British: Shell Motorsport final qualifying notes

24th July 2004 - Donington, UK: Shell Advance L6441 helps the Ducati MotoGP team to 3rd and 4th

The Ducati MotoGP team has had their most successful qualifying session of the year, helped all the way by the new Shell Advance lubricant available for the first time at Donington this weekend.

The Shell Global Solution's technicians in Hamburg, Germany, have been working hard for the past few months improving on the previous oil candidate that Ducati Corse used in the Desmosedici GP4. The latest Shell Advance lubricant, L6441, has been the most successful in liberating more power from the Desmosedici engine.

New Shell Advance L6441 showed a significant improvement over the previous generation Shell Advance lubricant during lab testing in Germany. It was in the Ducati bench testing that the power improvement of 0.6% was first seen by Filippo Preziosi, Ducati Corse Technical Director. Filippo then sent the lubricant to the track test to further prove the reliability before it was approved for race use at Donington.

Both Loris and Troy set their best time on their 28th lap of 30 during Saturday's qualifying session. Loris taking 3rd place on the grid, with Troy in 4th place a mere 0.005 seconds behind his team mate.

Peter Fordemann of Shell Global Solution's was in the Ducati garage to witness the success of the new lubricant first hand: "This is the sort of result that Shell knew Loris and Troy were capable of from the beginning of the year, it has just been a question of when the team could unlock the potential of the Desmosedici GP4 and the new Twin Pulse engine. It looks like the new Shell Advance has helped too"

The Ducati team were also visibly happy with the result. Livio Suppo, Ducati Corse Team director saying: "It's great to be back on the front row! Today shows that we are heading in the right direction with all our work, and it is not just our hard work... we recognise that Shell have put a lot of effort into developing the new Shell Advance lubricant for us, and the extra power they have helped us produce has certainly helped us on the track."

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