‘For sure the test helps a little bit, but I think it helps just the first 15 laps’ -Alex Rins

Alex Rins ended the first day of practice at Mugello with a great result for the Japanese manufacturer. The Spanish rider took second place overall and direct access to Q2 for tomorrow.

 

In a debrief, Rins spoke about the sensations of today with his bike and why he was riding at such a competitive pace.

– For sure the test helps a little bit, but I think it helps just the first 15 laps of the morning session. I think we are doing a good job since this morning. Already in Montmeló, I was able to be quite fast on the, at one lap, okay? But honestly here, with used tires, I feel quite strong and then the last round I was alone in front of the track and I saw P11 and I said no please not this time. So I tried to push at 100% and I did it at an unbelievable lap time. So I’m quite happy for this. And yeah, the lap honestly was not perfect. I made some mistakes. Maybe we can improve some tents, but not that much. We need to keep working on our base setup. I feel the bike is quite heavy on the change direction, so we are looking forward to tomorrow after analyzing all the data.

He added of tomorrow’s prospects: ‘Well, he couldn’t enter Q2, but he was at 0.2. It’s so close. I mean, before the start of the practice, I was talking with Julito and my crew chief and we were trying to understand which lap time we need to do to be in, at least for P10. The lap time that we say was much slower than the lap time that we did, so everything is so close.here the bike works a little bit better on the aero side. Let’s say like this, this track has really high speed corners like a Ravieta 1, a Ravieta 2, the last corner, corner 12. So I think this new fairing helps a little bit to carry a little bit more of speed in those kinds of corners, but as I said before, still we are far from finishing on the top. So we need to keep working. I’m confident, at least for the sprint race, to do it with a softer compound. Let’s see if the soft tyre is ok for the main race, that is 23 laps. We only did 16 laps on the soft tyre this afternoon, so still many laps to finish the race.’

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