Turning fewer than ten laps on the first day of practice at Mugello prevented Valentino Rossi from doing better than thirteenth-best, but there are nonetheless promising signs. In the first session, some technical problems forced the Italian to return to the garage after a positive first outing. The afternoon weather was erratic once again, rendering the second practice session useless.
Rossi’s teammate Nicky Hayden began working on a setup for the step 2 frame in the morning, but the rain forced the postponement further tests.
Nicky Hayden, Ducati Team
“We were pretty strong in our first run this morning. We didn’t improve much from there, but I used the same hard tyre the whole session, and it worked well here on both sides. We made a couple little changes with the bike that felt like they were in a good direction. I did my fastest lap on the step 1 chassis, but the data showed that the step 2 had some pluses. This afternoon was wet one minute and dry the next. It looked like guys were destroying their wet tyres quick, and there was no point in putting on engine mileage and taking risks. We just went out to check a power setting on a practice start. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
Valentino Rossi:
"Today it's almost as if we had not tried. This morning we did one full lap, which was good enough, but then we had a problem with both bikes. At the end of the day I was left with the time I completed after a total of four laps. They were actually minor problems, but in fact the first few minutes after we no longer shot: on the first bike, a wire was touching a hot part, which shorted the electronics and the bike stopped. On the other, there was an electrical problem and the result was the same - I stopped. The afternoon session was a cross between wet and dry; useless. Only in the last minutes could I do three laps to test some changes and we had some interesting results. We hope to test them more thoroughly tomorrow to see how competitive we are in normal conditions. Having tried them with the GP12, we have a good base from which to start, but we still need to adapt the set-up to the 800, which requires different lines to hold more corner speed. Tomorrow we hope to continue to try and get close to rest.”