Francesco Bagnaia closed the MotoGP testing day in Jerez in the top five. The rider posted the fourth fastest time, 0.184s behind the leader Fabio Di Giannantonio (Gresini/Ducati), and had no new solutions to try out on the Ducati.
The 2022 and 2023 champion shared his thoughts on Monday’s testing session in southern Spain: ‘I have to say that most of the things we had to test today, we have tested on Friday. So today was just a day to analyze and test everything again. Everything we tried was working well, so I’m happy with it. Then we were focusing on a different setting that maybe could help in a track with less grip. We used all the last runs of the tyres just to test this kind of setting that maybe in a track like Barcelona or where we have less grip, we can have an advantage’.
The high levels of grip on the Jerez asphalt ended up not being very useful, Bagnaia noted: ‘It was very difficult to test something today for the grip level. It was quite impressive; this morning I entered on track and the feeling was fantastic, much better than yesterday. And it was very easy to run on 1m36s. It was an incredible feeling, but also not so useful’.
When asked if there were any new items on the bike, the current second-place holder in the championship denied it: ‘No, not today, because on Friday we did more things. Normally on a race weekend, Friday is a day just to take feeling and try to improve your riding on a bike and adapt, not changing too much. And on Friday we changed many things just to improve my feeling, just to improve the situation of the vibrations – that this weekend we didn’t have any, so maybe we solved this little problem. But we want to wait. I think Barcelona could be one of the tracks where we can have some issues with the vibrations. But we didn’t test any new items’.
Regarding the vibrations, according to Bagnaia, they seem to be related to the level of grip: ‘It looks like that the less grip we have, more vibrations we have, so today was not the case’.