Dani Pedrosa isn’t a rider to take team orders and don’t even suggest it, because today he caught his team mate Casey Stoner and slipped right past him with no thoughts to the standings and the fact that Jorge Lorenzo was dominating, while his Australian team mate suffered from fatigue, niggling neck problems (probably brought on by the hot and very humid conditions at Misano) and was quickly fading.
Like we said yesterday after the qualifying session, fuel consumption would be an issue for some riders even if we didn’t expect that it would be Andrea Dovizioso to suffer from it.
It effected the outcome of his race (even if he didn’t have the pace), but his battle with rival Marco Simoncelli can still be considered one of the best moments of the race and he’s still the best Italian rider on the grid with his 3rd place in the standings.
“I’m a little disappointed with the race because the bike didn’t feel as good as in practice,” reported Dani Pedrosa who took second.
“We wanted to make a change to the suspension to improve it but we had the opposite effect, sometimes it happens.
From the first lap, I realised I couldn’t keep up with Jorge and Casey, at the beginning the bike was closing the front and then it was sliding in the rear.
The second part of the race was good, Jorge had a perfect race today, but I was able improve my times lap by lap and catch Casey.
I overtook him and had another second place in two weeks, which is not so bad.
We’ve been lucky today as it was cooler than yesterday the rain didn’t come.
It’s been two demanding races in a row and this one in particular was the toughest of the season so far – the circuit is challenging with so many hard braking areas and it’s been very hot again, also after Indy it’s been difficult to recover from the jet lag.
Let’s hope we can get some rest and be stronger for Aragon.
” “At the beginning of the race I was cautious as there were a few spots of rain, once this cleared up I was pretty comfortable behind Jorge, I didn’t feel the need to push and then tiredness suddenly hit me,” said Stoner.
“It was hard to find the braking points and change direction on the bike, there was nothing wrong with the tyres, nothing wrong with the bike, the team did a great job and gave me a fantastic package, I’m just worn out.
I had to put in a lot more effort into Laguna and Brno, riding a lot harder than I normally would.
This together with the neck injury from Assen has finally caught up with me.
For the second half of the race I was just too tired, simple as that, I’m very grateful to have finished on the podium.
All credit to Jorge, he had a fantastic race, hopefully by Aragon I’ll be fully fit and recovered.
”Andrea Dovizioso said, “It was a tough race, I had to push hard and ride aggressively and we had to cut the power a lot due to fuel consumption issues.
We suffered from this during the whole race weekend, but after the warm up I received the bad news that we had to cut even more power.
This hasn’t been such a big issue this year and in fact it’s never been the case that I can’t match Simoncelli in acceleration.
This is due to riding style and set up of the electronics, especially engine braking.
I knew that with this cut in power it would have been impossible to fight for the podium, so this affected my motivation.
We had a good battle with Marco and Spies; for the first time this season Marco beat me so congratulations to him.
Our target was to gain some points on Lorenzo and we didn’t manage it.
We are still third in the Championship; we are confident and will continue working.
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