Yesterday was not a good day in the factory Ducati camp but it was marvellous if you had one of their old, hand-me-down, second-hand models that were a chunk faster in both Argentine MotoGP free practice sessions.

Andrea Dovizioso expressed some anger as an as-yer-untraced glitch saw him tumble down the timesheets to 14th while Jorge Lorenzo blamed a mix-up on tyre strategy for his poor performance on the GP17.

“We don't know. Electronics, clutch or something like that, we don't know. We're working now to try and understand exactly what happened,” saud Dovizioso, speaking at the track.

“I don't think it's something big but, it's big to manage the bike because the grip is very low here. I couldn't slide how I wanted, so I couldn't decide the line and it was very bad. But the negative point is the position. I am angry about that because tomorrow can be wet and it's something that doesn't have to happen."

Lorenzo, meanwhile, said the wrong front tyre was the cause of his issue and his times would be remedied forthwith:

“We use the softer one when the conditions were not for the soft. I didn’t know, I thought I had the medium. I didn’t understand why the front was closing so much, but then after practice I understood that we made a mistake.

“And this for sure meant we missed… not the top five, but closer than where we are now. We are 18th, but we are very close. With the right front tyre for sure we would be much better in the classification.”

Karel Abraham and Alvaro Baustista are third and fourth and on a GP15 and GP16 respectively.