Repsol Honda rider Dani Pedrosa rode to an impressive second place in the 80th edition of the Dutch TT today and duly climbed back into second place in the MotoGP World Championship. It was a pleasing result for the Spaniard after a difficult weekend during which he and his crew spent much of the time chasing the right set-up for the Assen circuit. In the morning warm-up session, his team found some answers to the handling issues they had been tackling which allowed Pedrosa’s RC212V to set the fastest lap of the race and to take the battle to today’s winner Jorge Lorenzo in the 26-lap encounter. Pedrosa’s new race lap record of 1m34.525s was just 1/100th of a second slower than Lorenzo’s pole position time from yesterday.
From a lowly seventh on the grid, Pedrosa skillfully threaded his way up to third into the first corner behind Ben Spies and Lorenzo in front. On lap three Pedrosa passed Spies and set off in pursuit of Lorenzo, quickly catching his fellow countryman and threatening to take the lead from him. However, Lorenzo was able to pull away in the second half of the race and in turn Pedrosa stretched the gap to Casey Stoner behind him to secure a comfortable second place, just 2.935s back from the winner. It was Pedrosa’s third rostrum finish of the season to add to his win at Mugello and his second place at Jerez.
His Repsol Honda team-mate Andrea Dovizioso put on another fighting display and, like last weekend at Silverstone, he had a lengthy battle with Randy De Puniet - their duel this time going right down to the last corner. From sixth on the grid Dovizioso made up one place into the first corner and soon climbed to fourth behind Lorenzo, Pedrosa and Stoner. Mid race front-end issues with his machine caused the Italian to slip back to sixth, but in the closing laps Dovizioso mounted a spirited fight back and held off a determined attack from De Puniet - who lunged past and then ran wide into Assen’s final bend. Dovizioso now holds third place in the World Championship, just four points behind Pedrosa.
A breathless MotoGP paddock now heads directly for Barcelona for next Sunday’s Grand Prix of Catalunya - the third of three races on consecutive weekends.
DANI PEDROSA – 2nd – World Championship position: 2nd 93 points
“Well first of all I have to say I’m surprised by this result because, I tell you, in practice we had a lot of problems and we tried so many things that didn’t work, so I wasn’t expecting to get second today or to have this pace. For the warm-up we found something which gave us a better lap time and my rhythm improved a lot, which gave us the chance to fight in the race. I knew with the soft rear Bridgestone tyre that I would have more of an advantage in the first part of the race and so I pushed really hard from the start to catch up. But then I began losing a little bit of time in the first section of the circuit and lap-by-lap we lost touch. Anyway, this is a good result for us and I’d like to say thanks to my team because they never gave up. I’m back into second in the World Championship but actually I’m more pleased with second in this race. Now we go straight to Catalunya for my home GP and I hope we can have a good race there too.”
ANDREA DOVIZIOSO – 5th – World Championship position: 3rd 89 points
“We had higher expectations for today’s race and so I’m a little disappointed with how things went. I made a good start and moved up to fourth but I couldn’t ride the laps under 1m 35s that were needed to stay with the leaders. We weren’t at 100% with the front-end feeling which meant I couldn’t ride as aggressively as I wanted. Having said that, we could have finished in fourth today, but in the battle with Randy we lost time and Spies took advantage of our duel to get a gap. Considering how Dani’s and Casey’s soft tyres worked, our choice of the hard compound Bridgestone was perhaps not the perfect one today. Anyway, we have to learn from this and I’m looking forward to Barcelona - it’s a track that I really like. Today’s race was disappointing, but with only five days before we get back out on track we won’t have to wait long before we can make amends.”
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