Petrucci: It was like a two-stroke!

Danilo Petrucci is targeting a top-five finish in Sunday's Czech Republic MotoGP after overcoming a fortunately-timed engine failure in final practice.

The Pramac rider's GP18 twitched as he entered turn one, moments after the chequered flag in FP4. A tell-tale trail of smoke soon revealed the engine problem as the Italian took to the gravel trap.

"It was like with a two-stroke!" he joked. "I closed the throttle and the rear wheel locked! I was quick to pull the clutch and go straight into the gravel. Anyway, my motocross experience helped!

"I don’t know if it's a broken engine. But if it is, it's okay. Because we have to remove it tonight anyway because it was at the end of its kilometres."

The reason the failure was fortunately timed is that had the engine held on until the very end of FP4, it might well have let go at the start of qualifying.

"It was a shame, but I was lucky because if the engine went one lap more I would have broken it at the start of qualifying. And that would be a bigger problem. So we have been lucky in the end," he said.

Petrucci, second fastest in this morning's FP3, wasn't surprised to see fellow Ducati rider Andrea Dovizioso on pole position.

"Dovizioso only showed his real potential this afternoon. If you watch carefully in FP2, FP3 and even FP4, he rode always with very used tyres. And this I think made him so fast. Like me this morning, I used a very used tyre and then when I put the new one I was immediately faster than everyone."

One of the largest riders on the grid, the roasting Brno heat is putting Petrucci at a disadvantage in terms of tyre endurance and he will need to conserve rubber in the early to middle stages of the race.

"Tomorrow we'll continue to work on the set-up because the first ten laps of the race we think we cannot attack or push because we have to take care of the tyre, which for me is always a bit more difficult because of my weight.

"In this temperature a smaller rider with the g-force in the corner puts less stress on the tyre. So it's a little bit unfair, but we have to take the advantage of my weight on braking. So we'll see. The target is the top five but if it's possible to make the podium we will try!

Having given the new Ducati fairing its public debut on Friday, Petrucci switched back to the standard design for much of Saturday, only using the upgrade in qualifying. Why?

"Because we have only one [new fairing] and so I saved it for qualifying," he explained. "The difference is really small, but in MotoGP even one-thousandth is important."

Dovizioso and factory team-mate Jorge Lorenzo used the new fairing for the first time on Saturday.