Strong showing from Espargaro

Returning to the scene of his stunning start to the 2014 season Aleix Espargaro showed the potential of the Suzuki once again with the fourth fastest time of the opening night of the Qatar test.

The Spaniard set his time on the softer Open tyre but his pace on the harder tyre was also strong, on par with the Tech3 Yamaha’s, even though he conceded that tyre life was an issue on the longer stints and that the team would need to improve their electronics settings to be able to deal with that moving forward.

“Overall we made good improvements since the beginning and I really like this track,” said a smiling Espargaro. “I’ve some great memories because of what we did last year [with Forward] but today our bike was really good. It was stable, easy to move and we worked really hard with the electronics today to improve the setting. We need to continue to work with the Traction Control, especially with the hard tyre after ten laps because the tyre drops a little bit so we need to be more competitive when that happens. Tomorrow we need to fix the rear grip and just keep working.”

When talking about the tyre longevitity in more detail Espargaro expanded by saying:

“With the hard tyre I felt really good grip but after ten laps the grip drops and it starts to spin and we lost a lot in acceleration and then you also have less top speed. The first ten laps were really good but after that we need to improve.”