MotoGP: Viñales not out to change much after flying start

Movistar Yamaha rider Maverick Viñales says he’s not out to change much on his M1 machine, after making a stunning start to the 2017 season last night under the floodlights, dipping well under the floodlights to finish over half a second ahead of closest rival Marc Marquez.

But with three successful days of testing at the track earlier this month to build on, he says that the plan for the remainder of the weekend is just to put new tyres into his bike and continue working on race pace.

“I‘m feeling good. During the last part of the test I felt confident and today I felt the same. I went out on the same bike and the track was looking good, so I just pushed and tried to do my best. The bike is working great and the team is doing a good job all the time and we improved the electronics a bit, so that helped to set today‘s lap time. At the end, I put in a new tyre and set that 1‘54.316s. The important thing is that tomorrow we‘ll work really hard on the race pace.

“Today we were feeling good on the medium tyres and I was able to set nice lap times, but we decided to put in the new tyre anyway, so in case it rains tomorrow we‘ll be in Q2. The track was little bit dirty and windy on the first couple of laps, but then the wind calmed down so we had more power on the bike and that helped a lot. The first laps were quite difficult with the wind, the bike was wheelying and there wasn‘t a lot of grip on the circuit, but suddenly the track improved a lot and when I put in the new tyre I just had to push and go for it.”

However, things were less happy on the other side of their garage, with Valentino Rossi admitting that coming home in ninth, a second and a half off Viñales, was far from ideal.

“The performance was not fantastic, but I‘m in the top ten and this is good because we don‘t know what the conditions will be like tomorrow. With the softer tyre I thought I would be able to push a bit more and improve by some tenths, but with the race pace we are a bit far behind and we have to find something better. At the end of the practice we did some modifications that could be not so bad, so tomorrow we will try to understand if we‘re closer. I hope we can improve.”