“A photocopy” - Fabio di Giannantonio puzzled by Sachsenring MotoGP crash

Fabio di Giannantonio's 17-race grand prix finishing streak, stretching back to Catalunya last season, came to an end in Sunday's German MotoGP.

The VR46 Ducati rider, who finished third in the Sprint behind the Marquez brothers, crashed out of a close fifth in the early stages of the grand prix.

“We are still trying to understand exactly what happened because what we saw on the data is exactly a photocopy of the lap before,” di Giannantonio said.

“Exactly everything: the suspension, speed, angle, touch of throttle. So, it's a bit strange but it's also part of the game - sometimes you crash and you don't really know why. It's a mix of things.

“First mistake of the year, a pity but statistically it had to happen.

“But I think there are a lot of positives from this first half, we always showed amazing speed, even today I think we were quite fast and we must take these positives with us for the summer break.”

The race retirement came just hours after another heavy crash during morning warm-up.

“For sure my neck is a bit stiff, but I don't want to cry. It's part of the game,” he said.

“I was trying a better line, and actually all the warm-up it was working really good.

“On that lap I did even better, but with the setup that we have, we discovered one thing that we didn't know before and for that reason, I was too on the limit on the rear and I lost it.”

Aero change

The Italian had surprised observers by switching to Ducati's latest aerodynamic package for the first time during warm-up, before keeping it for the grand prix.

“I saw Marc and Alex using it and I wanted to try to understand and actually it was a little better here this morning, so for this we decided to continue with it,” he explained.

Asked if racing with relatively untested aero had been a risk, di Giannantonio replied:

“We had a really great bike from yesterday so we thought that maybe it's not a big gamble to try it in the warm-up. Then, if it was not the right thing to do, we could go back [to the older aero] and still have a potential podium bike, so we were not that worried.”

Despite the retirement, di Giannantonio heads into the MotoGP summer break fifth in the world championship, just 24 points behind leader Jorge Martin.