Despite having six bikes in the MotoGP class, including the two highly fancied Ducati Factory bikes in the hands of championship contender Andrea Dovizioso and multiple world champion Jorge Lorenzo, things are looking pretty glum for  fans of the Italian machines.  

When the riders line up on the grid for tomorrow’s Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix, fans will need to look as far down as the fourth row to spot a Ducati.

Andrea Dovizioso (1m29.496s), the only Ducati rider to make it into Qualifying 2, crashed during Free Practice 4, and could then do no better than eleventh fastest in Q2. He will start from the fourth row of the grid tomorrow. 

“The crash in FP4 conditioned my qualifying session a bit. We could surely have gone quicker, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to ride as well as yesterday and so we start down the grid. A real pity, but that’s the way it went and now we have only to think about tomorrow to try and work out where we can improve, because in any case my pace with the medium tyre is not bad. We’re not going to give in and we’ll see what we can do in the race.”  

Jorge Lorenzo suffered a spectacular crash during Free Practice 3, severely spraining his ankle. He made it out for Qualifying 1 but could do no better than 16th (1m30.085) for a sixth-row start. 

“It was a very tough day because things went totally in the wrong direction. This morning the rain meant that it was going to be impossible for us to improve enough to get into Q2 and obviously the crash didn’t make the situation any better. It was a bad crash and I rolled over a number of times in the gravel: I immediately thought I had broken something, but luckily the x-ray ruled out any fractures and only confirmed a sprained left ankle, which hurts a lot. In this condition we weren’t able to improve the bike in the dry and tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, we’ll go back to our original settings on Friday to try and make a step forward. It’s going to be a long hard race but I will try and find a good pace and fight to the finish.”

Danilo Petrucci (1m30.471s), riding for the satellite Pramac Ducati team, also crashed out and could do no better than an 18th position start also on the sixth row. Splitting Lorenzo and Petrucci, and making the sixth row an all Ducati affair is Loris Baz (1m30.224) riding for the Reale Avintia Racing team.

On the seventh row is Baz’s teammate Hector Barbera (1m30.543s) and the second OCTO Pramac Racing Ducati of Scott Redding (1m30.806s).

Dovizioso, Australian MotoGP 2017