Aruba Ducati’s Marco Melandri still hasn’t found the front-end confidence he needs to up his WorldSBK game after testing at Misano but believes an experiment tried in his final runs might do the job.

Melandri has been suffering at both ends of the Panigale and a problem with rear stability on corner exit has now been sorted out, so the little Italian now only has to worry about stopping and turning.
“We can only be partially happy, I expected something more from these tests. We tried several setup configurations to improve the stability of the rear under acceleration while upshifting, and things have improved to this end,” said Melandri.

“However, we’re still struggling under braking to get the bike to stop and turn. I don’t have the necessary confidence to push as hard as I’d like with the front yet. We found something interesting in the final hours, but we couldn’t explore that setup further because we ran out of time. We’ll try to restart from there during FP1 at Misano. I’m confident we’ll soon be able to make strides.”