Qatar MotoGP: Valentino Rossi thrilled with Ducati breakthrough

For the first time in a long time, Valentino Rossi was sporting a beaming smile in the MotoGP paddock tonight.

The Italian was ecstatic having enjoyed his most productive 45-minutes to date on board Ducati’s factory GP11 as the 32-year-old claimed the fifth quickest time at the end of the first free practice in Qatar.

Rossi went into tonight’s first session on the back of a confidence-draining two-night test at the Losail International Circuit in Doha earlier this week.

The nine-times world champion crashed twice and only finished in 13th position earlier this week.

Yet he clocked a best time of 1.56.479 tonight to finish just over a tenth-of-a-second away from Dani Pedrosa in second.

Rossi though was a massive 0.727s adrift of a rampant Casey Stoner, who continued his imperious form to set the only sub-1.56 lap of the night.

Rossi said: “We finished tonight with a smile when before we have been crying. We modified the settings from the test and after some laps I was able to go in 1.56.

“I was never able during the test to do that and from that moment we improved the bike. Also the position is not so bad and I ride the bike in a better way.

“Stoner is a bit faster but we are very close to Pedrosa and at the test the gap was more than one second. We still need to improve and we need to find another half a second, but we are a lot more positive.”

Rossi said the improvement had been made in the turning performance of the GP11, which has been a big weakness of the bike so far in pre-season testing.

He said: “We modified the setting to improve the turning and it worked. Now the bike goes where I want, especially at full throttle. The problem for me with this bike is from the beginning is front contact. With this modification we improved a lot.”

Rossi though doubts he’ll be able to pull off a repeat of his fairytale first race victory for Ducati like he did with Yamaha back in 2004 at the Welkom circuit in South Africa.

Stoner was looking too strong and he added: “I think Stoner is the favourite. He has been fast in all the tests and he’s very strong at this track. But we are not so far from Dani and for us that is a great achievement.”