Under the blazing German sunshine the solitary qualifying session for the MotoGP class was a confidence inspiring occasion for the Tech 3 Yamaha Team as lead rider, Carlos Checa qualified in 12th fastest position, just 1.1 seconds off pole position taken by Dani Pedrosa (Honda). In the final moments of the session, Carlos was denied the rare experience of being the leading Yamaha rider as world champion, Valentino Rossi relegated the experienced Spaniard one place on the grid by just 0.096 second. Teammate, James Ellison improved his time to move up the grid slightly but is nonetheless, disappointed that he ran out of time to improve his 18th place on the grid.
Carlos Checa (12th, 1'22.964, 33 laps)"Of course for us personally this is good as we are quite close to Valentino and at this moment he is the best rider even if here his position is not his usual. This weekend we have worked quite well heading in the right direction and making advances with the Dunlop race tyres but we still have some limitations especially with the qualifying tyres. We are ready for tomorrow with a pretty good setup and hopefully we can build on what we have been doing in the recent races. We cannot be perfectly satisfied with this situation because it is clear that all riders on Yamaha are struggling around here. "Anyway for the race I am more confident than I am with qualifying. We have a good tyre and I think the setting we have chosen for the race we will have a good pace but hopefully even though warmup is early tomorrow there will be enough heat in the track to do some more final testing to make sure we have made the right decisions. I must get a good start as if we are too far back in t he first corner with how close the lap times are it will be very difficult to move up many positions as it is also very hard to overtake around here.
James Ellison (18th 1'24.464, 28 laps)"I'm not happy as although I dropped my times, yesterday's sessions were a loss. With the setup we had on Friday you kind of lose your confidence because we had so many problems it takes time to build up confidence again. If you arrive at a circuit and the bike works it's awesome because you can build on it all weekend but when you start bad like it's very difficult to get your head up to speed again. We've been chipping away and slowly building to the times we wanted to get but we really wanted to get into the 23 second bracket. We made a couple of mistakes with the last qualifier so I'm very disappointed with that to be honest. We had another tyre lined up but we just ran out of time. We might've gone quicker, we might've gone slower - who knows - it would've just been nice to try it. I'm not happy at all as I have only qualified five-tenths faster than I did last year and I'm on a bike way more capable than what I had. That's the result, so I have to live with it and try a nd get a good start to get away with them and hopefully move up a few places."
Herve Poncharal - Tech3 Yamaha Team Director"It was another positive day for us as in the morning and afternoon Carlos was right up there with everybody else. For the majority of both sessions Carlos was the first Yamaha and it was only in the last seconds that Valentino got him but we are on the same row and in front of Colin Edwards. This makes us very happy - not to see Valentino and Colin so far back - but shows us the improvements that keep continuing with the Dunlop tyres. We are confident we can do a good first part of the race but because of the rain on Friday morning and all the setting changes we had to make, we didn't manage to do a full race distance in hot conditions as yesterday was a lot cooler on track.
Tomorrow's forecast is a lot hotter than today, so we are a little bit concerned about the last 10 laps of the race because 30 laps around here on a high temperature track is very demanding on tyres - this is our main worry to see how those 10 laps unfold but I guess we have to wait and see. We have impr oved on our qualifying tyres but unfortunately the last run of Carlos for some reason we couldn't improve. If we had dropped another tenth of a second we could be a row closer because the lap times are so close but our main concern is durability and race distance more than grid position. It was also quite a good improvement from James. Yesterday he was nowhere and today he is running low to mid 1'24 second laps, which for MotoGP is a fairly decent lap time. Let's hope he can run at that pace for the entire race because there are guys in front of him that he can stay with and hopefully pass during the race.""
Round: 10 - 2006 MotoGP Sachsenring
Circuit: Sachsenring
Circuit Length: 3671
Lap Record: 1' 23.705 (Sete Gibernau, 2005)
Fastest Lap Ever: 1' 21.815 (Daniel Pedrosa, 2006)
Date: 15 July 2006
Temp: 22ºC
Session 1: 1 D. Pedrosa Honda ESP 1' 21.815
2 K. Roberts Team Roberts KR USA 1' 21.907
3 N. Hayden Honda USA 1' 22.083
4 S. Nakano Kawasaki JPN 1' 22.273
5 L. Capirossi Ducati ITA 1' 22.329
6 M. Melandri Honda ITA 1' 22.420
7 S. Gibernau Ducati ESP 1' 22.469
8 C. Stoner Honda AUS 1' 22.577
9 J. Hopkins Suzuki USA 1' 22.701
10 M. Tamada Honda JPN 1' 22.866
11 V. Rossi Yamaha ITA 1' 22.868
12 C. Checa Yamaha ESP 1' 22.964
13 R. De Puniet Kawasaki FRA 1' 22.974
14 C. Vermeulen Suzuki AUS 1' 23.050
15 C. Edwards Yamaha USA 1' 23.087
16 T. Elias Honda ESP 1' 23.660
18 J. Ellison Yamaha GBR 1' 24,464.000
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