Rossi still losing out on corner entry
Valentino Rossi made small steps forward with his Yamaha on Friday in Qatar, but says he is still suffering on the way into corners.
The nine-times world champion has struggled for much of the winter with front-end issues, and they reared their head again in last night’s opening practice session, where he was ninth fastest and 1.5s adrift of his team-mate Maverick Vinales.
The cause of the Italian’s problems is the softer construction and compound of front tyre Michelin are using this year, which is robbing him of confidence on the way into corners and preventing him from carrying as much speed through the turns as he would like.
He began FP2 positively, lowering his Thursday lap time by a couple of tenths to a 1m55.414s, which put him just a few hundredths away from Vinales in sixth.
However, his progress was halted in the third session due to a lack of grip, and then an issue with a sensor towards the end of the 45 minutes.
“Today we started in a good way, because in FP2 I wasn’t doing so bad and I set my best lap time,” he said.
“We still needed to improve, but in FP3 I suffered from a lack of grip and was more in trouble. At the end, I also had a problem with a sensor.
“We had to change the rear suspension for another one with another setting that wasn’t fantastic. I did just one lap and I wasn’t able to improve on my time from FP2, but the good thing is that we stayed in the top 10, so tomorrow we can start from Q2 and we’ll see.”
Not only did Rossi’s single-lap pace leave much to be desired, his race pace was well off what his team-mate was managing, with the Italian lapping in the mid 1m56s relative to Vinales’ mid 1m55s.
“We have to work: I’m still not able to enter the corners fast enough and I suffer a bit, so we have to try to make that better.
“I think for me personally it will be difficult to do the whole race on the softer tyre, so we are now more open to using the medium tyre.”