Ducati: GP4 will suit Le Mans.

Ducati Marlboro heads to round three of the 2004 MotoGP world championship, the French Grand Prix, believing that the stop-go nature of the Le Mans circuit will suit the so far disappointing Desmosedici GP4.

Despite the new machine's awesome top speed, riders Loris Capirossi and Troy Bayliss have had a tough start to the season, with Capirossi's sixth at Welkom by far their best result.

Last time out at a wet Jerez Capirossi was the only Ducati rider to finish, this time in a distant twelfth, but motivation remains high and a two-day test which followed the GP enabled the Bologna based company to catch up on some of the lost pre-season testing time.

"Jerez wasn't easy. In racing you get weekends like that," said team director Livio Suppo. "The main thing is that team morale is high. And we did take away some positives from Jerez, like Troy's speed in the wet, plus what we learned during two days of testing after the race. Last season we showed our potential at a lot of racetracks and we are determined to show it again."

Technical director Corrado Cecchinelli hopes that Le Mans next weekend will allow the first opportunity for his team to prove the prowess of the new machine, which - in the two GPs so far - has struggled to match the relative pace of its 2003 spec predecessor.

"I think the new bike is already better than last year's at stop-and-go tracks like Le Mans, which is basically a sequence of straights interrupted by mostly slow, 180-degree hairpins," he explained.

"The GP4 worked well during winter tests at Valencia, which is also quite stop and go. The bike still isn't perfect in fast corners but it is good in slower corners," revealed the Italian. "The main thing we are working on now is front-end confidence, so that our riders can really attack high-speed corners."