Following some very positive signs yesterday, Danilo Petrucci used the penultimate day of testing ahead of the season opener 2021 in about two weeks’ time to further adjust himself aboard the KTM RC16 machine, which he was riding for the first time at the Losail International Circuit last Saturday. The Italian lowered his lap time slightly by 0.083 seconds, concluding the day 0.792 seconds from the top 10.

On the other side of the Tech3 KTM Factory Racing garage, Iker Lecuona managed to improved his lap time in Qatar once again. He went 0.120 seconds quicker than on Wednesday, missing out on his teammate by just 0.300 seconds while following him closely in the standings one more time. The Spaniard aims to further get ready to race throughout the final day of testing tomorrow.

Danilo Petrucci

Position: 19^th

Time: 1:54.895

Laps: 49

“It has been a quite difficult day, because we didn’t improve the setup a lot, as we had to try something. This made us lose some time and at the end, we didn’t find the step we were searching for.”

“Unfortunately, we didn’t find any solution today, so we still need to work on this. Yet, we still have one more day, where we aim to try to be faster and work with a difficult frame of mind. My feeling was basically the same as yesterday.”

Iker Lecuona

Position: 22^nd

Time: 1:55.195

Laps: 40

“To be honest, I’m a bit frustrated about today. I went down one more time, although I didn’t do anything different, so I didn’t understand why this happened. Yet, I definitely lost a bit of my confidence after this, so I had to work harder in order to gain it back.”

“It was not easy and the lap times didn’t come like I was wishing. We struggle a bit at this track, but we have some good ideas to try out tomorrow to improve.”