In 2017, the Ducati factory will reward the investment of the Octo Pramac Yakhnich team by allocating it a D17, exactly the same bike that Jorge Lorenzo and Andrea Dovizioso will have.
Nice gesture, but which obviously arouses the desire of Danilo Petrucci and Scott Redding, that is to say one driver too many. And if we immediately believed the bike (and its twin sister) granted to the Italian rider, this is not the case, and the two owners of the transalpine team started a sort of mini-championship in Brno to find out who will actually be the lucky one who will get the machine.
Why Brno? On the one hand because this is where the news was made public, but also for other reasons that are explained Scott Redding : “We have an internal agreement between us because Danilo had a broken hand at the start of the season, and it's unfair, just like I had a lot of mechanical problems, so we decided to start again from Brno.”
An elegant attitude which, however, does not solve all the problems as the British pilot presciently declared: “It’s going to be interesting, there’s a lot to gain, a lot of riders would kill to get a factory bike in 2017.”
Coincidence or not, after four rounds of a challenge which includes eight, the two Octo Pramac Yakhnich drivers clashed during the last Grand Prix, the fault of the friendly Danilo Petrucci who easily admitted his faults. But that's not enough to make things easier for Scott Redding : “When we made the deal, he was the one who said 'what will happen if we drive aggressively? Shouldn't we be punished?' and he's the stupid idiot who does it!
We'll see if this happens again. Maybe Ducati will see that he is not learning, maybe it is the youngest who is learning. My job is just to beat him in the next races.”
As we see, Scott Redding (23 years old) and Danilo Petrucci (25 years old) are not about to go on vacation together.
In the last 4 races, Scott Redding has only scored 2 points compared to 21 for Danilo Petrucci; a differential which could also explain the bitterness of the British driver…
source: Motorsport
