Reuters/Doha

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Valentino Rossi’s legacy as MotoGP’s greatest ever rider is in danger of being further eroded by another lacklustre season with Ducati and the Italian is under no illusions about how difficult this year could be.
The season begins at the Losail track in Qatar on Sunday and Rossi, a nine-times world champion across the classes, will have to work hard throughout the year if he is to better last year’s seventh place finish on the uncompetitive Italian bike. 
“We worked hard over the winter and although we went the wrong direction at one point, we once again managed to find the good feeling with the GP12 that we’d had in the first test,” the 33-year-old said in a team release yesterday. 
“I’m a realist and I know well that our times are still a long way off and that there are still some things to fix.
“We won’t be able to address some of them right away, but it’s also true that both we at the track and the guys back home now have a direction to work in and we must try to do as well as we can.”
Last year’s world champion Casey Stoner, formerly of Ducati, is favourite to retain his title on his Honda.
Rossi, who last won the championship in 2009, moved to Ducati from Honda last year but the dream tie-up between Italy’s most famous rider and most famous bike manufacturer did not work out as planned.
Ferrari’s similar woes in Formula One have led pundits to wonder whether Rossi made an error in not switching to four wheels when he had the chance with the Italians in 2006 and again in 2009.
The death of friend and compatriot Marco Simoncelli in the Malaysia Grand Prix last October hit him hard but rumours of retirement were soon denied despite Ducati’s difficulties.
Their current plight after poor testing times means small milestones are all Rossi is left to cling to.
“We won’t completely redo the bike during the season, but we’ll try to progress little by little,” he said.
Dorna Sports launch brand new MotoGP  Live Experience app
For the 2012 season, Dorna Sports SL has developed a brand new application to enhance how MotoGP  fans experience the World Championship, with a brand new interface and a range of functionalities. The MotoGP  Live Experience is the only official application to offer access to Live Timing of each practice, qualifying session and race, but also to a wide range of contents.
The MotoGP  Live Experience app allows users to follow the 2012 season with Live Timing and real-time tracking from all 18 rounds of the MotoGP  World Championship - so the user knows what is going on at the circuit and how their favourite rider is performing at any point throughout the Grand Prix.
The key features of the app are real-time tracking which allows users to follow any rider in real-time around the track, and the live timing which charts each session and race as it unfolds with extensive live timing data. During the sessions and races from all three classes there is also live text commentary giving updates on the key moments of each race/session, with rider and incident notifications.
Apart from the Grand Prix coverage, the MotoGP  Live Experience includes a lot of additional data such as a MotoGP  Guide with statistics and information about the events, riders and teams, and also access to all the latest news, photos and videos.