that the tyres can handle the 20 laps of the two long races, "I think Pirelli has done a very good job and the tyres are stronger than last year. So, I think there is a possibility to run the whole race on the same tyres without any problems."
Finally, one last comment about Sanremo: "With the time difference, it was difficult to watch it, so I followed it very little. But my girlfriend (Elodie, ed.), of course, I always watched her."
