LCR Honda’s Randy de Puniet rode his RC212V to sixth place today in a very hot qualifying session at the stunning Mugello circuit in preparation for tomorrow’s 23-lap race, which gets underway at 2pm local time. Both of today’s premier class sessions were conducted with a temperature of 30ºC while the track reached 51ºC, as the French rider continued to search for the optimum setting on his machine.
After fifth position in the morning’s second free practice, De Puniet was again in sparkling form clocking his best lap time of 1’49.737 on lap 24 of 26, 0.918ss behind today’s pace setter. The 29 year-old set consistently fast lap times, lying in third place for long spells, and he qualified on the second row for the fourth time this year. Honda rider Dani Pedrosa leads tomorrow’s fourth round front row followed by Jorge Lorenzo and Casey Stoner.
Randy de Puniet
“I am a bit disappointed because I had the potential to start from the front row but I did lose some time at the end of my best lap because somebody crashed in front of me, and after that I made a small mistake on Turn 5. We could have improved a couple of tenths there. Anyway, considering the overall package we are very pleased about this fourth consecutive second row. We still have to fix something about the race tyres because we had some small grip issues on the maximum lean angle in this afternoon’s session but it looks like everybody has to face the same problem on race set-up.”
Press release courtesy of LCR Honda
De Puniet maintains strong qualifying form
Source: motogp.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment