Alvaro Bautista continues testing progress as Sepang 2 gets underway

Without a even a chance to catch their breath after the exciting Sunday on Phillip Island where Aprilia made its triumphant entry into the 2015 WSBK season, they were off to three days of testing on the fast Malaysian track, which represent the penultimate step before the start of the 2015 MotoGP World Championship.

Aprilia Racing Team Gresini resumed work developing the bike which had already been launched with the tests and Jerez and Valencia last autumn and then with the first test sessions at Sepang, bringing new solutions and materials to the track which had been developed by the racing department at Noale over the last few weeks.

Alvaro Bautista and Marco Melandri focused primarily on testing the intermediate versions of the bikes tested in Spain and the ones seen in the first Malaysian session.

The tests were decidedly encouraging for Bautista who, besides benefiting from the great job done by the Aprilia Racing mechanics, also had the satisfaction of a good time to finish out the test sessions – which were in fact called off early due to a couple of rainstorms – stopping the clock at 2’01,740 and climbing to 12th place.

ALVARO BAUTISTA
“We are continuing to grow little by little and I think we can be satisfied with our progress. The positive thing is that we have already improved our times since Sepang1. So we are working well and we need to keep it up. For the first day today we focused on the electronics, trying to solve a few issues that had come up during the previous tests. We also tested a frame with a different stiffness to specifically try and improve performance going into turns. Unfortunately this afternoon the rain kept us from testing other setups.”

Source: Aprilia