Francesco Bagnaia still needs to ‘confirm’ whether new exhaust ‘is good or not’
Francesco Bagnaia admits Ducati’s new fairing has a lot of potential after a busy day-two at the Sepang test.
The two-time MotoGP champion finished day-two fifth fastest as team-mate Enea Bastianini topped the leaderboard with a new unofficial lap record.
Like his team-mate Bagnaia tested some of Ducati’s new aero, fairing and exhaust, with the latter still needing more work.
- Marc Marquez Sprint simulation: “I went faster at the end…”
- Enea Bastianini: New aero ‘80% better’, unofficial lap record made with ‘new fairing’
Bagnaia was a fan of the new aero package from Ducati, which includes a small change to the side winglets.
But even more pleasing was the improvements made in terms of power delivery, with Bagnaia saying: “I think [the new aero] was good. I feel good more or less with everything.
"The thing we improved a lot today was the power delivery. It makes me very happy.
“The new fairing has a really good potential but we need to make changes on the set-up to improve the feeling there.
“Also, the exhaust is quite good but I need to do another back-to-back to confirm whether it is good or not. But it was a really positive day.”
Where the new aero is helping is clear, and that’s downforce as Bagnaia said he’s experiencing less wheelie on the straights.
“It is a completely different one to last year,” said Bagnaia. “It has more donwforce on the straight and you can feel less wheelie but when you enter on the brakes it is a bit stiffer.
“You have to work on your set-up to make it easier and feel the potential to have less wheelie.”
Although Bagnaia was very fast on day-two, the world champion was not focusing on time attacks performance, which will instead come on the final day.
Bagnaia is expecting to make two different time attack runs after being impressed, but not surprised at the time of Bastianini.
Bagnaia added: “Not really. Today we were focused on the same things. He tried the time attack in the last part of the day and he is very strong. 57.1 is quite a good lap time.
“I’m curious to see my two time attacks run tomorrow. If it doesn’t rain I think we will see some 56s.”
