» BACK TO CRASH.NET

Lanzi saves the day for Ducati.

Advertisement

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.

Race two the team decided to make a change but it was in the wrong direction and things went from bad to worse. “In the second race we thought we couldn't do any worse and tried something different, we put the hardest tyre in the front which we used last year and we made a change to the rear suspension. The biggest problem we had was at the rear however because we had no feeling at all. It's a long year ahead, it wasn't a good start but that's racing! For sure I'll feel much more confident at Phillip Island, where the track is normally pretty constant and I'm looking forward to that," he concluded.

The Ducati team will now re-group and prepare for their assault on the undulating Phillip Island race track next weekend.