Aspar Ducati’s Alvaro Bautista continued to post impressive times on the second day of pre-season testing from the Sepang International Circuit on his GP16.
Bautista makes his Ducati debut this season with the team that took him to the 2006 125cc world championship having spent the last two years with Aprilia. Despite the Desmosedici GP being a new bike to the Spaniard, he has thus far impressed on it, finishing both days of this test inside the top five.
The Aspar rider has spent the last two days getting to grips with the bike, and has already found that his riding style is well-suited to the GP16. Today he focussed on the engine and fine-tuning the electronics to extract the most out of the Desmosedici’s powerful motor.
The Spaniard completed 49 laps on his Ducati today, setting a best time of 2m00.218s to go third fastest and just eight tenths off of the pace set by Suzuki’s Andrea Iannone.
“I am happy because we have been very competitive and we have managed to complete everything we had planned,” he said. “I really like the engine and my riding style suits this bike.”
Bautista admits that there is still much to do. But the bike’s race-winning pedigree and the team’s efforts this week see the Spaniard head into tomorrow’s final day of running with a strong base set-up to work from.
“We need to improve certain aspects but the base is very competitive. We tried some things with the electronics to get the most out of the potential of the engine and found some useful things for the future. Even though our bike is last year’s, it has a good base because it is a race winner.
“Today was a tricky day because we had to wait until 2pm for the track to dry. Also there wasn’t as much grip as yesterday and it was more difficult to find a feeling but that was the same for everybody.”
Team-mate Karel Abraham, who makes his MotoGP return this year with Aspar following an unsuccessful 2016 World Superbike campaign with Milwaukee Aprilia, was just over seven tenths of a second adrift in 16th.
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