Andrea Dovizioso believes that Ducati have gone some way to curing their Achilles heel of 2014 if the Sepang test is any indication. The Desmosedicis would regularly qualify on the front row of the grid before fading in the race but after completing a long stint in the sweltering heat of Malaysia, Dovizioso is hopeful that those issues are a thing of the past.
“I am very happy with the pace I did today because we were interested in doing a long-run: we did 15 laps in these extremely hot conditions, and it was important to do some constant laps, which is normally a bit our limit. We lapped pretty well, and this shows that the guys back in the factory have been working well in recent months. I’m happy with this morning’s time (2:00.015) but not 100% because I wanted to see a time of 1’59 on the dash! I was counting on it, it was an aim of mine here but I just missed out. Hopefully it won’t rain tonight so we can find the track still fast tomorrow.”
Teammate Andrea Iannone confirmed Ducati’s improvement by climbing to fifth on a 2:00.391 and the 25 year old was also buoyed by the long-run performance of the GP14.3.
“I am quite happy with the way the test went today and in the end we managed to improve a lot our performance from yesterday. In addition, I managed to find more feeling with the bike in turn-in, and now under braking I feel a lot safer and I can push harder. Some of the components of the GP14.3 have for sure helped us in this and it’s a very important aspect in view of the race. Tomorrow is the third and final day of testing and we can do some more modifications, because I want to improve even more.”
