The Ducati Xerox Team got their season off to a tough start at the Losail circuit in Qatar. Current World Champion
Troy Bayliss and his team-mate
Lorenzo Lanzi could only manage one podium between them in the two races.
The young Italian clinched third place in race one with a superb pass on Alstare Corona Extra's
Yukio Kagayama on the penultimate lap, and finished seventh in the second race, while Bayliss took a fifth and seventh.
"In race one I succeeded in scoring a great podium finish" commented Lanzi, "It was a good, hard-fought result because in the last few laps I had a great battle with Kagayama. For race two we changed the suspension a bit and my 999 worked a lot better. Unfortunately I got off to a bad start, which lost me a lot of time in the early laps. I am sure I could have finished fourth quite easily had the tyre not started to turn on the rim half-way through the race which created some ‘chattering' problems. Now that the Qatar race is over, we look forward immediately to Phillip Island, where we should go better."
Bayliss is also looking forward to getting back to his home country for the next round and admitted Qatar was a lot harder than he had expected. “We knew that this weekend was going to be difficult for us but it turned out to be tougher than expected" declared Troy.
"All weekend I'd been doing quite well on the race tyre so I was feeling quite confident, and was quite happy with the way race one went. I could have done a lot better but I would have had to put my life on the line so I settled for points,” he explained.
