Dovizioso upbeat on Jerez chances

The Italian, making his MotoGP debut in the Qatari race, finished in fourth position after beating Yamaha rival Valentino Rossi with a daring pass in the dying moments of the event.

Dovizioso is now looking to build on his promising start, although the JiR Team Scot rider admits Jerez is not among his preferred tracks.

"The Jerez circuit is not my favourite one, but with my MotoGP bike I did very well there in testing as I was riding consistently and I did some very good times," said the Italian in a team preview.

"I'm confident that we can do very well and now we have done the first race I have learnt a lot of things that you can only learn while racing with other riders on the track at the same time.

"It will be a very hard weekend, because the other riders want to give their maximum performance - more so than at the championship tests.

"I think we have a good technical base set-up but during practice we have to work on the braking of the bike and also the acceleration in low the RPM regimes from around 2000-4000rpm."