Maverick Viñales & Aleix Espargaro 10th & 11th in opening Misano practice sessions

Team SUZUKI ECSTAR had a positive first day at the World Misano Circuit Marco Simoncelli in Italy today for the first two practice sessions of the weekend, consistently-improving their feeling and confidence; although the classification-position still needs to be improved tomorrow.

Maverick Viñales settled his GSX-RR in the top-three for many laps in the morning, focusing his job on the finalisation of a base set-up for the pace. His position in the classification could be have better though, but some of his best laps had been ruled-out for alleged course-cutting infringements, pushing him down the leaderboard from a potential top-three overall: It was a matter of inches in exiting corner 13 that the new rule applied – and which all riders will be called to adapt-to quickly this weekend and for the rest of the season.

Team-mate Aleix Espargaró also had a positive first day with many improvements and a renewed competitiveness. He sits right behind Viñales in the classification but his potential for the ‘time attack’ is still to be exploited.

Maverick Viñales:
“I’m happy with today because we did a very good job, we are utilising the information we collected from the test in Brno and we decided to focus on the pace to finalise the base set-up for the race. Especially in the afternoon I worked mostly with the hard tyre and I felt confident, we improved a lot and also covered the race distance, in the top-10; which means we have a good potential. Also some of my best laps were cancelled for exceeding the track limit, the truth is that it’s just the exit of a corner where you go on the curb that has been changed this year, but everybody has the same problem and we must adapt to it. I also tried a time attack with the soft tyre in the last run but I didn’t feel confident, so we need more time to try it and adapt the set-up. Maybe if I had more time with the soft I could have improved my lap-time also, but this was not our priority for today. The job we’ve done leaves me confident that we are in good a condition for the race and tomorrow we’ll be able to focus on the time attack.”

Aleix Espargaró:
“My feeling today was positive, we did many improvements and I found a positive efficiency. We are not so good in the classification but we worked hard on the pace and this is a very important job we’ve done in preparation for the race. The feeling with the new tyre is good, but we still need to better-understand it in order to exploit it better. We wanted to also check the performance with the drop of the tyres, our consistency on the pace is good, we have room for improvement, but the actual point is not bad. Also the temperature of the circuit will be important, it rises a lot in the afternoon and so we have so much of a difference in performance between morning and afternoon.”

Source: Suzuki