While he arrived in Brno with 121 points in third position behind his teammate who totaled 127, Danilo Petrucci found himself slightly behind at the end of the Czech event with 129 points against 147 for Dovi.
Friday went modestly for “Petrux” with the tenth time in 1'56.593, 0.791 behind El Diablo fabio quartararo. The rain which soaked the track on Saturday morning saved his day by qualifying him directly for Q2 with this tenth position.
The qualifying session was average with a time of 2'06.457, 3.704 behind Marc Márquez's pole position. At the start of the race, Danilo found himself fighting for seventh place, 3.8 behind Márquez, with Cal Crutchlow in front of him, and Fabio Quartararo and his teammate Takaaki Nakagami just behind.
15 laps from the checkered flag, the race began to take shape with Marc Márquez, Andrea Dovizioso, Álex Rins and Jack Miller in the lead, while Valentino Rossi occupied fifth position at 4.1, followed by Cal Crutchlow who had just taken sixth place from Pol Espargaró. Danilo Petrucci then closely followed Fabio Quartararo who occupied eighth position.
At mid-race, the Ducati official was ninth, 0.1 behind leader Marc Márquez. Petrucci had chosen two medium Michelins at the front and rear, like his teammate Andrea Dovizioso and Aleix Espargaró for his Aprilia RS GP.
When there were only 5 laps left, Danilo eighth was at 13.1, then he finally crossed the finish line 13.976 behind the winner Marc Márquez.
According to Danilo Petrucci, “ We will look forward to the future. Unfortunately, the first negative race of the year arrived, the worst of this year 2019. I hoped it would never have happened. But in the end it happened. I want to find a solution first and foremost. I hope that this failure will serve to do better in Austria. At least I brought home a few points, trying to limit the damage, but it is clear that to finish third in the world championship it is no longer possible to do such races.”
“I find it difficult to explain such a race, although we have some ideas. It is clear that tomorrow we will have to try to understand what was missing. Dovi and Jack were faster in the first laps, they left me by 10 seconds. Afterwards the pace was very similar, but when you take more than a second per lap, even for 10 laps, it means that there was a problem that we could not solve.
“Tomorrow I want to try to solve it, also because in the championship I lost only 5 points on Rins. The goal is to resume the fight for the top five places, as we have always done.”
“I have to say that since Friday I haven't been fast here in Brno. By monitoring the pace of the race, we also noticed that I was faster in the second half of the race compared to the first. I started as if my tires were already worn out, I wasn't able to attack. I knew I had good pace with worn tires, in this situation where everyone is paddling on the track. The problem is that today I rowed. In the race, I was non-existent.”
“I chose the medium rear tire, while almost the entire grid chose the soft tire. So I told myself at the start of the race that maybe it could depend on it and I waited for the second half to advance, but in reality even those who had the soft were following at their own pace and even Dovizioso had a medium behind, so that wasn’t the problem.”
“The weekend was negative, we just have to try to make up for it in Austria. Of course, being ahead of Viñales is a positive note, he probably had bigger problems than mine. But we can't stop and look at who had problems, we need to focus on those who are more successful than us. I'm really sorry for the team who did their best, but at least I'm happy for Andrea and also for Jack.
Grand Prix results:
Provisional ranking of the World Championship:
Photos © Ducati
