Rossi: I never had a good feeling with the bike

Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi maintained a slender two-point lead in the world championship standings, after the Italian finished a difficult Spanish Grand Prix in a lowly 10^th spot.

After making a breakthrough in Argentina and Austin with his M1, Rossi came into a happy hunting ground for both rider and team at Jerez positive of being able to carry on his form from two weeks ago.

However, much of the weekend has been spent battling rear traction issues through the 4.4km Jerez circuit’s left-handers and the front-end problems which plagued him throughout the pre-season.

Starting from seventh on the medium rear tyre and the hard front, on which Rossi displayed a decent pace in yesterday’s FP4, he struggled to make any inroads on the lead positions and was roughed up in the opening stages.

“It was a very difficult race after a difficult weekend,” he said.

“I never had a good feeling with the bike and the tyres. We tried to work a lot, especially to fix the spin and acceleration, but unfortunately for the race we did worse. We tried to modify it a bit, but I was also in trouble with the front.”

Rossi quickly slipped down the order, the Italian finding himself back in his starting position of seventh after a handful of laps. As the race wore on, his problems with his tyres grew increasingly worse, to the point where he was lapping over four seconds off the pace.

The Yamaha rider was powerless to stop compatriot Danilo Petrucci and Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro from relegating him to 10^th in the closing stages. Expecting more from this weekend, Rossi is looking to tomorrow’s one-day test for answers.

“At the end I had to slow down a lot and had a lot of vibration,” Rossi added.

“It was okay to arrive (10^th) right at the end, but it was a difficult weekend for the whole team. We expected to be stronger and more competitive at this track, looking at last year’s results.

“We need to try and understand what happened. Tomorrow, we have the test and we’ll see.”

Team-mate Maverick Vinales suffered the same plight as Rossi, and has been left feeling similarly baffled by the situation after feeling comfortable on the bike in warm-up. Vinales faired slightly better, the Spaniard able to get his M1 across the line in sixth spot.