During today’s MotoGP qualifying session, Valentino Rossi hit a new time low, qualifying only sixteenth on the starting grid of seventeen riders with the highly tooted Ducati GP11.
1 (2012 chassis and the DST) which debuted at Assen which was supposed to be the cure to all of Rossi’s problems and solve the chronic front end problems, is now officially a very expensive prototype dud.
Rossi, who more than 1.
6 seconds slower than pole man Casey Stoner, was also 0.
925s slower than team mate Nicky Hayden who is running the GP11 step 2 version and it took the Italian the better part of and three a half race weekend’s to realize that the GP11.
1 is a dead carbon fiber horse, and no matter how much you flog it, it’s just not moving and now it may be time to switch back to the version that Hayden is currently using.
“We are very upset, because we are struggling very much this weekend.
I am very slow and close to last,” said a despondent Rossi, who was lucky Loris Capirossi wasn’t healthy and riding or he’d be the last on the grid.
“For three races now we’ve used the new bike to try to improve on the performance of the old one.
I tried this bike with the 1000 engine and it was not so bad, but with the 800 engine the bike became very difficult to ride and I cannot load the front of the bike.
So our performance at the last three races has been very, very bad.
Especially in practice.
And here it has been worse.
“So now we think maybe to come back to the normal, standard, bike.
I don’t know when.
Maybe after Brno We will decide after tomorrow.
We’ve tried changing more or less everything on the bike and at the end the lap time and our performance does not improve.
So I don’t know what we can do for tomorrow’s race, but we won’t give up and will keep trying to improve.
”Rossi says he wants to do a comparison test between the two versions on Monday after Brno, however he’s unsure if he’ll try to use the older version at Laguna Seca next weekend.