The riders of Ducati Lenovo Team secure the direct seed to #CatalanGP Q2. Bagnaia is fourth quickest in Practice, Bastianini is eighth
Francesco Bagnaia and Enea Bastianini have both clinched the direct access to Q2 for the Catalunya Grand Prix, the sixth event of the 2024 MotoGP season, which got underway today at “Circuit de Barcelona – Catalunya” in Montmeló. Bagnaia finished the Practice session in fourth place with a personal best lap-time of 1:38.695, while Bastianini logged a 1:39.017 that gave him the eighth position.
After the seventh place taken in the free practice session, the reigning world champion stayed close to the top ten for the most part of the afternoon Practice before making his way back to the top five with ten minutes left. In his final quick-lap attempt, Pecco was the fastest rider in the first three sectors before crossing the line with a 0.133secs gao from the top of the timesheets.
Bastianini managed to bounce back in the latter stages of the afternoon session after a having a challenging time in Free Practice 1 – which ended with a 19th position – and for the majority of the Practice session. A set-up change, combined with the softer tyre option, allowed him to make the difference in the end, with Enea now aiming at finding, with the help of his crew, the right feeling also with the medium-tyre compound.
The standard bearers of the Ducati Lenovo Team will be back in action tomorrow morning for the second Free Practice session from 10:10 local time (GMT +2), which will be followed by Qualifying 2 (11:15) and by the sixth sprint race of the season, which is scheduled to get underway at 15:00 over a 12-lap distance.
Francesco Bagnaia (#1 Ducati Lenovo Team) – 4th
“I’m happy as we did a good job and we managed to improve the feeling with used tyres. Surely the bikes ahead of us have a little bit of a bigger margin, but we have time and data to improve our situation. This year’s bike works better under braking although we lost something with regards to grip; this is especially true at this track, which is the worst on the calendar in this department. Still, we’ll find a solution for tomorrow. I’m happy with my time attack as I didn’t put together the best lap but the lap-time in the end turned out to be a very good one. We’re fast and we’ll keep working in order to be competitive in the sprint race.”
Enea Bastianini (#23 Ducati Lenovo Team) – 8th
“We struggled a lot, especially this morning as I wasn’t feeling good in terms of grip. We started the afternoon session with the same set-up but I kept struggling in full lean and I couldn’t find the right angle; towards the end of the session, a set-up change and also a tweak in my riding style did help. We did better with the soft tyre; now we need to understand how to find the same type of feeling with the medium compound. The important thing was to get into Q2 and we did it, now we have time to keep working on the set-up and to improve, because it’s clear that we need another step forward if we want to do well tomorrow.”
