Challenging Practice at Sepang for the Ducati Lenovo Team Bagnaia twelfth, Pirro twenty-second and both in Q1

The Ducati Lenovo Team completed the opening day of action at the Sepang International Circuit, venue of the twentieth Grand Prix of the season. After a solid performance in Free Practice, Francesco Bagnaia finished Practice in twelfth place. Like his teammate Michele Pirro, who was twenty-second, he will take part in Q1 tomorrow.

Bagnaia, second in the morning’s wet FP session, remained in the top three for most of Practice. However, with light rain arriving in the final minutes, Pecco was unable to improve his lap time and ended the day twelfth, just 0.089s away from the top ten. Michele Pirro continued his development work on the Desmosedici GP to conclude day one in twenty-second position.

The Ducati Lenovo Team will be back on track tomorrow morning at 10:10 local time (GMT +8) for Free Practice 2, followed by Q1 at 10:50 and Q2 at 11:15. The twentieth Sprint of the season will take place over ten laps at 15:00.

Francesco Bagnaia (#63 Ducati Lenovo Team) – 12th
“We made a small step forward and it was a clear one, as we were in the top positions in both sessions. Unfortunately, there was a little bit of chaos towards the end of Practice and we couldn’t improve, so we missed the direct seed to Q2. We must stay calm and keep working: tomorrow’s Q1 will be both important and challenging, but the goal is to keep growing in terms of feeling and performance. At the moment, the issue I’m experiencing is that I’m having a hard time making the bike turn. There are a couple of corners where, exactly for this reason, I end up losing a lot of time.”

Michele Pirro (#51 Ducati Lenovo Team) – 22nd
“We’re working on the bike set-up, which is completely different from the one we had at Phillip Island. The feeling is OK at the moment, but I’m having a hard time getting up to speed with the soft tyre during the time attack. Generally speaking, I chose not to take too many risks, especially when the conditions were not ideal. The solutions we tried today didn’t work as we had hoped, so we’ll analyse the data to find a different direction ahead of qualifying and the Sprint.”