Andrea Dovizioso wrapped up the first day of free practice action for this weekend's Dutch TT round of the 2016 MotoGP World Championship, in fourth place on Friday after suffering an engine failure within the first few minutes of free practice one.
The Ducati Team's Italian rider, who had also been fourth in the morning's FP1 session, clocked a time of 1'33.790 on his third and final run in FP2 in the afternoon.
“I'm pleased because we started well and I'm satisfied with the time I set, but we will have to work more to improve our set-up because we must be a bit more competitive in some sectors, especially T3 and T4,” he explained. “Today Viñales and Marquez were particularly quick and, if the track conditions are dry tomorrow, we will try and get closer to them.”
Meanwhile, teammate Jorge Lorenzo, who finished the morning run in ninth place after an accident in the opening minutes of the session, improved by six-tenths of a second in the afternoon to set a lap time of 1'34.523, but the Spanish rider was only classified fourteenth at the end of the first day.
“Today was a very complicated day for me,” he explained. “For the moment I don't feel fully comfortable with the bike and the modifications we made in the afternoon to improve stability didn't work the way we had hoped. In addition there are a couple of corners in the final sector that I'm not able to do the way I want and there we lose a lot of time. Now we have to find some solutions to improve our competitive level and hopefully it won't rain tomorrow, otherwise we'll only have the Sunday morning warm-up to try and improve in dry conditions.”
