The factory Yamaha pairing of champion Jorge Lorenzo and Ben Spies took to the track for the 2nd official test today in Malaysia. And as with the first test, the teams benefited from an unexpected day of sunshine, and the pair capitalised to continue their evaluation of the new M1 package.
Jorge Lorenzo made some changes to his chassis setup over the lunch break and these seemed to work well for him as he was then able to put in consistent laps to finish in 3rd, just 0.48s off the top of the timesheet. Speaking after the session, Jorge commented, “Today was a good day for me, we worked on the traction to improve it from the previous test which helped us a lot in the set up, I’m now very satisfied with it. We have our chassis for 2011 now and we are working on it as well as our engine spec.”
He finished, “With the improvements we’ve made we can now brake a little later and enter the corners a little more quickly as well so I was able to do some good fast consistent lap times this afternoon when it was still very hot on the track.”
As for Ben Spies, his day was spent getting more miles under his belt on the factory setup, before testing different suspension setups in the afternoon. At the end of the session, the young Texan finished in 6th place, just 0.82s off the top of the timesheets.
Speaking after the session, Spies said, “Today we came to this test with the engine configurations we’re going to race with so both bikes have that. We just warmed up in the morning and spent the afternoon on one set of tyres. We set our fastest lap of the day when it was very hot and mid race distance on a hard tyre. We’re saving some tyres for the end of the test when the track’s good. We worked on some race set up and I also worked on some different riding styles. We’ll start again tomorrow with plenty more to do. We tried a couple of shocks and found a few tenths and were still consistently fast on used tyres which was promising.”
Finishing on a positive note, “It’s definitely a good day and I’m happy with it.”