The time table indicated it and it corresponds to reality: Miguel Oliveira found improvements on the last day of MotoGP pre-season testing, being the 12th fastest in Losail.
The Portuguese rider from Trackhouse Racing said that there were improvements with the new Aprilia RS-GP, but he regretted the time it took to take this step forward: ‘Yes, it was a better day. I’m not completely satisfied, but at least we took a good step forward. It’s just a shame that we reached a good feeling too late – it was four days with the same bad feeling and today with a slightly different bike I finally managed to take some steps and be competitive. I couldn’t extract the best from the whole bike because your braking points, the way you ride, if you have a good bike day by day you can improve those aspects. Also during today we were building good speed, with a good pace testing things. Then I had a small problem with one bike, I had to wait for that bike and transfer the settings to the other bike, which took a while. But then with attacks on the stopwatch everything worked more or less well’.
Asked if the improvements come from a different tuning, Oliveira confirmed: ‘Yes, and that’s why it’s frustrating: the bike is the same, but we only changed the tuning a bit. Actually, it was a simple thing to change that gave me a much better feeling. It’s frustrating; if I had probably done 1m52s yesterday, today I could have done better than 1m51.8s. But that’s how it is; the position doesn’t excite me too much being 12th, but it’s better than being 21st putting it into perspective’.
