Valentino Rossi gave an honest assessment of his opening day’s running at Silverstone, stating that he wasn’t fast enough in Friday practice. The Movistar Yamaha rider was third quickest in the morning but tumbled to tenth in FP2 and believes he paid the price for taking the wrong direction on set-up with his YZR-M1.
“This afternoon was difficult. I expected to be stronger, especially after this morning when my lap time wasn’t so far off the top. We suffered a lot with degradation of the rear tyre so we tried to change the setting of the bike in the afternoon but we found nothing. From one point of view, we improved but I’m not strong enough and I’m not fast enough to that’s not the way to follow.”
Despite the disappointing start, Rossi remains confident of competing with Jorge Lorenzo and Marc Marquez at the front this weekend and expects to learn from this afternoon’s mistakes.
“We need to continue more like this morning. I lost a lot of positions because I didn’t concentrate on a time attack when a lot of riders used a soft rear tyre because of the risk of rain tomorrow morning. The performance isn’t fantastic but we tried a lot of different things and I hope we understand more or less the way to go and hopefully tomorrow we will be strong.”
