Miguel Oliveira had the opportunity on Monday to test the latest version of Aprilia’s MotoGP bike during the testing day in Misano. The CryptoDATA RNF MotoGP rider, who finished seventh on the timesheets, felt that the bike was better than his own.
The Portuguese rider shared his thoughts with the press about this year’s RS-GP: ‘It was… there is nothing that stands out better than mine, but it is a little better everywhere. It was an interesting test. The interesting factor was that even with very used tires, I was still faster than with my bike – the 2022 bike. There is a lot of potential; when you go to a bike and suddenly you are even faster, it means there is a lot of potential there. So, I am happy with that‘.
However, according to Oliveira, the work focused mainly on the bike he has now: ‘It was also in the plans that we wouldn’t do many laps on it [2023 bike], because we won’t be competing with this bike, so it wouldn’t make sense. And then we focused our efforts on the 2022 specification. We tried a swingarm, a link, a steering damper – little things like these just to help us understand how we can improve the current specification‘.
Asked if he believes it is possible to extract more performance from the current bike, #88 replied: ‘The margin is much smaller than with the 2023 bike, but we try to do our best with it. We know it’s the machine we have to work with. I know the limitations of the bike because I rode the new one and I won’t go crazy if I can’t achieve the same performances as the other two riders, because now I understand well how the bike works. There is more margin [with the 2023 bike]; nothing can give you a big step now, but there are little things everywhere helping you to achieve better performance, for sure. I expected small differences‘.
