Francesco Bagnaia and the Ducati Lenovo Team have edged the competition in the Practice session for the #SolidarityGP, the final event of the 2024 MotoGP season, which got underway today at Montmeló’s ‘Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya’. Enea Bastianini finished the afternoon session in tenth place.
After the seventh position secured in Free Practice, Bagnaia started the afternoon session on the right foot, as he stayed in the top four while working on the race set-up of his Ducati machine. Pecco then made the difference in his final quick lap attempt by setting a 1:38.918secs lap-time that translated into first position at the chequered flag.
Bastianini, who was sixth-fastest in the morning, had a bit more of a challenging time in getting up to speed in Practice as he was outside the top ten until the closing stages of the session. In the time attack, Enea made his way to the top positions to secure the direct seed to Q2 with a tenth-place finish.
The Ducati Lenovo Team will be back in action tomorrow morning at 10:10 local time (GMT +1) for Free Practice 2, followed by Q2 at 11:15 and by the 12-lap sprint race at 15:00.
Francesco Bagnaia (#1 Ducati Lenovo Team) – 1st
“I can be happy with today: we tried everything we had planned to try and improved our feeling in each run. The temperatures are lower and there’s less grip, but the adjustments we made to the set-up turned out to be positive, hence I’m happy with the work done as well as with the time attack. We will do some fine-tuning tomorrow morning, and we’ll also try the hard tyre to see if it can be a valid option for the sprint race. The main goal right now is to qualify on the front row, which would make things a lot easier, and then we’ll focus on the race.”
Enea Bastianini (#23 Ducati Lenovo Team) – 10th
“It was quite a challenging day as we went through several tyre combinations to understand which one worked better. The situation at the front-end is quite clear as I like both medium and hard options, while we’ll have to keep working on the rear-end tomorrow morning. We know we’re losing time in the third sector and that’s where our focus will be, but we’re in a good position in the rest of the track. I feel a lot more comfortable with cooler conditions here at Montmeló and I hope this can work in our favour. Let’s see how it goes tomorrow.”
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