If the Repsol Honda riders are suffering chatter at the Losail circuit in Qatar, the same can’t be said for Yamaha who is not suffering from the 4kg weight increase and is working well with the tire options that Bridgestone brought for the first race of the season while Casey Stoner is complaining that they are too soft.
Both Jorge Lorenzo and Ben Spies with the addition of Yamaha Tech3s Cal Crutchlow all lead the top of the timesheets during the first practice session, before being pipped by Casey Stoner in the finale, but they have a very strong base set-up which allows them to be fast with small tweaks.
“A quite good start, the track seems pretty dirty though, we are very far from the lap times of last year but that’s the same for everybody.
I feel good, we are in the top close to Casey and we have improvements to come tomorrow from the bike, the track and myself.
At the end we made a small change to gain some rear grip on all the corners which helped drop the lap time,” commented Lorenzo who finished the session just 0.
174s from Stoner.
“I was happy with tonight, we were generally pretty close to the top,” said Ben Spies who took 4th.
“The bike seemed to work pretty well; we made just two small changes to it and kept the same set of tyres on the whole time.
We made our fastest lap when the tyre had dropped off with almost race distance on it.
I’m quite pleased with how the bike performed.
We’ve tested at Sepang, Jerez and here and the bike has been good at all three so I’m happy with the bike, the team and myself.
We’ve just got to keep rolling and keep the momentum going.
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