Andrea Dovizioso will have two years to turn around the Ducati D16, and try to do what only Casey Stoner could do, make the GP machine into podium scoring weapon, again.
Dovizioso has spent all his career on Japanese bikes, and when he gets on the Italian bike tomorrow morning at Valencia for the first test of the 2013 season, there will probably be immediate lap comparisons to Valentino Rossi’s debut on the machine and what Rossi’s and Nicky Hayden’s race weekend lap times were – but Dovi has already said that he isn’t going to be chasing lap times and it won’t matter if he’s two tenths of a second from the top of timesheets or two seconds – he knows that he has a lot of work to do and new owner Audi has promised to that he’ll get what he wants.
Here are the first pics of Dovizioso getting acquainted with his Ducati, and Filippo Preziosi will be holding a press conference on Wednesday, so we may find out what Ducati has in store for the future and if the Italian engineer is still going to be following the MotoGP project.