MotoGP: Pramac Ducati crew chiefs rate their riders

It’s been a bittersweet start to the 2017 MotoGP season for the Pramac Ducati pair of Danilo Petrucci and Scott Redding, with the Italian enjoying a strong start to the season and podium pace while his British teammate has struggled towards the back of the field.

But there’s no one that knows what goes on inside the garage – and inside their riders’ heads – than their crew chiefs, and the Pramac Ducati squad have recruited Daniele Romagnoli and Cristhian Pupulin to rate their riders during the mid-season break.

Petrucci has had a strong start to the season with podium success at home in Mugello and front row starts multiple times – but despite that, Romagnoli says that he believes that the Italian could have done even better still – and has time to prove it in the second half of the year.

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“I can say that the first part of the season has gone well and beyond all the expectations. Especially, Mugello was a huge turning point that gave us great satisfaction. If we think at what we did in Mugello and Assen and the qualifying in Barcelona and Sachsenring, I will give a good eight out of ten.

“It was a great satisfaction to go at podium in Mugello with an Italian rider, for me it was almost like winning. Then at Assen we were almost there, and a win there would allow us to get a nine or even a ten. However, we will work hard in order to achieve what we could not in the first part of the season.”

On the other side of the garage, Pupulin is more circumspect, however, admitting that Scott Redding’s start to the season has been disappointing based on their expectations.

“Let’s say that a general rating could be five and a half out of ten. We have obtained great results during free practice and we managed to be fast. However, we were not able to put that performance into the race for various reason. We struggled on race distance and we didn’t manage to get the best feeling that could have helped Scott to make important steps forward.

“Some mistake during the races maybe penalised him, so at the moment we did not get the result that we actually deserve for the performance we have. For this reason, the overall evaluation is slightly negative.”

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