Team Gresini Heads To Home Away From Home In Indonesia

How can a place 12 thousand km away from Faenza’s HQ be considered home by Team Gresini MotoGP? It can be, if the track is the Mandalika International Circuit. With a huge fan base in Indonesia, and with a strong network of partnerships in the Southeast Asian country, the team led by Nadia Padovani gets to the second event of the season as the absolute star.

The 25 points scored at the end of a masterful performance in Qatar make Enea Bastianini the first MotoGP World Championship leader of the year, and all the right ingredients are there to continue doing well at Mandalika. Preseason testing speaks clearly, even though there are many variables to take into consideration, starting from tyres to the areas of the track that have been resurfaced – without forgetting the question mark related to the weather.

Fabio Di Giannantonio gets ready for his second-ever MotoGP event. He also showed positive signs at Mandalika despite a poor physical condition. The #49 is now back to full fitness and returns to Indonesia with a touch more of experience after the many laps completed at Losail. He will try to improve on the 17th place finish secured in Qatar, but also – end especially – continue his learning curve aboard the Ducati Desmosedici GP21 machine.

MotoGP proceedings will get underway on Friday at 10:50 local time (GMT +8).

ENEA BASTIANINI #23 (Championship leader)

“I cannot wait to get to Indonesia. We’re coming from an incredible race in Qatar, where I claimed my first win in the series. It will be hard to do it again this time, but we surely showed a good pace during testing. They should have finished resurfacing some parts of the track, so I don’t know what to expect. Even tyres will be different compared to testing, but we have to continue working the same way we have been doing up until now. I expect a huge crowd and a lot of supporters of Gresini Racing. We’re eager to get started!”

FABIO DI GIANNANTONIO #49

“We’re returning to an incredible place, where we also have so many supporters. It’s always a great thing and it is important to be embraced by the people’s warm support – and I’m sure it will be this way at Mandalika. I’m getting to Indonesia with a bit more experience on how to manage the race, but obviously we’re still in the early stages of our journey: we want to learn, and we also want to do it with the right timeframe. The goal is to keep improving bit by bit, and we can do it at Mandalika.”