Vinales: The bike is working great
Yamaha’s Maverick Vinales praised his new YZR-M1 and team after easing to the top of the timesheets in this evening’s first free practice session in Qatar.
The Spaniard comes into the first round of the 2017 season having finished fastest in all four official pre-season tests, and picked up from where he left off in the Qatar outing two weeks ago in FP1.
Vinales took to the track on the same bike he finished the Qatar test on, and immediately felt comfortable with it despite some issues with the windy conditions.
“I’m feeling good. During the last part of the test I felt confident and today I felt the same,” he said.
“I went out on the same bike and the track was looking good, so I just pushed and trued to do my best.
“The track was a little bit dirty and windy on the first couple of laps, but then the wind calmed down so we had more power on the bike and that helped a lot.”
The Yamaha rider spent most of the session running the medium tyres as he began to look at race preparation, as well as trying a few electronics setting changes, and was able to set a few laps in the mid-high 1m55s bracket.
Wary of the potential for poor weather conditions tomorrow, Vinales opted for a run on the soft rubber at the end of the session to secure a place in the second part of qualifying should the rain close in.
His first effort was a 1m54.739s, which returned him to the top of the time sheets. He knocked over four tenths off of that time on his next attempt, lowering his best lap to a 1m54.316s, which was half a second underneath the race lap record.
“The bike is working great and the team is doing a good job all the time and we improved the electronics a bit, so that helped to set today’s lap time,” he explained.
“Today we were feeling good on the medium tyres and I was able to set nice lap times, but we decided to put in a new tyre anyway, so in case it rains tomorrow we’ll be in Q2.”
“At the end I put in a new tyre and set that 1m54.316s. The important thing is that tomorrow we’ll work really hard on the race pace.”
Team-mate Valentino Rossi spent his 45 minutes playing around with weight distribution in order to find some feeling with the front-end of his bike, but this proved largely unsuccessful.
His problem seems to stem from the softer construction and compound front tyres Michelin are using this year, the Italian complaining trackside that he has ‘a lot of movement on entry’ which is isn’t allowing him to ‘carry enough speed’ into corners.
The nine-times world champion managed to end the session eighth quickest on a 1m55.799s, but was over 1.5s off the pace of Vinales and was behind both Tech 3 bikes.