German MotoGP: Valentino Rossi motivated for milestone 250th race

Valentino Rossi insists he’s still motivated for the challenge of improving Ducati’s flagging fortunes as the Italian prepares to start his 250th Grand Prix in Germany this weekend.

Rossi has scored only one podium so far for the Bologna factory and he was humbled on home soil recently when he finished nearly 30 seconds behind race winner Jorge Lorenzo in Mugello.

Rossi is still trying to make big progress in solving a long-running front-end issue with the Ducati and he will continue with further set-up experiments on the new GP11.1 machine he’s been running since Assen at the Sachsenring this weekend.

The GP11.1 is basically the GP12 chassis and rear suspension Ducati was developing for next year’s new 1000cc class, but fitted with the current 800cc motor.

The new bike hasn’t sparked a sudden upturn in fortunes for Rossi and Ducati, but the 32-year-old says he’s not ready to throw in the towel.

The nine-times world champion said: “It is not a good moment for us and we have to work to be closer to the top guys. It is more difficult because the effort for fifth place is the same as the effort to win. When things are going well you have a lot of extra motivation and the atmosphere is good and you feel fast.

“When you have problems it is more difficult but we won’t give up and we have to stay concentrated and we know we have a good potential. Unfortunately in the last two races we have to fight a lot with the weather because in Assen and Mugello we don’t work enough on the bike with conditions always not so good. It looks like with the new model we have fixed some problems but we still have some other issues and we need to try and fix them to improve the performance.”