Spies was second fastest at the end of the day, nearly half a second faster than his Spanish team mate Jorge Lorenzo and only 0.295 seconds behind Spain's Dani Pedrosa. The track was dirty at the start, but times soon started to drop in the afternoon as more fresh rubber was laid down.
Current championship leader Jorge Lorenzo had a slow start to the day, finding the track conditions more challenging in the search for fast consistent times. The Spaniard picked up pace considerably from the session in the morning to finish behind Texan in third at the end of the day.
Ben Spies
"The track definitely made a huge improvement from the morning to the afternoon today. The bike is working really well; we made some small changes then just worked on race set up. We used hard tyres for the whole time and were able to set our fastest lap and be consistent with a lot of laps on the tyres, which is encouraging. We’ll try the softer tyres tomorrow to see if we can pick up some speed for qualifying but for the race set up the bike is good."
Jorge Lorenzo
"We were better this afternoon than this morning. We managed to get closer to the first position. I didn’t feel great on the track today so I hope we can improve the feeling for tomorrow. This track seems to be quite difficult for us to find a good set up. I’m struggling on the entry to the corners where I don’t seem to have much grip."
Press release courtesy of Yamaha Factory Racing.
