Mar 10 : Unexpected Struggle Leaves Rossi in Fifth in Qatar Opener

The opening race of the MotoGP season and the championship’s first night race saw Fiat Yamaha Team rider Valentino Rossi finish a disappointed fifth tonight, after struggling for pace on the cold track throughout the 22 lap race. His young team-mate Jorge Lorenzo meanwhile took second on his MotoGP debut.
 

Rossi, racing on Bridgestone tyres for the first time, made up two places on the opening lap and for the first few laps looked like he might be a contender for the top spots as he picked his way through the field. On lap five he took the lead and held onto it for three laps, but he was unable to ride his M1 as he wanted to and surrendered first place to Casey Stoner just three laps later. It was downhill for the Italian from then on as his pace dropped off and he began to slip back, unable to keep up with the leaders. Dani Pedrosa passed him for third and Rossi eventually became embroiled in a close battle for fourth with Andrea Dovizioso, with the rookie eventually running out the winner by just a fraction of a second.

It was a good night for Yamaha in general however as Lorenzo’s podium, Rossi’s fifth position and sixth and seventh places from Tech 3 riders James Toseland and Colin Edwards made it four Yamahas in the top ten. The next stop for the paddock will be Jerez, Spain on 30th March for the second race of 18.

“We expected a difficult race here, but actually not as difficult as this! We haven’t been fast here in Qatar since last week’s night test but, despite this, I thought we might be able to fight for the podium. Tonight however it was really difficult and now we have to understand the reason for this result. After five or six laps I started doing 56.4 and
56.5 and from then on I couldn’t improve on that pace until the end. I was very fast in braking, but not so fast in the corners. We know that we can make our Bridgestone tyres work better than this, because they are winning tyres and tonight they showed it once again. Throughout the winter, at all tracks, we were very fast and this is the only one where we were not. Now our task is to understand why this happened. We had a couple of ideas to try but in the end we decided to stick to what we know because we need some more time to understand how to improve and how to be faster. We know we can do better than this and so we just need to gather all the information and use it in the best way for the next race. Finally I want to say congratulations to Lorenzo for a great debut tonight; honestly I’m not surprised because I knew he was fast and talented, but he did very well tonight in a hard race so well done to him.”