Valentino Rossi
took pole for the second race running at Donington Park on
Saturday afternoon, his fourth of the season and the 56th of
his career. Jorge Lorenzo qualified third and, with four
poles for him also this year, the Fiat Yamaha Team has now
taken the front grid slot in eight out of the ten races. It
is also the fifth consecutive race at which both riders have
been on the front row.
After Friday's downpours, yesterday was dry with sunny
intervals and the morning saw Lorenzo second and Rossi third
as they got their first chance to work on their dry settings
around the 4km track. In the afternoon’s hour-long
qualifying session Lorenzo held pole position for most of
the session until briefly surrendering it to Dani Pedrosa
ten minutes from the end, whilst Rossi struggled slightly to
find the best set-up with the hard Bridgestone tyre.
22-year-old Lorenzo moved back to the top just a couple of
laps later but was then edged off by Rossi with three
minutes to go, as the Italian found his best form at the
perfect time. The Spaniard was unable to match the pace of
his championship-leading team-mate with the soft tyre and
finished 0.286 seconds adrift, whilst a strong charge from
Dani Pedrosa edged the Spaniard into third but was not good
enough to knock Rossi off pole. Today’s race will start at
the later time of 1530 local time, which is 1630 CET.
Valentino Rossi
- Position: 1st Time: 1'28.116 Laps: 32
“I am quite surprised to be on pole today because we had a
couple of problems this afternoon! This morning
unfortunately we didn’t try the hard Bridgestone tyre but we
weren’t worried because everyone else had good grip with it.
But this afternoon when we finally tried it we found the
grip to be not as we expected and our pace with it wasn’t so
good. We made some modifications and improved it a bit, then
we made a few more and used the soft tyre again and then we
were very quick. Like that I could ride the bike how I
wanted and it felt great, fast and flowing so this was a
good job from the team. We need to do some work to improve
our pace with the hard tyre, and then we just have to wait
and see what the weather does tomorrow. Whatever happens,
we’re starting from the front and this is the most important
thing.”
Jorge Lorenzo -
Position: 3rd Time: 1'28.402 Laps: 35
“With the harder tyre, we’re definitely ready and I feel
very good on the bike. With the softer tyre and on my last
run I wasn’t so fast, but we are not too concerned about
this. Anyway I feel confident on my M1 and I am enjoying
riding here. Tomorrow we don’t know about the weather but I
was fast also in the rain yesterday so I know that I can be
competitive even if the weather is bad. I am really hoping
for a good race here since it’s the last time we will come.”
Davide Brivio -
Team Manager
“At the end everything worked out okay and we got a nice
pole position, the second in a row. We still have some work
to do to improve the race setting to finalise the package in
case we have dry conditions tomorrow, but we have the
warm-up in to try to fine-tune everything. It looks like
it’s more likely that it’s going to rain however, in which
case we will use what we learned yesterday.”
Daniele Romagnoli - Team Manager
“We are on target, because starting from the front row will
be very important for this race. Today we concentrated
mostly on our race setting and Jorge’s pace is very fast and
consistent. Maybe we should have considered something a bit
different for qualifying with the softer tyre, but the most
important thing is that we’re in good shape for the race. We
hope that we can have the same weather as today tomorrow,
but if the rain does come then we have yesterday’s good
session to help us.”
