Dani Pedrosa put his Repsol Honda RC212V on pole position for the San Marino Grand Prix in a commanding display at the Misano circuit today. The 24-year-old Spaniard was in total control for the whole session and, despite the best efforts of his rivals to steal pole in the last few minutes of qualifying, Pedrosa unleashed a final lap which put him 0.308s clear of his nearest challenger, Jorge Lorenzo. With the next ten riders behind him covered by only one second, Pedrosa’s margin for pole position is all the more impressive and bodes well for his chances in tomorrow’s race.
This was Pedrosa’s fourth pole position of 2010 and his second in three races, having last qualified at the front of the grid two races ago at the Czech Republic Grand Prix at Brno. It is his 17th pole in MotoGP, and the 35th of his Grand Prix career. When the lights go out tomorrow, Pedrosa will be going for his first ever back-to-back MotoGP victories following his win last weekend in Indianapolis.
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On the other side of the Repsol Honda garage, Pedrosa’s team-mate Andrea Dovizioso had a less fruitful qualifying session and will start his home Grand Prix from the middle of the third row. After finishing in a promising second place behind Pedrosa in yesterday’s practice, the 24-year-old Italian struggled to find a good front-end feeling today and, although he improved his pace in every session, Dovizioso’s time of 1m 34.826s this afternoon put him in eighth place. It wasn’t the grid slot Dovizioso wanted but he and he crew will put their heads together to analyse the set-up options available and target improvements in the 20-minute warm-up session.
Round 12 of the MotoGP World Championship starts tomorrow at 14.00 local time (GMT +2 hours).
DANI PEDROSA – Pole Position – 1m 33.948s
“I’m happy to be on pole position because we were strong throughout practice and things have gone according to plan so far this weekend. We are doing a very good job at the moment, improving at every round and now we have the chance to have another good race. I’ve never won two MotoGP races in a row and this is a good challenge for me - I really want to go for it. Today went well especially because this was a very tight qualifying session and, as I said yesterday, it was crucial to be on the first row of the grid to have the best chance of getting through the first corners cleanly, because they are very tight. It’s a quite a tricky circuit and tomorrow it will be important not to make any mistakes - particularly on the brakes - in order to keep a high pace for the whole race distance. I think it will be very difficult to make a gap, but we’ll wait and see what the strategy is for the race. Hopefully we can get through the first corners cleanly, and then we will simply need to push very hard to win. We have a good opportunity.”
ANDREA DOVIZIOSO – 8th – 1m 34.826s +0.878s
“We made a big change to the set-up of the bike in terms of weight distribution to get a better feeling with the front end, but it didn’t work for us. I was struggling a lot with the front and at the end of the session I almost crashed - like in Brno. It is very difficult to improve your lap time when you don’t have the confidence with the front. Now we have to decide whether to keep going in this set-up direction with something more radical or go back to what we had before. I’m disappointed to have qualified this far back for my home race, so we have some work to do tonight to find a setting that can improve things for warm-up and in the race. We’ve made it quite tough for ourselves, but we’ll aim to get a good start and make up as many positions as possible early on.”
TOSHIYUKI YAMAJI - REPSOL HONDA TEAM MANAGER
“Dani has been very fast so far at Misano and this pole position today reflects the pace he has shown all weekend. The sessions have gone smoothly for him and he is riding very well at the moment after his win in Indianapolis. There’s no way we will relax yet, but from this position he has a good chance in tomorrow’s race. Andrea has had some issues with front-end grip and we will be working to make improvements for him in the warm-up. We know he can be strong in the race and, although he is disappointed today, he can still have a strong home Grand Prix if he makes a good start.”
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