MotoGP – Petrucci fastest as Syahrin still adapting to KTM

Bruno Gomes

November 28, 2018

In what was the first day of the last test session of the year for MotoGP teams, in Jerez racetrack, before the Winter break that’ll last until the end of January 2019, Danilo Petrucci, the new Ducati factory team rider, surprised everyone by setting the fastest time of day one.

The Italian was able to beat his teammate and current MotoGP vice-champion Andrea Dovizioso by just 0.217s, and he was the only rider able to enter the 1m37s lap time.

Behind the duo of Ducati’s, Japanese Takaaki Nakagami (LCR Honda) riding the bike that was raced by Cal Crutchlow last season, also surprised by achieving the third fastest time, beating Maverick Viñales and Marc Marquez.

On a day that started with very cold ambient temperatures, and with riders opting to stay in the pit in the first two hours of 7 hours in total they had of track time available today, waiting for track surface to increase its temperature to make the Michelin tyres work as expected, Hafizh Syahrin ended with the 21st fastest time.

The Malaysian is still adapting to his new race machine, the KTM RC16 of Tech3 team, and the transition is going well, albeit being a difficult one since the Yamaha M1 Syahrin raced last season has a completely different behavior and the Tech3 team also needs to spend a lot of time adjusting the base settings on their new machine having raced Yamaha bikes for the last 20 years in MotoGP.

This is what Hafizh Syahrin had to say about day 1

“The first day here is already over and I have the feeling that we are going in the right way together with my crew to set up the new bike. We start to understand it step by step, the character and how to ride it. We did quite a good amount of laps and began to find out how the suspension works, what we can change about it and how we can use it. We believe that we could have improved the lap time if we would have changed the tyres again, but we saved them because I wanted to do a long run in order to simulate a race. Even by the end, my lap times were quite good. So, I’m very happy and I hope we can make another step forward tomorrow, trying to get closer to the top.”

Tomorrow all MotoGP riders will have their last day on track before the Winter break, and we will give you all the updates on this last official MotoGP test being held in Jerez, Spain. Stay tuned!