Valentino Rossi was forced to complete his testing programme on Tuesday with the 2012 Yamaha YZR-M1 after a technical problem on the 2013 challenger. The Italian was fifth fastest at the end of the day and was pleased with his pace given the machinery at his disposal, although the afternoon rain prevented him from gathering any more data.
“The first day is not so bad, but we were unlucky because we had a small problem with the bike which had the new chassis so we had to stop and use the old bike. We made some tests with that using just one tyre and my pace and my lap times were not so bad. After we waited for the afternoon for the real work but the rain came so we decided to stop and continue tomorrow. If it rains again tomorrow we will do some laps in the wet conditions.”
Teammate Jorge Lorenzo was second fastest but continued to trail Repsol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa as he has throughout the winter. The world champion echoed the comment of Cal Crutchlow that the grip levels made it difficult to draw any conclusions from the day.
“Today we just tried to improve our current settings. We made some modifications but nothing special. We need to improve the acceleration a little bit but for the moment no new bits to try. The track was more slippery than the first test due to the rain which has left the tarmac in a worse condition.”
Team Director Massimo Meregalli was frustrated to see such valuable track time lost to the weather but expects the serious race preparation to start later in the week.
“Unfortunately we started as we finished the last test, the rain came and interrupted our work. At the beginning of the day the track conditions were not great and by the time the circuit got better the storm had arrived. We couldn’t do a lot of our testing but our homework was not so much for today. Tomorrow should be fine to achieve the main objectives of the test so we can proceed on the final day with the long run to optimize the settings for the start of the season.”
