The timesheets indicated that and it’s a reality: Miguel Oliveira found some improvements in the last day of the MotoGP pre-season tests, being the 12th fastest rider in Losail.
The Portuguese from Trackhouse Racing said that there were improvements with the new Aprilia RS-GP, but regrets the time it took until taking that step forward: ‘Yeah, it was a better day. I’m not fully satisfied, but at least we took a good step forward. It’s just a shame that we got to a good feeling too late – it was four days with the same bad feeling and today with a slightly different bike finally I could start making up some steps and be competitive. I couldn’t the get out the best of whole bike because your braking points, the way you ride, if you get a good bike day by day you can fine tune those points. Also during today we were building up a good speed, with a good pace testing the things. Then I got a small issue with one bike, I had to wait for that bike and transfer settings to the other bike, so that took a while. But then with the time attacks everything worked more or less OK’.
Asked whether the improvements came from a different setup of the bike, Oliveira confirmed: ‘Yes, and that’s why it’s frustrating: the bike is the same, but we just changed a little bit the setup. Actually it was a simple thing to change that gave me a much better feeling. It’s frustrating; if I’ve done probably 1m52s yesterday, today I could’ve done better than 1m51.8s. But it’s like that; the position doesn’t really excites me too much being 12th, but it’s better than 21st putting into perspective’.