Rossi: “We improved the setting of the bike a lot”

Valentino Rossi was happy as he ended Tuesday in sixth place but is still undecided on which version of the Yamaha M1 he prefers.

Rossi had a positive second day at the Malaysian test. As the session was red flagged for the majority of the morning following Baz’s crash, the “Doctor” was fully committed to making up for lost time. When he returned to the track he made a good step with his set-up and consistently improved his times, dropping under his best lap from yesterday by almost 0.7s. He spent the afternoon testing various tyre options and completed a total of 54 laps, setting a personal best of 2‘01.021s which was enough for sixth place.

The three-day Sepang test concludes on Wednesday with the action kicking off at 10am local time.

Valentino Rossi: “I‘m quite happy, it was a good day. At first it was hard, because there was a lot of work to do, but I‘m quite satisfied, especially because we improved the setting of the bike a lot. My pace and my best lap improved quite significantly, so for this reason it‘s been a good day. We have a lot of important new data that will help us decide which way we should follow. It‘s sure that we will have a lot of things to do. I tried some tyres in afternoon, some were good, some things were bad, but I think also Michelin did a good job. At the moment I‘m spending more time on the bike that‘s more similar to the 2015 model. Tomorrow we will try them both another time and maybe we will also try the other bike at another track, like Phillip Island, and after that we‘ll decide.”

From MotoGP