Andrea Dovizioso comes to Silverstone as last year’s race winner and has already started strong in 2018, finishing top of the combined times after practice.
On Friday afternoon, he spoke about the feeling he had on the bike and about the new track surface, which doesn’t seem to have gone down well with any of the riders.
“The feeling I think is bad for everybody, also when you are fast, because when you have to fight through the bumps it is very bad.” said Dovizioso.
“Especially when you are at maybe the best track in our championship this is very bad. You have to fight in every exit because all the power we have in these bikes, the reaction to the bump is very bad.
“With the wind here, everything becomes worse. It’s very difficult, but overall the speed is good. I’m happy because the speed is good, especially in the afternoon when we have the used tyre, our pace is fast. That is the most important thing from today, more than the lap time at the end with the new tyres. We are minimum 4th.”
Some riders have described the bumps on the resurfaced circuit as dangerous, and Dovizioso was asked if he also would consider them dangerous.
“The grip is good, even last year the grip wasn’t bad … to speak about ‘dangerous’ would be too much, dangerous things I think is different. But it is very bad, it’s so easy to make a mistake and so easy to crash, you have to use a lot of energy so in 20 laps, the energy is difficult to manage.” explained Dovizioso.
The Italian rider is looking like he could repeat the win he took last year, but the forecast for Sunday is rain all day so it’s extremely likely we will see a wet race. Due to the lack of wet running this year, it’s hard to know who could have an advantage. The forecast for Saturday is currently dry, so it might not be until Sunday morning warm up that we see a real representation of wet weather pace.
