Yamaha riders Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi were both satisfied after shaving half a second off their personal best times on Wednesday at Sepang. Lorenzo all-but-matched overall leader Dani Pedrosa and felt the lap times were coming easily to him but the Spaniard would be frustrated by a deluge of rain an hour from the end of the day’s running.
“Today in the morning the conditions were good and I could easily do the lap times from yesterday, I improved by more than half a second. Later we tried some little parts we couldn’t try yesterday, but not so much and the bike didn’t improve a lot. In the last hour it started to rain so I decided to exit and ride in the wet. We made more than eight laps in the rain. I think it was important to find the feeling in these conditions and also try the new tyre.”
Rossi was two places further back in fourth and was not only buoyed by the improvement in lap time but also his rhythm on the YZR-M1 as his Yamaha comeback continues to progress.
“The second day of testing in Sepang is finished and the balance of the day is positive for us, especially as we finished some work on the bike. We have some different parts for the bike for this season and we continue to work on the setting. The positive is we improved compared to yesterday in terms of time on one lap with the new tyre but especially on the rhythm, I was half a second faster than yesterday which is not so bad. Fourth position is quite good especially as we are less than half a second behind Pedrosa and Lorenzo. Unfortunately it started to rain so we had to stop earlier, because our target this afternoon was to go into 2’00 but we will try again tomorrow.”
