French GP: Pramac d'Antin qualifying notes

PRAMAC D'ANTIN MOTOGP WORKS FOR THE RACE

After variable weather conditions in the morning, the qualifying practice session of the MotoGP class hopefully was on dry, and it allowed the Pramac d'Antin MotoGP Team to go on defining the set-up of the Ducati Desmosedici GP06 "Sat." (DUNLOP tyres). The German Alex Hofmann will start from the 18th position on the grid, while the Spanish Jose Luis Cardoso from the 19th. Tomorrow the race of the MotoGP class will start at 2 p.m. and the whole Team is obviously hoping for dry conditions.

ALEX HOFMANN #66 (18th - 1'37.267): "Today, we went on working on the tyres and on the set-up definition of our Ducati for the race of tomorrow. We will continue during the warm-up, depending on what weather conditions there will be tomorrow. I hope to get the chance to make a good race ; with the race tyres we are not so far from Checa, I will do the maximum to precede him and try to catch some other points for the general classification of the Championship. Anyway, I'm happy to be in the front row if we want to talk about visibility, the logo with my website URL address is on the leather suit of my friend Hopkins, as his logo is on mine".

JOSE LUIS CARDOSO #30 (19th - 1'37.812): "I'm not much satisfied about today's practice. I had some difficulties in the exit of the corners, the motorcycle tended to bring me on the outside and, consequently, I couldn't open the throttle very quickly ; perhaps also because of the wind. We will see tomorrow, we will make other modifications during the warm-up, to be able to make the race in the best way as possible".

EMANUELE MARTINELLI - Track Engineer of Alex Hofmann: "Unfortunately, even if the race tyres improved slightly, I'm not sure they will have enough duration to finish the race in a good way. We will check it tomorrow, of course if the weather conditions will remain dry. In the meanwhile, today, we concentrated ourselves on the race tyres and on the corresponding set-up for our motorcycle. It's more important to get ready for the race than to make a fast lap with a qualification tyre. For this reason, we didn't test many qualification tyres, to work a lot more on the race configuration of our Ducati".

-pda