Maverick Vinales is looking to translate his impressive Friday practice performance into a strong result on Sunday after finishing the opening day at Silverstone in second place. The Suzuki rider was quickest of all in the morning before being usurped by Ducati’s Andrea Iannone in the afternoon but the Spaniard remained ahead of the pre-race favourites.
As Vinales alluded to afterwards, this isn’t the first time he has shown good pace on a Friday but he believes his performance on all tyres, in all conditions, bodes well for a good weekend.
“We are the champions of a Friday!” he joked. “I did almost the entire second practice on used tyres to understand the electronics when the tyre wears down so I want to be ready for the last part of the race. In Austria we missed that so I want to learn from what happened in Austria. With both tyres I feel good. This morning I did the lap time with the hard and I felt good and this afternoon I tried the soft so with both tyres I feel good. We will see tomorrow which has more grip over one lap.”
Having run a single set of tyres for much of FP2, Vinales switched to new rubber in the closing minutes and he admitted that was a deliberate tactic with tomorrow’s weather forecast in mind.
“We put the new tyre in at the end because we don’t know if it will rain or not tomorrow, for the qualifying. We still have a lot to improve and Andrea (Iannone) did a really fast lap time. In sectors 3 and 4 we need to improve. Here it’s difficult because you need to do laps and laps to find the good lines.”
