Valentino Rossi’s cornering woes reared their ugly head once again during free practice on Friday for the Argentine Grand Prix, with the Italian admitting that he is in ‘big, big trouble’.
Rossi struggled all winter with the front-end of his Yamaha, Michelin’s new tyre carcasses causing a lot of movement on corner entry and robbing him of confidence to push through the turns, costing him chunks of lap time.
A breakthrough in Qatar allowed him to fight for the win in the race and eventually finish on the podium in third.
Michelin were set to introduce a stiffer front soft from 2016 into their allocation for Argentina, which Rossi was keen to try. However, a transport strike saw delivery delayed and he was unable to run the tyre.
“I was very happy to try (the alternate tyre), but unfortunately today we don’t have them. Maybe we can have them tomorrow morning, but unfortunately the (2017) rubber is too soft,” he said.
“We hoped to have a good feeling, like we had in the last race with the bike, but it was more similar to what the feeling was like in the practice sessions in Qatar and the tests.”
Rossi ended FP1 down in 16th spot, and while he improved on his lap time to a 1m40.531s in the afternoon he failed to pull himself up the order.
To make matters worse, he is one of several high-profile names outside of the top 10. Should the forecast rain arrive tomorrow morning, Rossi faces an incredibly tough QP1 group.
“We have a lot of problems to enter the corners fast with this bike and I don’t feel comfortable. I’m about one second behind, but the problem is that we are all close together and we have a lot of different riders that are very fast.
“We need to improve the feeling and the setting of the bike, and we hope that tomorrow morning’s FP3 will be dry. We will try to improve and try to stay in he top 10 for qualifying.”
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