Yamaha rider Valentino Rossi had a productive evening under the Qatar floodlights as MotoGP’s final test of the pre 2017 Championship season gets underway.
Having waited until after 6pm local time before heading out, he completed 48 laps in total, whilst working through an extensive range of setting options with varying weight distribution.
Though focused on improving the feeling of the front of his YZR-M1, the Italian rider managed to consistently improve his times as well as the feeling with his bike.
He was able to set a best time of 1‘55.679s and took seventh position in the standings, +0.860s from the front.
"Today we worked on the feeling of the bike especially on the entry of the corner. We improved, but I‘m not very happy," he said. " We are not at 100%, because I didn‘t have enough feeling to push on the entry, but today wasn‘t so bad and we tried something quite interesting."
"We also had a bit of trouble with the front tyre life, the tyre is a bit too soft, so we have to work on the weight distribution. The condition of the track usually changes a lot here in Qatar, so we will try to continue our work tomorrow and try to make things better.
Rossi will be back on track later today from 16:00 – 23:00 local track time.
