Valentino Rossi will be starting tomorrow’s Aragon GP from the pitlane and with a 10 second penalty.
The Ducati rider sealed a 7th engine on his Ducati Desmosedici GP11.
2, thus breaking the 2011 six engine per rider rule.
Rossi doesn’t have excessive mileage on his other engines, but debuting different chassis versions seemingly every other race and now using this lastest version in aluminium requires different engine mountings, forcing him to take a 7th engine in order to have his main and spare bike with the same specification.
The Italian who qualified 13th decided that starting from the Aragon pitlane will be less costly than say at Motegi, said, However, I’m thirteenth, and at this point we’ll use our seventh engine and start from pit lane, as the new front chassis part only works with the engine we used at Misano.
Unfortunately, although we have two engines that are nearly new and probably would have let us make it to the end of the season, we aren’t able to use them.
Anyway, we made this decision looking forward, and we’ve started working in what we think is a good direction, though of course we’re on our first step, with a lot more left to do.
” Rossi starting from the pitlane should apply to this race only, if we understand the rules correctly (someone please correct us if we’re wrong).
And pitlane start has never been applied so far, as Rizla Suzuki got a exemption from the governing bodies when Loris Capirossi and Alvaro Bautista had to use more engines to finish the 2010 season.
Suzuki did receive a ten point penalty in the constructors’s championship during the Australian GP in 2009 when the rules restricted each rider to five engines for the final seven rounds and then Suzuki rider Loris Capirossi was demoted to the back of the grid for taking an extra engine.