Alex Rins finished the first day of training at Mugello with a great result for the Japanese manufacturer. The Spanish rider ended up in second place overall and with direct access to Q2 for tomorrow.
In the debrief, Rins talked about the feelings of today with his bike and why he is maintaining such a competitive pace.
– Surely the test helps a bit, but I think it only helps in the first 15 laps of the morning session. I think we are doing a good job since this morning. Already in Montmeló, I managed to be quite fast in one lap, right? But, honestly, here, with used tires, I feel quite strong and, on the last lap, I was alone at the front of the track and saw P11 and said no, please, not this time. So, I tried to push myself 100% and I managed to do it with an unbelievable lap time. So, I am very happy with this. And yes, honestly, the lap was not perfect. I made some mistakes. Maybe we can improve a few thousandths, but not much. We have to continue working on our base setup. I feel that the bike is quite heavy in changing direction, so we are looking forward to tomorrow, after analyzing all the data.
He talked about tomorrow’s prospects and mentioned his teammate, Quartararo: “Well, he didn’t make it to Q2, but he was 0.2 off. It’s very close. I mean, before the start of the session, I was talking to Julito and my team boss and we were trying to figure out what lap time we needed to at least be in P10. The time we said was much slower than the time we actually did, so it’s all very close. The bike works a bit better aerodynamically here. Let’s say this track has very fast corners, like Turn 1, Turn 2, the final corner, Turn 12. So, I think this new fairing helps a bit to gain a bit more speed in those types of corners, but, as I said before, we are still far from finishing at the top. So, we have to keep working. I am confident, at least for the Sprint race, to do it with a softer compound. Let’s see if the soft tire is good for the main race, which is 23 laps. We only did 16 laps with the soft tire this afternoon, so there are still many laps left to finish the race”.
