Solid day one at Assen for Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Viñales

Team SUZUKI ECSTAR’s Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Viñales continued the work to find the good set up of their GSX-RRs today at the TT Assen Circuit in The Netherlands and set positive lap times within the top-10 overall.

Both riders continued the positive progress from the Barcelona and Aragon tests in Spain last week, with improvements to the power-delivery and also the electronics. In both today’s sessions the rider salso focused on finding the most-effective lines to interpret the track with their GSX-RRs.

At the end of the day, both Espargaro and Viñales scored top-10 positions and will try to access Q2 tomorrow; Esparagaro (8th) with a time of 1’33.857 and Viñales (10th) on 1’34.232.

Aleix Espargaro:
“It was a strange day because we had to struggle to find the better set-up for my machine. I like this track a lot, but I am still missing something to feel totally confident. Between FP1 and FP2 we pretty-much changed everything on the bike in terms of electronics and set-up. We started from the data collected in Aragon and from there we tried to improve. There is not such a big difference between soft and hard tyres here, so I preferred to focus on the hard ones, because we will have those next year, so it’s wiser to work with future plans if the difference is not so big. However, I’m in the top-10 and the time is pretty good and also some early trials for the pace gave positive reponses. Overall I’m confident that tomorrow we will make further improvements.”

Maverick Viñales:
“We still have a lot of work to do because the machine is very responsive to the changes we make, but I still need to find the best set-up. Also I need to better understand the lines. This is a very-demanding track, so different from the previous ones, and I’m struggling to be effective, expecially in last part of the track. However, I feel positive for tomorrow as the test we made on the pace today gave positive responses and the only thing now is to find a better effectiveness on the single lap. It is also positive that at the moment we are already in Q2, so that if the weather tomorrow will turn into rain we will have an advantage.”

Source: Suzuki Racing