Mixed Friday in France for WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Team

13-05-2022

Mixed Friday in France for WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Team

Andrea Dovizioso and Darryn Binder opened the French Grand Prix with some steps forward.

The sun was upon the world-famous Bugatti Circuit for day one of proceedings at round seven of the 2022 MotoGP World Championship today. Yet, it was a rather tricky Friday for the WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Team duo of Andrea Dovizioso and Darryn Binder, who concluded the first two Free Practices in P20 and P24, respectively.

While Dovizioso started out well this morning and was losing just less than one second to the top, he managed to lower his lap time in FP2, but not quite enough to eventually miss out on the top 10 by 0.624 seconds. The Italian still went 0.200 seconds faster in the afternoon and now aims to find some solutions to improve his feeling tomorrow in Free Practice three.

On the other side of the WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Team garage, MotoGP rookie Binder once again had to start from scratch this weekend. The South African did well to go more than one second quicker from FP1 to FP2, but unfortunately had an off in turn seven towards the end of the second session, which prevented him from stepping forward any further.

For Free Practice three tomorrow at 09.55 local time both, Dovizioso and Binder aims to get closer to the top before they start their race preparations in FP4 at 13:30 local time and go into the Qualifying from 14:10 local time.

Andrea Dovizioso

WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Racing Team

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t do the fast lap with the soft tyre in the afternoon, because there have been a lot of yellow flags and on the last lap, I did a mistake. I could do better, for sure. I’m still happy to feel the soft with more potential, because I was struggling a bit too much with the medium rear. For tomorrow, everybody will be focused more on the soft rear and this might be the race tyre as well. But let’s see. With the medium, I’m pretty good, but I don’t feel that confident on maximum angle, so I expected a bit more. Tomorrow everybody will use a different tyre anyway, so we have to wait and see what we can do.”

Darryn Binder

WithU Yamaha RNF MotoGP Racing Team

“We got treated with really nice weather today, which was a great thing for Le Mans. I started off this morning in FP1 just trying to learn my way around the circuit with the MotoGP bike. Unfortunately, during FP2 in the middle run I had a crash in turn seven. Luckily I managed to get out at the end and continued and finished the practice. But I feel like I wasn’t able to make the step forward that I’d like to have done, so I got a little bit of work to do for tomorrow. Overall, I’m enjoying riding the M1 here and I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.”