Ducati: "Winning is an objective, not a promise"

The Ducati factory team has only 150km to travel from its base for this weekend's San Marino Grand Prix.

And, naturally, racing on home turf brings great expectations to the Italian team and it is probably where Ducati would most love to meet its main goal for 2015 - winning a race.

“That is our main target,” Dall'Igna told Motorsport.com.

“That’s the goal we set ourselves at the beginning of the year and I don’t think it’s necessary to revise it."

He continued: “I think there are specific tracks and conditions that might help us to win a race this year. Almost all tracks we’ll race on until the end of the season should suit the GP15. Additionally, some of them nicely suit the driving style of our riders.

“I am confident. And I believe that the goal that we set ourselves at the beginning of the season must remain unchanged. After all, it’s an objective, not a promise,” Dall'Igna declared.

The recent tests at Misano

Dall'Igna doesn’t want to create heightened expectations among the fans by claiming that Ducati will win at home.

He is fully aware that the Italian make has not had great success at the recent San Marino Grands Prix, their last podium at Misano dating back to 2011 with the somewhat unexpected second place of Valentino Rossi.

To prepare for this year's race, Ducati performed a two-day test at Misano two weeks ago.

Dall'Igna stressed that the objective of the test was to validate recent technical upgrades of the GP15.

"We did not work specifically on the race set-up, but to validate the recent technical updates we have introduced during the past few races. We performed most of that work with [Andrea] Dovizioso because [Andrea] Iannone didn’t ride that much,” he added.

“We wanted to verify if all updates were working properly and we managed to find a compromise between the various set-ups we ran so far in 2015.

“I think we now have a much better platform than what we had until Brno”, he continued.

“However, since we worked on very specific components of the bike, I cannot say if this test will be really useful for the Misano race. The track conditions were not so good to perform a genuine pre-race test [as the track was wet in the morning].

“We managed to identify the problem which caused us problems in previous races, especially in Barcelona and at the Sachsenring,” Dall'Igna explained.

“Of course, we cannot claim that we solved the problem once for all. But we put our finger on it and we implemented measures to minimize its effects, so it’s something that makes me confident.

Dovizioso said that he had a better feel for the bike at Silverstone and Ducati will want to confirm that the machine had really progressed.

However, the hard-working yet stoic Dall'Igna will never asset that Ducati will win this weekend in Italy.

“Misano is not at all like Silverstone. We’ll see”, he said.

“That said, things went relatively well last year, especially with Dovizioso. I expect him to run a strong race here because this track suits his riding style well."

Interview by Matteo Nugnes