Andrea Dovizioso’s 2020 MotoGP world championship challenge might finally have come to an end on Saturday during qualifying for the Teruel Grand Prix at Motorland Aragon, with yet another woeful performance for the Ducati rider at a track that was predicted to be one where he could take easy points.
Dovizioso will start tomorrow’s race from a distant 17th place, the third time this year that he will line up on the sixth row of the grid. The last time he started that far back was in Barcelona, when he qualified in the same position and got taken out in the opening laps of the race as he tried to work his way through the field.
He faces a similar issue tomorrow, too, in the short run into Motorland Aragon’s tight opening two corners – and knows that even if he makes it safely off the line, there’s not much that he can do to fight for a solid finish.
“When you have the kind of speed we have,” a defeated-sounding Dovizioso admitted, “you can’t make any strategy and you can’t think about the championship. I will approach the race like always to get the maximum points, but when you don’t have speed you can’t use your energy thinking about strategy.
“You have no power to decide anything. So at this moment I don’t think about the championship because it’s not in my hands.”
And while he wouldn’t admit outright that the championship is out of his grasp now, Dovizioso did concede that a fight back is going to be increasingly hard given that Ducati looks to have lost its way.
Dovizioso sits only 15 points from title leader Joan Mir, but with a difficult race expected tomorrow and then three more rounds at tracks that won’t suit the Ducati in the shape of Valencia and Portimao, the Italian knows that the chances of turning it around are all but gone.
“If you analyse this season, it’s so up and down,” the Austrian Grand Prix winner told The Race when asked whether Johann Zarco’s impressive Teruel GP qualifying in a 2019-spec Ducati offered any hints.
“There are a lot of riders with very special speed at some moments, but when you look at the championship, where are they? In the end, this just confirms that the situation isn’t under control for us and it’s very difficult to manage.
“We’ve worked a lot on the set-up and tried to adapt, but in the end you can see it’s not working. We’ve been a bit faster at some tracks but in the end we’re never there.”
All of those woes continue to come, according to Dovizioso, from a single source: Michelin’s new-for-2020 construction of rear tyre. Offering more grip across the width of the tyre, it has left the Ducati advantage on acceleration greatly reduced by allowing its rivals, particularly the inline-four bikes of Suzuki and Yamaha, a chance to get on the gas harder on corner exit.
With the tyre neutering Ducati’s traditional strength, as well as preventing Dovizooso in particular from attacking under braking by gripping and pushing the bike, thereby destabilising it, the end result is a deeply frustrated racer.
“It’s more difficult to explain where we’re gaining than where we’re losing,” Dovizioso said. “It’s a track where the turning of the bike is pretty important, and with this tyre you have to ride on the maximum angle.
“When you don’t have a lot of grip you have to wait until you can open the gas.It’s been clear from the beginning, and the bad thing is that our competitors have improved since last week and we haven’t.”
