Zoom Jorge Lorenzo

Following on from his recent successful test in Brno, when he made some positive steps forward with his Michelin tyres, Jorge Lorenzo was in good shape today on the first day of the Grand Prix of San Marino at Misano.

The Fiat Yamaha Team rider finished the day in seventh overall and, more importantly, feeling confident and positive about the weekend's task.

The 21-year-old, who won the 250cc race here last year, made a good start to the morning with the fourth fastest time and then improved by just under four tenths this afternoon. He will be hoping to make some further set-up improvements tomorrow morning, when the hot weather looks set to continue, before attempting to return to the front row in the afternoon's qualifying session.

“I'm very happy today. We had a good test after Brno and now here today I feel that the tyres are much better at this track than they were there, so I am feeling even more confident”, he commented. “I don't want to make any predictions about the race or talk about results; first of all we have to wait until tomorrow to see if we can continue like this. I think I can improve even more because everything feels better than two weeks ago, so tomorrow we will try to keep going in this way. The surface here is not new, like it was in Brno, and this is better for Michelin, but we need to make one more step in order to be at the level that we want.”

“This is definitely a different situation form the last two races !”, added Team Manager Daniele Romagnoli. “Here, as expected from last year's data, Michelin tyres are more competitive and they are giving us the chance to be back at the top end of the classification. The test in Brno was very important to improve the tyre situation, but we still need to work more with Michelin to further improve the grip level because we're still not as fast as we would like to be. We need to improve our set-up more for this track because the front of the bike is still not stable enough on the hard braking and we need to work more on the suspension.”

Lorenzo's team-mate Valentino Rossi was second fastest today, 0.418 seconds behind Casey Stoner.

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