2nd AND 4th ROW FOR DUCATI MARLBORO TEAM IN CHINESE GP.
Ducati Marlboro Team riders Sete Gibernau and Loris Capirossi
were sixth and tenth fastest in this afternoon's rain-interrupted
qualifying session for tomorrow's Chinese Grand Prix.
A rain shower dampened the track in parts halfway through
the session, robbing teams of valuable dry-track time. Riders
were able to return to the rapidly drying track for the final
few minutes, but since both yesterday's sessions were run
in heavy rain, this morning's hour-long outing has been the
only fully dry session of a weather-blighted weekend, leaving
riders and teams with precious little set-up time for what
is expected to be a dry race.
Gibernau and Capirossi made the best of this afternoon's tricky
session, continuing work on race set-up before switching to
qualifiers in the final minutes, but neither rider was able
to extract the full performance from their Desmosedici GP6s
in the time available. Gibernau had led the early stages of
the session and looked capable of taking pole position, but
the Spaniard was unable to maintain that pace to the flag
and ended 6th. Italian team-mate Capirossi will start from
10th position. Weather for tomorrow is unpredictable but Ducati
Marlboro Team riders are going to exploit every single minute
of the warm-up in order to make the last adjustments for the
race.
SETE GIBERNAU, 6th fastest, 1m 59.639s
"That was a bit of a strange session. Everything seems
to be working well enough from a race point of view, but we
still have to work some more with Bridgestone to find the
right race tyre choice. The first part of the session went
okay but later on I was struggling to get a lap time with
the qualifiers because I could do the first part of the lap
not so bad, but after that the tyre wasn't giving me the grip
I needed for a qualifying lap. It's up to us and Bridgestone
to find the right solution for the race, because when the
tyres are okay we know we can go well, but we don't what to
end up in the same situation we were in at Istanbul. We have
one more rear to try in tomorrow morning's warm-up session,
one more choice that might help us for the race."
LORIS CAPIROSSI, 10th fastest, 2m 00.078s
"Sete and I have been using the same rear race tyre,
but we need a bit more endurance for the race. I have been
using a front tyre that's a bit harder than Sete's but it's
okay for the race, while Sete's is softer but maybe doesn't
have the endurance. This afternoon's rain didn't help us because
we couldn't test everything we wanted to test. At the end
of the session I didn't have full confidence in the front,
so I couldn't fully exploit my qualifying tyres. We did our
best today and we will need to make the most of warm-up to
test more tyres, making sure we don't take any big gambles
for the race."
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