MotoGP news

Yamaha not progressing at desired rate

The twelfth round of the MotoGP World Championship got underway at Brno in the Czech Republic today, with Fiat Yamaha Riders Valentino Rossi and Colin Edwards finishing the day in sixth and thirteenth positions after two free practice sessions.

With scorching sunshine having welcomed the paddock back from the summer break yesterday, an overnight rainstorm dropped the temperature to a more comfortable 23 degrees for today's on-track action. The Yamaha duo got the weekend off to a solid start in the morning, finishing the first free practice in fourth and fifth positions. The afternoon then saw the riders concentrating on refining set-up and making headway towards their final tyre choices and Rossi was able to make an improvement of almost one second on his time from this morning, which was good enough for sixth place overall. Edwards meanwhile ran into some problems and had to settle for thirteenth.

"Today has gone more or less okay for the first day and, as is usual on a Friday, we spent most of the day working on the set-up of our M1," Rossi said. "This morning was okay and then this afternoon we made some more progress and we found out some interesting things, which we hope will help us tomorrow and on Sunday. Despite this we still have quite a lot to improve on; we can and must be faster!"

Edwards commented: "My main problem today was basically that I didn't have much grip. We've tested pretty much all the tyres we have available to us but we haven't yet been able to find a solution that enables me to ride the bike how I want to. At the moment we don't have one that I feel would work for the race, so we need to concentrate on fixing this problem tomorrow. The plan now is to take the one that's working best and turn the bike around to find a compromise that gives us enough traction. I improved a tiny bit this afternoon but everyone else improved a lot more! It's frustrating but I have faith in the team and I am sure we will come up with something tomorrow."

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