Movistar Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi was left feeling satisfied with his front row qualifying result having endured a tricky time at the Ricardo Tormo Circuit this weekend.
The Spanish venue has always been something of a bogey circuit for the Italian, and this weekend has been a challenge. Rossi struggle to find the right set-up for his YZR-M1 in Friday’s sessions and ended the day a disappointing eighth, some eight tenths of a second off the pace set by his teammate.
Saturday morning didn’t appear to have yielded any improvement, Rossi only just making it into the second part of qualifying in ninth spot. Things seemed to get better somewhat in FP4, and by the time qualifying rolled around the Italian was immediately a contender for the top two rows.
With some stiff competition coming from Suzuki’s Maverick Vinales and Ducati’s Andrea Dovizioso, Rossi had to dig deep if he wanted to start on the front row. The nine-time World Champion did just that and produced a 1m30.128s in the closing seconds to go third quickest by just over a tenth of a second.
Though happy with third, Rossi isn’t getting ahead of himself and understands that his pace is lacking somewhat to Jorge Lorenzo’s and Marc Marquez’. Nonetheless, he still has his sights set on ending the season on the rostrum.
“At this track Jorge and Marc are very strong and I‘m very happy about this front row because usually I struggle always at Valencia and during the practices, from yesterday to today, we had a lot of problems,” he said.
“We weren‘t fast enough but we improved and I think I did a quite good lap, but they are still a bit faster. Depending very much on the pace, I hope to be strong enough to be able to fight for the podium.
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