Movistar Yamaha MotoGP Claim First and Second Row in Catalan Qualifying

2016-06-04 13:21
Movistar Yamaha MotoGP‘s Jorge Lorenzo continued his strong results from yesterday in a challenging second day at the Circuito de Barcelona-Catalunya, taking second on the grid for tomorrow‘s Gran Premi Monster Energy de Catalunya. The reigning World Champion and his teammate Valentino Rossi only had two sessions before the 15-minute qualifying heat to get used to a track revision following yesterday‘s tragic incident involving Luis Salom. After the Doctor changed his setting to suit the new fourth sector he recorded the fifth best time at the very end of the Q2 session.

Intending to hit a clear track, Lorenzo was one of the last riders to leave the pits in Q2, allowing the pack to move ahead. With his first flying lap, a 1‘44.452s, he shot straight into second place. He continued to push hard but was unable to improve his time on his first tyre and returned to the pits with six minutes left.

Two minutes later he was back on track, ready to attack again. The local hero bettered his time but not his placement with his third attempt, a 1‘44.056s lap. Despite a strong fast sector from Lorenzo on his final lap he was unable to snatch pole and took second on the grid, 0.467s off the front.

Rossi kept the tension high to the last moments of the qualifying heat. Leaving the pits late like his teammate, he took third on his first flying lap with a 1‘45.315s. Having been pushed back to sixth, he put the hammer down and was promoted to fifth on his second hot lap with a 1‘45.138s before entering pit lane with six and a half minutes remaining.

Returning to the track with just over four minutes on the clock offered him another chance to step up to the challenge. As the pace quickened towards the end of the session, the nine-time World Champion moved five places up the timesheets as the flag went out with a 1‘44.324s, to take fifth for a second row start, 0.735s from pole.



The extended imagery from today's Qualifying session at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya (Spain) is available on
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MASSIMO MEREGALLI

MASSIMO MEREGALLI
TEAM DIRECTOR


Today we faced some challenges. We used most of the free practices on altering the bikes‘ set ups to make them suit the revised final sector of the track, which has different requirements than our bike was prepared for yesterday. The time we spent on this compromised our programme for the weekend, especially concerning the tyres. The new layout drastically changes the characteristics of the track, and it doesn‘t fit the strong points of our bike. Jorge did a good job to set the second fastest time and secure a place on the front row of the grid. Valentino also put in extra effort to recover from this morning‘s difficulties and will start the race from the second row. It looks like we have only one tyre choice for the race and unfortunately that option is not our favourite, but despite this we will be working hard in the garage to further improve the total package so we can have a race that‘s full of action from the start until the end.






JORGE LORENZO

JORGE LORENZO


It‘s very tragic what happened with Luis yesterday. As a result, the Safety Commission decided to make this modification to the track and this for sure doesn‘t help our bike. There are a lot of corners in first gear, so this benefits our rivals a little bit. Finally, we set a very good lap time for this track and we have to try to finish on the podium tomorrow. It will be a good result after what has happened.






VALENTINO ROSSI

VALENTINO ROSSI


In the end, the qualifying was not so bad. Unfortunately I wasn‘t able to make the perfect lap, I made a few mistakes and will start from the second row, from fifth position, that is OK. We need to work, we are quite worried for the race. With this new layout we suffer a lot and especially because we need to use the hard front, but unfortunately we are not able to use it in the right way, we are very slow and in terms of pace we are quite far from the top guys. I think that it will be hard, but we have time and have some hours to think and we hope we can change the situation for tomorrow. It‘s not a voluntary decision, with the medium option after seven or eight laps it‘s finished, so we need to use the hard tyre, but try to use it in a better way.

Source: Yamaha Motor Racing

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