In today’s second and final day of private testing at the Motorland Aragon circuit where the 13th round of the season will be held on September 30th, four of the five riders present were able to break under 1.
49 barrier as they also tested Bridgestone’s new rear tire.
Jorge Lorenzo left the Spanish circuit as the fastest rider of the day (he’ll be heading to Italy to be one of the judges in the 2012 Miss Italy beauty pageant) however he wasn’t able to smash the new circuit record that rival Dani Pedrosa set yesterday (1’47″983), but he did shave off two tenths of second while testing once again the new chassis combined with a new engine hoping to find those extra 4/5km he was losing to the Repsol Honda rider yesterday.
Dani Pedrosa set the second fastest time again working on suspensions and he also testing a new exhaust and he wasn’t able to repeat his own lap time, but he seemed more interested in solving rear grip issues.
Stefan Bradl made a big jump forward as he shaved off more than seven tenths of second from his day 1 lap times as he alternated between the 2013 factory RC213V and his own satellite machine to finish in third, while Yamaha’s Ben Spies continued his long runs and a race simulation.
Jonathan Rea who will be officially stepping in for Casey Stoner in next week’s Misano GP, also made a big jump forward in his third test on the Repsol Honda as he cut the gap to Jorge Lorenzo to 1.
706s, while yesterday he was more than 2.
6 seconds adrift compared to Pedrosa’s untouchable lap.
The Honda rider will have a full and very busy schedule of racing this month.
This weekend he’ll be at Nurburgring for the 12th round of the World Superbike championship.
Next week he’ll be racing in MotoGP at Misano (September 16th), the week after he’ll be back on his CBR1000RR for the Portimao round (September 23rd) and then back for the Aragon GP (September 30th).
MotoGP Motorland Aragon day 2 test results:01- Jorge Lorenzo – Yamaha Factory Racing – Yamaha YZR M1 – 1’48.
244 02- Dani Pedrosa – Repsol Honda Team – Honda RC213V – 1’48.
499 03- Stefan Bradl – LCR Honda MotoGP – Honda RC213V – 1’48.
834 04- Ben Spies – Yamaha Factory Racing – Yamaha YZR M1 – 1’48.
946 05- Jonathan Rea – Repsol Honda Team – Honda RC213V – 1’50.
057Rider quotes:Jorge Lorenzo:Today was a very long day.
We did a race simulation at the end of the session of 22 laps.
Now I feel very tired, but it was necessary to see the performance of the special rear tyre.
I think the rear tyre was a little bit worse than the ones I tried across the two days.
Something was wrong, because I had much more chattering and a bad feeling on the corners.
But in general we’re leaving the track with happiness and confidence, because we are one second faster than the last time.
” Ben Spies: “We basically tested the bike over race distance and did a race simulation, and set the bike up more for the end of the race.
We worked on some different fork and shock settings.
A little bit of electronics but nothing major, just fine tuning with the bike.
It seems ok and I’m positive for the rest of the year.
” Dani Pedrosa:“Today I had a test on a new exhaust to see if we can get better driveability of the engine.
Some positives.
We also tried a different rear shock to get more grip.
In general it was a positive test so I’m happy.
” Jonathan Rea: “Yesterday we did a lot of work with the base setting, and we confirmed that this morning.
Still, I’m not so happy finishing the corner.
And this afternoon I tried a long run on the tyre and my fastest lap came right at the end, so I need to push this tyre much harder.
But it’s like trust thing – I need to trust the tyre more.
When I went out in the last outing with the new tyre, I pushed a little harder and trusted the tyre, and it worked.
Maybe the idea is to just push more and more.
”Stefan Bradl: “It’s a request from Honda that they want to have some information about this new bike, and we re-tested a similar situation as we did yesterday.
We found some more grip, and I’m happy to go with it, but also it was an improvement for our bike, which we’re using this year [as he was able to transfer the information to the satellite machine].
”