After the first day rain, the second day of the final preseason test at Jerez proved to be largely fruitful, with the track drying out by lunchtime to allow for productive afternoon before the heavens opened once again at around 5pm. After a winter that has seen the time sheets dominated by Pedrosa, Lorenzo and Márquez at Sepang and Austin, today it was the turn of Valentino Rossi to return to the top and stake his claim as a contender for the crown of MotoGP World Champion once again.
After preferring not to ride in the mixed conditions yesterday the POWER ELECTRONICS Aspar Team had plenty of work to do today. Aleix Espargaró made back-to-back comparisons between his bikes from last year and this year, the Spaniard finishing with the thirteenth fastest time of the day after 49 laps. His team-mate Randy De Puniet spent much of the day working through an issue with his engine braking and was fortunate to escape unhurt at the end of the day after a crash in turn eight.
13th Aleix Espargaró 1.41.444 (49 laps): “We finally had some dry track time today and we had a lot of work to do on the bike, so luckily every lap we did was productive. We still need to make some comparisons between last year's bike and this year's so we dialled them both in with similar set-ups and did some back-to-back tests. I love the new bike but I don't know it as well as the 2012 version so we're working on it. We tried a bunch of different set-up options on both bikes to try to find a more comfortable setting. If the weather is good tomorrow we will work on getting the lap time down.”
16th Randy De Puniet 1.41.686 (37 laps): “Even though the weather was better today we had to wait until lunchtime before we could ride because the track was quite damp. At the start we had a few problems under braking, I didn't feel comfortable with the bike and I was struggling to stop it so we had to work on that all day, adjusting the engine braking. We had it sorted for the afternoon but it started raining. We wanted to do one last run at the end of the day just to test a few things but I crashed at turn eight. I was lucky I wasn't hurt because we don't know why it happened so we have work to do tomorrow.”
Power Electronics Aspar Press Release
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