Adjustments still to be made for Fiat Yamaha pair

Fiat Yamaha duo Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi were in slightly different spirits after the opening practice session at the Gran Premio Generali de la Comunitat Valenciana, having recorded the second and fourth fastest times respectively.

Lorenzo was pleased with how he performed, as he registered the second-fastest time of the session behind Casey Stoner.

“I’m quite happy with the practice because Valencia is not one of my favourite tracks, and every year I struggle to get a good feeling and a good result,” said the 22 year-old. “But now I’m in one of the best shapes of my career so I am pushing and riding aggressively. I am fast, we have some improvements to make, but the feeling in general is positive.”

“This is one of the few places I haven't won in my career so I really want to try! Today was very good, I did many laps with a strong rhythm and with a consistent and fast pace. We are feeling strong and we hope we can continue to be competitive. Tonight we will look at the data from today and consider how we can make more improvements for tomorrow so that I can try to be on the front row once again.”

Rossi, who was 0.686s slower than the pace set by Stoner, was less satisfied with fourth but highlighted the need to experiment with the harder tyres provided by Bridgestone in Saturday’s practice.

“It's really nice to be riding as the World Champion without having to think about points and now I just want to finish the year with a good race,” said the Italian. “Today was not so bad, I'm not happy with fourth but we're not far off and we worked well on the bike. We had some different settings to work on to try to improve our performance at this track and then at the end I was able to do some good laps all together.

“Tomorrow we have quite a lot of work to do, we need to try the harder Bridgestone tyre and try to make another step with the setting, but so far we have done a good job.”