The second day of the Sepang MotoGP™ Official Test proved to be a productive one for PETRONAS Yamaha Sepang Racing Team, with riders Fabio Quartararo and Franco Morbidelli making the most of the good conditions – ending the day first and fifth respectively.
Quartararo was able to jump aboard his brand new 2020 Factory-spec Yamaha YZR-M1 for the first time and spent the morning taking the time to acclimatise to the new machine. After a day of tweaking the set up and racking up the kilometres, Fabio set the fastest lap with less than an hour left on the clock. After completing 72 laps of the Malaysian track, Fabio’s best time of 1min 58.572secs was 0.069secs faster than Jack Miller and only 0.269secs off the official All Time Lap Record of Sepang, set by Fabio last year.
Meanwhile team-mate Morbidelli’s focus for the day was maintaining consistency across both bikes, while working through the team’s testing programme. Franco increased his pace throughout the day and bettered his time from yesterday, despite a small crash at Turn 2 just before lunch while testing a new rear tyre. The afternoon also saw the Italian testing and comparing different chassis components. The fastest of Franco’s 60 laps saw him finish the day fifth overall, 0.259secs down on Quartararo, with a time of 1min 58.831secs.
Testing will resume for the third and final day at the Sepang International Circuit tomorrow morning at 10:00 local time, with the chequered flag closing the action on the first official test of 2020 at 18:00 local time.
Quartararo tops the timesheets on second day of Sepang test
Quartararo tops the timesheets on second day of Sepang test
Another strong showing for Fabio Quartararo and Franco Morbidelli, as PETRONAS Yamaha SRT enjoy a productive end to the second day of testing at the Sepang International Circuit.
I am really positive because this is only our first day with the bike. We know that the Factory team tested on many occasions last season, but I’m really happy with the work of the team because we made so many changes in so few laps. We did 72 laps, which is quite a lot, but I’m so happy to already feel good on the bike. It is difficult to make a new bike really good in one day. We hope to make another step tomorrow. We had quite a lot of laps in the 1min 59secs on old tyres so that’s really positive. We need to improve the pace a little bit because I am not feeling 100% comfortable. We know that with a new bike you have some positive points and some parts that you are struggling a bit, but at the moment I have already found the positives in one day. With the settings we will change tomorrow we hope to find even more positive points.
I’m happy about today’s work, improving yesterday’s lap times. We’ve just been back-to-backing things that we were trying last year, as we wanted to reconfirm them for this year. Tomorrow we will try to make a time-attack, we will probably try to make that in the morning and then we will see what the weather is like. The forecast says it’s going to rain tomorrow but first of all we will do some work, then the time-attack, then continue to try some new things – we have some new ideas that we want to try with the bike.
