Ben Spies buoyed by 2011 Yamaha performance

 Ben Spies was full of praise for the job Yamaha has done in the winter break as he ended this week’s three-day MotoGP test at the Sepang circuit in Malaysia with the sixth fastest time.

The Texan posted a best time of 2.01.002 to finish within 0.3s of Marco Simoncelli’s best time as he completed tests on two different YZR-M1 engine specs.

Spies, who was top rookie and non-factory rider in a brilliant 2010 campaign for the Monster Yamaha Tech 3 Team, hailed the performance of the new YZR-M1 as he gets accustomed to life in the factory squad next to current world champion Jorge Lorenzo.

The 2009 World Superbike champion said: “The Yamaha is a very balanced and great bike. From the outside whatever wins the title seems to be the best bike, and that’s not always the case either. What is the best bike? You can’t really answer that but Yamaha has a great bike right now and just because I don’t want to talk bad about any other manufacturer, Yamaha has a great bike and it has won so many races for the last few years and that is down to the team and the riders. I am 100 per cent confident that Yamaha will have a great bike for us this year and hopefully me and Jorge can be at the front again.”

Spies was quick to play down the significance of the outcome of the Sepang test in which Simoncelli prevailed with a best time of 2.00.757.

He said it was too early to draw conclusions and added: “Testing doesn’t mean anything and I’m not going to be looking at the timesheets and being concerned about it. If I was eighth or fastest it doesn’t really matter, the last day of the Qatar test is more important before the race and that’s when I’ll really be looking at where we are.”

Spies said that having evaluated the engines and a range of new electronic settings this week, his plan for the next Sepang test later this month would be try and improve his pace without the distraction of assessing components.

Spies, who suffered a crash on only his fourth lap of the test, said: “We found a good solution and when we come back we are going to work on more the bike to get a lap time out of it to make it faster. This test we really didn’t focus on that a whole lot, it was basically to decide which engine to go with. We’ve got a good base and when we come back it will be the first real test when we really need to start getting with it and make sure the speed is there. We’ll just try and get more downright speed out of the bike. It was a successful test despite the small mishap with the crash on the first day but we didn’t blaze the lap times that we need.”