He hoped for it, he dreamed of it, but he lost it by a hair’s breadth. Fabio Di Giannantonio came close to achieving the feat in the Lusail Sprint, where he finished in second position behind only the elusive Jorge Martin, who once again proved to be the fastest on the grid. Diggia However, in his latest outings with the Gresini team, he is making his talent count and in the last few laps he has threatened the Spaniard of the Pramac team, only to then finish second, even if just under four tenths behind the star of the day.
The 11 laps of the race were not all easy for the Roman, who made a less than excellent start and was forced to fight with the starting device stuck in the first corners: “My start was terrible, it’s very difficult to find the right point with the clutch because you have to fight with the bike that pushes a lot. Where we start it is very dirty, sometimes it slides, other times it doesn’t, so it is very difficult to find a good point for the take-off. I then had another problem, because for half of the first lap the front device didn’t release.”
“It fooled me a bit because already from the second lap the front tire went up with the temperature and pressure,” he says Diggia to the microphones of Sky Sport MotoGP referring to the now well-known problem of the front tire which often affects the riders’ races. “So I had the front moving a lot, so I said to myself ‘ok, now we have to manage and pass’. It was a complicated race, but I had a lot of fun. I knew I had great pace. Since I didn’t want to risk too much, let’s say I woke up a little too late to go and get Jorge and when I was behind him it was difficult because I was at the limit in front, not so much in speed but in movement. But if all Sprints were like this… Not bad!
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
Fabio Di Giannantonio, Gresini Racing
Yes, it’s not bad to find yourself in the season finale like this. Uncertainty about the future seems to burden Di Giannantonio, who is proving that he deserves the MotoGP and even today he proved it with a solid race which is a sign of a lot of work and great growth. In some phases of the Sprint he even threatened Martin’s first position, only to then have to follow, but was there really a possibility of beating the Spaniard if it hadn’t been for a complicated start? Diggia doesn’t rule out this possibility: “I think I could have done a little better than that. In my opinion my pace wasn’t too fast, but I could have been, especially at the beginning. I could have made the real difference at the beginning and saved the front tire, because then I would have managed it better towards the end. I could have beaten Jorge, but with ifs and buts you get nowhere. So we just have to work and try to beat him tomorrow.”
One of the secrets is to study his moves, which the Gresini standard bearer has done: “Basically, Martin is precise. It’s true that he definitely makes mistakes every now and then, but when he gets into his rhythm, he’s really consistent. I study it a lot, but what got me today is the temperature that went up. I struggled in the mixed race to ride precisely and stay tight, I fought in the hope that it would never close, we missed this a bit. The third sector is where I lost a bit, but the three fast ones on the right and the penultimate one on the left were very good for me. That’s where I was able to get really close to him. But when I was close to him, the front tire was closing and so I always lost a little. It was a bit of a rubber band.”
Once the Sprint has been archived, the time has come for Di Giannantonio to look towards Sunday’s race, which will see double the number of laps and will be more complicated, especially in terms of strategy: “We made some changes to the bike which in my opinion were not great. move, with the benefit of hindsight. But I know perfectly well where we can work to try to improve and in my opinion we can make a big step, especially when exiting corners. On entry, however, we have to try to close the corner better, but that depends on where you are and how far you are from the rider in front, for the sake of temperature. When the pressure is lower, you are able to stop the bike better and turn much tighter. So we’re looking for a combination of things and I think we can take a step tomorrow.”
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