Gibernau gets 'tyred'.
Sete Gibernau led more laps than any other rider in Sunday's Turkish Grand Prix, heading 9 of the 22 circulations, but finished just 11th after tyre problems ended any hope of a debut Ducati podium.
"There's not much to say really apart from that
we had a rear-tyre problem," sighed Gibernau. "I couldn't do anything about it. The bike was working okay and I was feeling comfortable in the lead, but from lap four I started to feel some vibration from the rear.
I was thinking about coming into the pits to change the tyre but I decided to keep going. It's a pity, I was feeling confident."
Team-mate Loris Capirossi, who went into the race leading the world championship, ended the first lap in seventh - then slipped back to eighth - before fighting up to sixth on the final lap, but has now lost his points lead to Nicky Hayden.
"I can't say I'm happy with sixth, that's not where we should be," said Loris, who was the top Bridgestone finisher. "This weekend we were pretty good in the wet but we didn't have enough time to prepare for a dry race, so it didn't go as we had expected. Anyway, we are just one point off the World Championship lead and we scored some useful points for what is a very long and difficult championship.
"We did well to take home what we could, plus we were also the first Bridgestone team at the finish. We knew this track might be difficult, so we came here with many tyres but we preferred not to risk new tyres for the race, choosing what we thought would be best. Now we go to China, which will be another difficult track, so we will keep working like crazy. We started the season in the best way and now we have to maintain that focus and keep doing our best," he insisted.
"That wasn't a great day for us. For sure, we got much less than we expected after practice and morning warm-up. We certainly suffered from having no dry track time yesterday because we couldn't do any long runs with race tyres, but that was the same for everyone, of course," added Ducati MotoGP project manager Livio Suppo. "We knew that we had to keep our feet on the ground after our great results at Jerez and Qatar and we knew this would be a difficult track for us. We must keep our positive attitude, and at least it was great to see Sete lead for nine laps and Loris fight like a lion to gain the 6th position."
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