Le Mans MotoGP: Jorge Lorenzo urges Yamaha improvement

Jorge Lorenzo has repeated his demands for Yamaha to improve its factory YZR-M1 after he was powerless to stop Honda dominating the opening day of practice in Le Mans today.

The Spaniard, who is chasing a third consecutive victory in the French Grand Prix, could only finish fifth on combined times at the end of a problematic first day for the reigning world champion.

Lorenzo clocked a best time of 1.34.659 in this afternoon’s session but he was still a massive 0.877s behind Casey Stoner’s best pace on the impressive factory Honda RC212V.

Lorenzo, who is scheduled to become the youngest rider in history to compete in 150 world championship races in Sunday’s 28-lap clash, told MCN: “The lap time is not improving from last year and that’s the problem. The bike is more or less working like last year but the lap time is the same. The problem is that the others stay very far away and they are really, really fast.”

“If they were on the same lap time than me, it would be no problem. But the problem is that they are too far at this moment. We have to do something because from my side and my riding I can improve by two or three tenths. That would be riding at the maximum but we need 0.8s or one second and this is the problem. So we have to improve the bike and not only my riding.”