Was Lorenzo's Ducati debut as bad as it looked?

Jorge Lorenzo has been in plenty of on-track battles, and late in races, during his decorated MotoGP career. He's won plenty of them, too.

But his fight with Loris Baz towards the end of the 2017 Qatar Grand Prix will have been about as inglorious and sobering as they come. This isn't a shot at Baz, but no matter how low Ducati and Lorenzo tried to set the bar, fighting for 11th place with a satellite rider on a two-year-old bike is not what they had in mind for the Spaniard's first weekend in red.

"Disappointing," was Lorenzo's summary post-race, having repassed Baz with three laps to go to finish 11th by less than a second.

How did a rider who has been hired by Ducati to win its first riders' championship since Casey Stoner in 2007, and just its second ever, get here?

Ducati has made good progress with its Desmosedici, since Gigi Dall'Igna arrived late in 2013 and inherited a directionless outfit with a bike only Stoner could master. It failed to reach the podium that year, but grabbed three in 2014, eight in '15 and last year won races - two - for the first time since Stoner's final season in red in '10, amid nine podiums.

It moved to sign Lorenzo 12 months ago, when he stalled on the Yamaha contract offer he sought, and got the deal done, landing the final piece of the puzzle it craved. Nearly the entire 2016 season passed before Lorenzo was able to ride a Ducati, for two days, at Valencia just after the finale.

Lorenzo couldn't talk at the time, but every indication coming out of Ducati was positive. He looked to be settling into the bike nicely, his lap times weren't terrible and the body language was encouraging. Sure, he didn't grab the headlines like Maverick Vinales slotting seamlessly into his old Yamaha garage, but he would not have been battling too many sleepless nights based on what he found.

When Lorenzo could talk Ducati, at its season launch in the middle of January, he spoke about being pleasantly surprised by the bike, and not just what its engine is capable of.

"It's so powerful, it looks like a nervous bike, but it's not," he said.

"It's easy to keep control both on the straights and also in the corners. It's an incredible surprise."

The 2017 tests were a real eye opener, starting with 17th on the first day at Sepang. That was when it became clear, probably to Lorenzo himself, that there was a mountain to be climbed to get the most out of this very different motorcycle.

He finished that test 10th, and chipped away at it more at Phillip Island and Losail to be eighth and fourth in the final two tests.

That last test a fortnight earlier should have given Lorenzo a good platform to attack the season opener, at a circuit where he has enjoyed a lot of success, and that suits the Ducati. Just about any 2016 MotoGP highlights package you may have watched will have featured Andreas Dovizioso and Iannone waltzing past Lorenzo's Yamaha down the Qatar front straight early in last year's race.

Predictably, Lorenzo and Ducati tried to keep expectations in check. The new recruit spoke about there still being more work to do, that he wasn't yet ready to start thinking about the championship - Dall'Igna said "we are not ready to do it" of the manufacturer itself - and even that he expected Dovizioso to lead the way on pace in the first part of the season, based on the Italian having been with Ducati since 2013.

Still, he was in a "confident and optimistic mood" and "sure we'll be quick right from the start".

As it turns out, the first practice session was as far as Lorenzo made it up the order. He finished that fifth with a time of 1m55.607s, 1.291 seconds slower than Vinales. It is worth noting that Vinales led the way with a margin of 0.596s and even third-placed Dani Pedrosa was 0.894s adrift.

I was watching Lorenzo, in particular, trackside in second practice on early Friday evening. He tried a couple of different lines through Turn 1, and looked to be working harder to get more lean angle on the Ducati for the second/late apex there that sends riders towards Turn 2.

Track conditions weren't great - the best time was seven tenths slower than in first practice - and Lorenzo was one of the few front-runners to improve on his Thursday effort. It was only by 0.003s and he was eighth, but within 0.519s of the top.

Third practice netted another small gain, of 0.143s and he was ninth, 0.627s off the ultimate pace. However the net result of the three practice sessions was that he was 12th in the order, Lorenzo's best 1.145s slower than Vinales' - who finished 0.532s clear - and four tenths slower than fifth-placed Dovizioso.

His best effort across the three sessions was 0.942s slower than he managed in testing. Dovizioso was 0.641s adrift. Three 45-minute sessions on a race weekend is a very different kettle of fish to three days of testing. But in the top three in practice, Vinales improved by 0.014s from the test, Suzuki's Iannone 0.436s and Marc Marquez 0.078s on his Honda.

Lorenzo had missed out on an automatic spot in the second phase of qualifying by just 0.047s to old team-mate Valentino Rossi, but he was still bullish on Friday evening. The Ducati, in windy conditions that Lorenzo said don't suit the bike, was better over a longer run, even if it had lost some of the "explosivity" required for a quick single lap.

Gains had also been made on corner entry, braking has been one of the biggest areas Lorenzo has had to redefine in his style since the Sepang test, and exit, even if he lost a little bit mid-corner.

"I think we are better than yesterday," he said.

"In general, the consistency has been a huge improvement and tomorrow we will try to change a bit more the setting so we don't lose in those areas, and to keep the good improvement we made today."

And he still reckoned he could still get through Q1 and "fight for the first row or the second row" with a couple of extra changes. It wasn't flashy but generally harmless enough, progress and consistency were the key words.

Lorenzo did not get the chance to tackle Q1 or Q2 on Saturday, or fourth practice, with all of the day's running washed out in frankly farcical circumstances. It was the right decision, the track copped a lot of rain from the very early hours into the afternoon and it's understandable that drainage would not be at the top of the list when you are building a racetrack in the desert.

However that 80% of the track (ex-racer and safety representative Loris Capirossi's number) could be bone dry, but rivers be running across the middle of the main straight and some corners was amateur hour. And that's before we get to gravel traps and run-off areas that resembled lakes.

So that cost Lorenzo 45 minutes of practice running, plus 15 or 30 minutes of track time in qualifying, depending on whether he made Q2. And, potentially, even the 20 from the 'track evaluation' session that was initially scheduled to test glare on the wet surface under lights.

The other 22 riders on the grid also lost those sessions, though. And Lorenzo had spent 14 days riding the Ducati since November, 12 in the preceding two months on the 2017 bike, so another 95 minutes (maximum) of running was hardly going to change the world.

Then came the protracted race on Sunday, threatened and delayed by rain. Lorenzo opted for the soft rear tyre, which Dovizioso switched to just before the eventual start, and moved from 12th to eighth at the first corner.

He made a mistake on the run into Turn 4, though, running wide and dropping to 16th. Any hopes of a good result to mark his Ducati debut were effectively over, however there was still a chance to make a statement with a fighting ride.

Lorenzo ended up topping the speed trap in the race, by 2.68mph over Dovizioso, but that was the only thing even remotely worth writing home about. He completed the first lap four seconds behind Tech3 rookie Johann Zarco, who sensationally led the way on a 2016 Yamaha.

Making the most of the M1 Rossi describes as "friend of the rider", Zarco's average time on the first five flying laps - including the fastest of the race - was 1.56.387s. Dovizioso worked his way up to second averaging 1m56.550s. Admittedly running in plenty of traffic, Lorenzo averaged 1m57.246s.

That early block included Lorenzo's best lap of the race, a 1m56.744s, and was one of just four laps he recorded sub-1m57s across the 20-lap distance. Dovizioso managed 18 laps in the 1m56s barrier, only dipping out of it once, and only by 0.157s on a lap he was passed by Vinales, if you take out the first lap from a standing start.

The crashes of Zarco, Iannone, Cal Crutchlow and Alvaro Bautista helped Lorenzo move into ninth place by lap nine, along with overtaking moves on Danilo Petrucci, Baz and Suzuki rookie Alex Rins. He was 7.457s behind new leader Dovizioso at the time, but his race unravelled further on the run home.

Lorenzo lapped in the 1m57s for the rest of the race, and three times even fell into the 1m58s bracket; on lap 15 when he was passed by newcomers Jonas Folger and Rins to drop to 11th and then the following tour when he was passed by Baz.

At that time, Lorenzo says he "started to lose confidence in the tyres and my bike became a lot more physical to ride". It's worth remembering he struggled even with the Yamaha at times last year, when he lost confidence with Michelin's front in cool conditions, which in theory should be more rider-friendly this year.

By the end of the race Lorenzo was 20.055s behind Dovizioso, who finished a gallant second after taking the fight to Vinales. On the same tyres, Lorenzo was an average of 1.145s/lap slower than Dovizioso over the second half of the race.

Lorenzo's gap to the race leader

Time difference over 20 laps

He got back past Baz with three laps to go to at least grab 11th and five points rather than four, but was also beaten by 10.734s by Scott Redding, who finished seventh on his Pramac-run 2016 Ducati.

"The start was very good, I recovered three or four positions, I was behind Pedrosa and Valentino," Lorenzo said, with that pair finishing fifth and third respectively.

"Probably without this [off] in the fourth corner I could stay with them at the beginning, until the middle of the race. For sure I was not able to keep the same pace all the race, because when I started dropping the rear [tyre], I was not able to stay in the 1m56s.

"But at the beginning, I struggled so much to stay in the 1m56s - I was in 1m58s, 1m57s - but little by little with warmer tyres I was going to this time. I did five or six laps in this lap time, very close and almost faster than the top guys.

"But in a lot of moments in the race I was too slow to finish closer [to the leaders]. Conditions don't help, but to be honest I'm still not prepared to fight for something big."

Even though Dovizioso's Ducati experience will have helped him extend the life of the rear tyre, Lorenzo's fastest lap was also 0.499s slower. And Dovizioso set his best time on lap 17, when he reckoned the tyre was past its best, Lorenzo on lap six.

"I think today we were worse than we are," Lorenzo said. "We are not so bad.

"I tried to do the best, but sometimes the best is bad. I didn't do a good race, because of some mistakes, some bad feelings. You always try to do the best, and today the best gives me this 11th position, 20 seconds from the win."

As you read this on Wednesday, Lorenzo will likely be lapping Jerez as Ducati completes a private test day. Many expected Qatar to be a soft-landing for Lorenzo to start with, given his and Ducati's record there. The sterner tests would come at tracks like Jerez, when the championship starts its European run in May.

Qatar was a genuine wake-up call, a stark reminder of the work that he still has to do if he is to go from a rider who knew how to make a Yamaha tick innately to getting the best out of a Ducati that is still being developed. It would be naive to write Lorenzo off, even if he was absolutely correct that his race was "bad".

It's not panic stations, but that tough weekend will only make the spotlight on Lorenzo that much brighter in the weeks and races ahead.