The second day of Spanish race weekend at the Montmelò circuit saw the Pramac d’Antin riders Alex Hofmann and Alex Barros engaged in the important qualifying session for tomorrow afternoon’s GP.
Unfortunately Alex Barros could not achieve the desired result and will start the race from only fourteenth position which will give the Brazilian a hard time at the start of the 25-lap event. He will have to attack strongly from the start and use his encouraging race pace to make his way up through the field to the leading group.
Alex Hofmann, despite initial difficulties earlier in the day, was able to record a competitive lap of 1’42.860, using his Bridgestone qualifying tires to finish in tenth position, his best result of the season so far, and the German is confident for tomorrow’s race because he has found a good race set-up with his Ducati Desmosedici.
Alex Barros (1’43.722 – 24 laps): “Today I’m not really satisfied and unfortunately things did not work in the right direction. We worked a lot to find the best possible solution, but our final result wasn’t as good as we had wished. My big difficulty is with the rear, I haven’t enough traction and when I turn I lost too much speed. To try to resolve these difficulties, we made a lot of set-up changes, but as happened yesterday, we found only a partial solution. In order to work on this problem fully, we were not able to use the qualifying session properly because we used qualifying tyres only for the last lap. Perhaps if I could have had some more time, I could have improved my lap time; but today our main focus was to resolve my difficulties with the race set-up, something we have to continue tomorrow morning. ”
Alex Hofmann (1’42.860 – 18 laps): “Today was very difficult for me, but at the end it felt really good; the tenth position is a favourable position from which to make a good race start. During both the morning and the afternoon sessions, we had some technical difficulties and my bike did not work so well. As a result, we lost a lot of important time and I was a bit anxious, especially when I have to come back to the box during the qualifying hour to change by bike. This process took about half and hour and I was not confident in obtaining a good result. Thankfully, the bike felt immediately good in race trim and I had a good feeling with it. I am confident for tomorrow and I hope for a competitive race. ”
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