Sepang : Pramac d'Antin - Day 1The Pramac d'Antin MotoGP team begins the final push of the 2006 MotoGP World Championship season with fierce determination during the first two practice sessions at the Sepang circuit.
The ever-optimistic Alex Hofmann worked very hard
in conjunction with his crew to find the best setting for his Ducati Desmosedici GP06 “Sat” with Dunlop tyres, posting the 17th fastest time of the day with a 2'04.706.
José Luis Cardoso wants to end the season with good results, ending the second session in 19th place with a time of 2'05.958, and having focused on finding the optimum bike set-up which will allow him to race to his full potential in Sunday's Grand Prix.
Tomorrow, there is a third free practice session which precedes the official qualifying session at 14:00, and every minute will count as both riders continue to strive for the best results possible.
Alex Hofmann (17° - 2'04.706): "I am very happy to be back home with my team after a nice experience with the Ducati factory team in Brno. I wanted to start working again with my technicians, and today we tested several tires looking for consistency during the race. We used almost every possibility at our disposal to discover more grip from the rear. The whole team worked hard, but we have to take more steps forward to find the consistent traction we will need during the race - which will be quite difficult because of the warmth and humidity. Tomorrow, we are testing other tires and pushing to lower our times for a good performance on raceday."
José Luis Cardoso (19° - 2'05.
958): "We improved a lot with respect to this morning's session, thanks to the job of our technicians on the bike's set-up. I'm having some problems with the grip of the rear that's forcing me to ride more conservatively. While the bike is sliding I'm losing time. The soft tyre seems to be the better choice, while the hard one has less grip. Tomorrow we will work very carefully on tire selection, and I hope to find the best one for the race. We will also do a long practice run to verify our final choice."
Emanuele Martinelli – Track Engineer of Alex Hofmann: "During the today's free practices we tried to find the best race tires for Alex. We tried to improve the rear grip using almost all of the suspension combinations available to us, but we were unable solve the problem. The aim for tomorrow is to continue working on the race set-up."
Pramac d'Antin
