If in the time table he occupied the sixth place on the last day of pre-season MotoGP testing in Qatar, in the top speed table Maverick Viñales was one of the slowest – he finished in 20th place.
His teammate at Aprilia, Aleix Espargaró, feels that more torque and power is needed in the new RS-GP engine. Viñales was asked if he feels the same, to which he replied:
“I see the top speed, we are at the bottom [of the table]. I don’t know, because the engine for the test is not new, so you never know what the others are doing. The references we have are [Miguel] Oliveira and [Raúl] Fernández and they are up there. I think we can reach that top speed. If we are able to have this speed, it’s definitely 0.1s or 0.2s free on the track. So let’s see if we can really achieve that.”
Although the factory Aprilia riders were among the six slowest in terms of top speed, Oliveira and Fernández – from the satellite team Trackhouse Racing – were in the top ten of the statistics: the Portuguese in seventh and Fernández in tenth.
