Ducati says MotoGP rivals' progress masking its own gains

Gobmeier, who supplanted Filippo Preziosi at the end of 2012, admitted that Ducati was struggling to match its rivals even though it had made steps forward with its own bike.

"Even with a lot of changes that we have made we still struggle to catch up," he explained.

"The level of performance, what we see from the competitors, is very high, especially from Jorge [Lorenzo] and Dani [Pedrosa, who both] made some real big advances.

"This is just an intermediate result that we are having, though. So far we are pretty happy with it."

Gobmeier said much of Ducati's initial testing work was geared towards identifying the team's future development path, although it has also made identifiable progress in several areas.

"We made some changes from the first to the second day, [then we did] a few additional things to find out a direction for the future," he explained.

"This is just to confirm about the direction and future developments which need some more time.

"[At the next test] there will be some additional pieces that we want to test on the engine, electronics and chassis side, so there is always a little bit more that we want to try.

"If they are new things we want to see whether the direction is right, and with the existing things we just want to always confirm that the result is the same as last time, because you always have to look from track to track.

"We have tried to play around with the centre of gravity and weight distribution, and the fuel tank has really helped us.

"I try and get the opinion of all the riders, gather all the information of everybody to get a more global picture of what's going on, and we are pretty happy."