San Marino GP: Gresini Racing qualifying report

NAKANO EIGHTH AND DE ANGELIS THIRTEENTH IN SAN MARINO GRID SHOOTOUT

Qualifying practice for the San Marino GP saw Shinya Nakano and Alex De Angelis secure eighth and thirteenth place starts respectively for the thirteenth round of the MotoGP season at Misano tomorrow.

Shinya Nakano (8th - 1'34''494): "Even though qualifying wasn't perfect, today was definitely a better day than yesterday. After the changes the team made to the rear of the bike it felt much easier to ride through the corners, more stable, and this prevented me from running wide like yesterday. I had fun and it was positive that I managed to improve my performance on a qualifying tyre. Tomorrow we start from eighth on the grid and even though that is not bad, I would have preferred to be on the second row. My objective is to get a good result for the team in their home Grand Prix."

Alex De Angelis (13th - 1'35''153): "I'm not satisfied with this qualifying practice at all but there are positives as well as negatives. I managed to lap consistently fast on race tyres even though we're struggling with the qualifiers. Unfortunately we're still not getting the best out of them and as a consequence we can't improve at the same rate as the other riders. I'm still confident though because in free practice I did some practice starts and I think I can get away well. I'll try to make up as many positions as I can after that but it won't be easy at this track."

Fausto Gresini - Team Manager: "Qualifying today is not a true reflection of our standard but unfortunately we struggled more than the others on qualifying tyres and find ourselves down the order. I'm confident because the pace on race tyres is much better than our grid position suggests so we'll see what happens tomorrow. It clearly won't be an easy race for us but the objective will be to do well with both Alex, who is racing in his home Grand Prix, and Shinya, who is focused on development of this new machine."

-credit: gresiniracing.com