Fabio Di Giannantonio: ‘Not easy to improve when you don’t have new parts’

Fabio Di Giannantonio put together another strong day of MotoGP testing at Sepang, finishing sixth fastest as Ducati again led the way.

One of the stars of last season during the final few rounds, Di Giannantonio has adapted well to his new team despite losing track time during the early part of day-two.

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“It has been a good day,” began Di Giannantonio. “We struggled a bit this morning with the feeling of two different tyres, which blocked our plan a little bit.

“After lunch we started working quite well. We found a new solution with the set-up on the front. It gave me a huge step in terms of race pace.

“I was quite a lot faster than this morning and yesterday. I’m happy about that part of the day but in the last part of the day we tried working on finding grip and once we started this way of work we improved again a little bit. I was even faster again.

“When we don’t have many parts to try, whatever we find is good because it means we are improving the set-up. It is not easy to do when the bike doesn’t have new parts.”

One of the hot topics of the Sepang test is Michelin’s new front tyre for 2025, which has been available for riders to test, but Di Giannantonio was not one of those to do so.

Asked if it’s part of the plan to try it, Di Giannantonio said: “Theoretically yes. I came straight here from the physio so I don’t know exactly the plan, but I think we have to try this.

“We were also talking about a sprint simulation but we have to see many things. If our plan with the set-up and different things to try is too many then we might not have time.

“Personally, I don’t think it is so necessary at the moment. We are only on our third day on the bike and we also have Qatar. At the moment the plan is to improve the feeling with the bike.”

Alex Marquez sets hot pace in race simulation 

As the focus shifted between time attack and sprint simulations, Alex Marquez was one of those who focused mostly on the latter.

A very hot pace was set by the Spaniard, who claimed only Jorge Martin is stronger on a consistent basis at the moment.

Speaking about his day, Marquez said: “I did the time attack in the morning and did 57.6 on the first lap because I was struggling with the set-up to understand the 23 bike. 

“Later on we focused on improving the turning area and in the afternoon we had one more tyre but our plan was to do a sprint simulation.

“I tried to do laps for me, because after the winter I need to get used to making 10/11 laps without mistakes, but also to give to the team more information.

Today, the feeling was much better. Looks like Martin is really fast but for the rest, on the rhythm we are not bad.

“With the sprint simulation I was four seconds faster than the sprint I won in November. So it was not bad but if it doesn’t rain tonight, tomorrow will be a really fast day.”