Careful progress over the winter paved the way for a positive outcome for Maverick Viñales in the second day (night) of testing at the Losail Circuit in Qatar on Saturday where he built on his strong result from previous tests in an effortless fashion to top the timesheets.
His best time was set early on in the session and he successfully defended his lead from his late charging teammate Valentino Rossi and Jonas Folger, resulting in a top 3 finish for Yamaha.
Clearly happy with his race set-up, the Spaniard spent most of the day fine-tuning his YZR-M1 in order to be 100% ready for the upcoming first MotoGP round in Qatar.
He concluded the second day with a total of 49 laps and a fastest time of 1'54.455 under his belt, earning him first place in the combined standings.
“I feel good,” he said. “We need some further improvements, but anyway, I felt good from the first day, so I tried to do my best. We‘re trying to keep the lap times really consistent and on the same pace."
"Today we made another step and I hope tomorrow we can improve a little bit more, but I think we can be happy about our set-up and if the race was right now, we would be ready, for sure. I still want to improve on the braking points to be faster, but we still have tomorrow to continue testing."
The test concludes here later today.
