Álex Rins’ adaptation to Yamaha and the Monster Energy Yamaha team continued on Wednesday in the second day of MotoGP testing in Sepang. He finished 13th on the timesheet, 0.976s behind leader Enea Bastianini (Ducati) and just over two tenths behind his teammate Fabio Quartararo.
The Spanish rider explained that he focused on electronics and bike tuning, starting to work on adapting the YZR-M1 to his riding style: ‘Today was the day we only tested the swingarm in terms of items. And something on the fairing that was meant to cool the air around the bike. Today we focused only on improving the electronics compared to yesterday and doing some tuning because until today I haven’t made any adjustments to the bike; I’ve just been trying to ride, testing new items and things like that. Today was the fourth day riding here in Malaysia, so I was able to test some tuning, raising the rear, lowering the rear, raising the front, lowering the front, and trying to understand how this bike works and adapt the bike to my riding style‘.
Despite this focus, Rins still had time to try some fast laps and admitted that Yamaha is still far from the competition: ‘We made some attacks on the stopwatch. Honestly, I improved my lap time here in Sepang – 1m58.1s. I couldn’t improve anymore, I don’t know why, I was riding at the limit. It seems that we are still a bit far from the top riders; I was 0.9s behind, Fabio was about 0.7s, I believe. So, we just need to keep working to understand where we are losing this time, what the bike is lacking to be closer. But we are working hard for this. The engineers are working hard, especially one person who came from another factory and Fabio noticed more differences than me. It’s normal. But I saw the team working so hard, the engineers. So, we just need time‘.
