Jorge Lorenzo powers his way to Le Mans pole

After keeping up the pace in today‘s two free practice sessions on the second day in France, Movistar Yamaha MotoGP’s Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi went straight through to the Q2 session to qualify on the first and third row for tomorrow’s fifth race of the 2016 MotoGP World Championship.

Lorenzo had his signature start to the qualifying session, waiting for all other riders to leave the pit lane before rushing out on his YZR-M1.

Having set a 1‘32s lap this weekend, the Mallorcan continued the trend dropping a 1‘32.437s, a best lap of the weekend at that time, for first place. He further extended his lead with a 1‘32.236s before heading back to the pits with more than seven minutes remaining.

Two minutes later Lorenzo was back on track and had just enough time left for two more hot laps. Despite a slight error on his third hot lap, he made a stunning recovery.

He waited until the last moment to show his blistering pace and became the fastest man ever around the Le Mans Bugatti circuit, posting a new circuit best lap record of 1’31.975s, extending his lead to 0.441s.

JORGE LORENZO
From the beginning, the first practice on Friday, everything went very well already with our first setting. Little by little and practice by practice together with the whole team we improved small details in all the corners to create a bike that allowed me to keep a constant pace. I was using the same old tyres throughout free practice 4 and normally that means that when you use new tyres you can be very fast and that‘s what happened today. I didn‘t expect to set such an unbelievable lap time, but sometimes the lap time surprises you and I‘m very happy with the pole position and the lap record and especially with the work we did with the whole team on the bike.

Source: Yamaha