Andrea Dovizioso admits he thought his split times during his MotoGP pole lap for the Czech Grand Prix was “wrong”, as he reckoned they were “too fast”.
Dovizioso made a steady start to the second 15-minute shootout session at Brno on Saturday, beginning his final lap of Q2 down in eighth spot.
The Ducati rider produced a 1:54.689s lap to usurp provisional poleman Marc Marquez, and get to within a tenth of the outright lap record set by the Honda man in 2016.
Surprised by the lap, Dovizioso admits the time rather than the pole – his first since the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix – made him “happier”, and believes the way he achieved top spot was “important”.
“I didn't expect, I felt good but not like this,” Dovizioso said afterwards.
“When I start the last lap I feel really good support from the bike and was able to brake really hard, the bike was answering [to my demands] in a perfect way.
“During the lap I started to think the intermediate [times] were wrong, because the laptime was too fast. Sometimes this happens.”
He added: “I'm happier about the laptime rather than about the pole position. I never did a lot of pole positions in my career, it's not my style. So I'm not too focused on that.
“But in the way we did the pole position today was important because I didn't have anybody in front of me, and I was able to push really hard to make in a perfect way a good laptime.”
Speaking about the race, he believes he and Ducati has “done everything we could” in preparation for Sunday by securing pole and the evaluation work he did with different tyre options during practice.
“We start in the first practice with a good speed. That helped us a lot to be able to put a lot of laps on the rear tyre for the race.
“That is the key, everybody knows. We did with two tyres more than race distance, this is very important.
“So we did everything we could for the race. I don't know if it will be enough, but I have a good confidence.”
Dovizioso tested the new Ducati aero package Danilo Petrucci debuted on Friday, and confirmed he will race it, though remains uncertain of its exact benefits.
“Looks like we will use tomorrow. The difference [compared to the other package] is not clear, it's always difficult [to understand] when you try something like that.
“It's difficult to understand exactly the difference. Looks a bit bit better on the braking, maybe, but from the morning to the afternoon we change also the tyres.
“So we didn't have enough time to make a realy comparison, so it's not clear the positive things and if there is any negative things.”
