Valentino Rossi anticipating difficult Indianapolis weekend

Valentino Rossi is anticipating another difficult race in Indianapolis this weekend, despite recent improvements to the performance of his factory Ducati GP11.1 machine.

The Italian used new front-end parts at the last race in Brno and the modifications gave Rossi much more confidence in the braking zone and corner entry.

He was still only sixth but he finished just over 12 seconds behind race winner Casey Stoner, which was the first time he’d finished within 26 seconds of the victory since the Catalunya round in early June.

Rossi had an exhaustive one-day test after the Brno race, the nine-times world champion working on a range of geometry and weight distribution settings to find a future direction with the Desmosedici.

Ducati technical guru Filippo Preziosi and chassis design specialists from the Bologna factory were present at the Brno test so they could get first hand feedback from Rossi on the vast array of changes made to his bike.

And Rossi said while he optimistic that improvements would be made in the future, his bike would feature no new parts at this weekend’s Indianapolis round.

The 32-year-old said: “The test was long and difficult and it wasn’t for Indianapolis but more for the future, though the target for the next races is to make a weekend like in Brno where we stayed in the top six and fighting with the other guys not so far from the podium. In Indy it will be difficult because it is not one of my favourite tracks but we will try.”

Although he had no new parts to test in Brno, Rossi still believes the session was hugely beneficial and he added: “We did a lot of tests and we made a lot of different settings. We don’t work very much on the speed but we try to take away some of the doubts with this bike. We work a lot on the weight distribution moving the bike up and down and long and short and we have some good data and we can fix the problems one by one, unfortunately we can’t put all together. I think the work is important because we have some engineers from Ducati that say to us try the bike in different ways so they can understand it. We have some good information for the way to turn the bike or to increase the rear grip. Now we need something to put all of this together.”