Andrea Dovizioso says his second-place finish in the MotoGP Aragon Grand Prix is “more important” as it “confirms” Ducati's improvement.
The Aragon round proved to be one of Dovizioso's lowest points of his 2017 campaign, as he struggled to seventh, 7.4 seconds from race winner Marc Marquez.
Dovizioso led for much of the 23 laps of this year's Aragon race, and only missed the victory by 0.648s to Marquez after an intense battle with the Honda rider.
Both Misano and Aragon had been difficult tracks for himself and Ducati prior to this year, Dovizioso believes the result at the latter is 'more important for the future', and expressed his confidence of being competitive at Ducati's “worst track” of Phillip Island in Australia next month.
“Phillip Island for sure is the worst track for our bike and for sure will be an interesting weekend,” he said.
“I think we can be very competitive there this year, I don't think it will be like some other tracks.
“But what happened this weekend was very, very important, more than Misano.
“In Misano it was very important, but here even more because this confirms our improvement, and this improvement is the reality but is even better for the future.”
Dovizioso was reluctant to highlight which areas of the Ducati improved for the Aragon race, but felt being in a battle with Marquez allowed him to “understand a lot of things”.
“This is about our details, this isn't the place to speak about these details,” he added.
“But when you fight all race in this race like Marc, you are able to understand, analyse many things normally you can just see on TV.
“But when you are there, you can understand where he was better, worse, grip, how much he use the tyres, electronics, a lot of things.
“It's always about learn something, and small things is enough to take attention.”
Victory for Marquez at Aragon put him 72 points ahead of Dovizioso in the standings, which the Italian says is now an “impossible” gap to close.
“To gain 72 points to in five races to Marc is impossible. The only way is if he will not race, and even that is difficult to make 72 points.
“So if we wanna be realistic, no. In the race everything can happen, so it's open because mathematically it's open. But this is the situation.”
