The doctor is struggling to find a cure for the GP11.1

Valentino Rossi struggled to a disappointing sixteenth on the starting grid of seventeen riders.

Valentino Rossi struggled to a disappointing sixteenth on the starting grid of seventeen riders. Using the latest Ducati GP11.1 which was supposed to cure the front end problems, Rossi's bike seems to be a very expensive prototype lemon. Rossi was over 1.6 seconds off the pace of pole man Casey Stoner and 0.925 seconds slower than fellow Ducati rider Nicky Hayden who is running the GP11 step 2 version. Talking of his frustrations with the bike, Rossi said, 'We are very upset, because we are struggling very much this weekend. I am very slow and close to last. For three races now we've used the new bike to try to improve on the performance of the old one. I tried this bike with the 1000 engine and it was not so bad, but with the 800 engine the bike became very difficult to ride and I cannot load the front of the bike. So our performance at the last three races has been very, very bad. Especially in practice. And here it has been worse. So now we think maybe to come back to the normal, standard, bike. I don't know when. Maybe after Brno We will decide after tomorrow. We've tried changing more or less everything on the bike and at the end the lap time and our performance does not improve. So I don't know what we can do for tomorrow's race, but we won't give up and will keep trying to improve.'