Performance review of Andrea Dovizioso in 2012 MotoGP season – MotoGP Special
The 26-year-old Italian rider, Andrea Dovizioso having made a switch from Repsol Honda Team to Monster Yamaha Tech 3 had quite a run in the 2012 MotoGP season.
Dovizioso started off the season with 5th position in the Qatar Grand Prix, finishing only 0.306 seconds behind his Monster Yamaha teammate Cal Crutchlow. Similar were the results in the Spanish Grand Prix, only this time the gap between Dovizioso and was
15.635 seconds.
In the next round, the Yamaha teammates switched places with Dovizioso finishing 4th in the Portuguese Grand Prix, 10.225 seconds behind Dani Pedrosa, the bronze medal winner. In the French Grand Prix, Dovizioso finished 7th, with a total of 44 champion
points until then.
The first podium finish of the season came for Dovizioso in the Catalan Grand Prix where he finished 3rd beating his teammate Crutchlow by a mere 0.183 seconds. The 6th race was season worst for Dovizioso where he finished 19th and did not score any championship
points.
In the Dutch TT, Dovizioso got his 2nd podium finish of the season finishing the round with 3rd position, 2.781 seconds ahead of Ben Spies. Dovizioso again finished 3rd in both German and Italian Grand Prix. With first half of the season over, he had 108
championship points to his name.
Starting the second half of the season, Dovizioso finished 4th, 1 position ahead of his teammate. In the Indianapolis Grand Prix, he posted the 5th podium of the season again finishing 3rd, 7.513 seconds behind Jorge Lorenzo who later went on to be the 2012
MotoGP World Champion.
Finishing the next two rounds 4th, Dovizioso had 163 championship points at the end of San Marino and Rimini’s Coast Grand Prix. For Dovizioso, 6th and the final podium of the season came in Aragon Grand Prix where he clinched yet another 3rd position again
finishing behind Lorenzo.
In the Japanese Grand Prix, Dovizioso, finishing 4th, lost a podium to Alvaro Bautista. Bautista finished comprehensively ahead of Dovizioso with a difference of 9.645 seconds between the two. Malaysian Grand Prix proved to be the second worst round of the
season for Dovizioso. He finished 13th in Malaysia.
With only 2 rounds to go in the championship, Dovizioso was 18 championship points behind Casey Stoner, his closest competitor for a 3rd place finish in riders’ championship. But Dovizioso could not post a podium position in any of the next two rounds and
thus could not win the championship bronze medal.
In the Australian Grand Prix, second last round of the season, Dovizioso finished 4th whereas Stoner won the round, the increasing the point difference to 24 between himself and Dovizioso. After Australia, the only way Dovizioso could have won 3rd place
in the championship was Dovizioso finishing with a victory and Stoner finishing with no points in the final round at Valencia. As expected, that did not materialise. In the Valencian Community Grand Prix, Dovizioso finished 6th thus ending the 2012 season
with overall 4th place in the championship and a total of 218 championship points.
Although Dovizioso could not clinch even a single victory in the 2012 season, still he held the record of being the only rider not to have retired from any of the rounds and having finished all 18 rounds of the season.
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