Zoom Jorge Lorenzo

The final Grand Prix weekend of the season got underway at Valencia in Spain today in bright sunshine, with Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi finishing the first day of practice in second and fourth respectively.

The Fiat Yamaha pairing have little left to achieve this weekend but both are determined to close the season on a high note, with Lorenzo especially looking to confirm second place in the championship.

It was the young Mallorcan Lorenzo who spent the most time at the top of the time sheets today as he quickly found a comfortable setting for his M1 around the twisty 4.005 km circuit, one of only three circuits on the calendar where he has never won. In the last five minutes he was edged into second by Casey Stoner, but he continued to improve his time right up to the flag, ending up 0.382 seconds off the Australian.

"This is one of the few places I haven't won in my career so I really want to try! Today was very good, I did many laps with a strong rhythm and with a consistent and fast pace”, he said. “We are feeling strong and we hope we can continue to be competitive. Tonight we will look at the data from today and consider how we can make more improvements for tomorrow so that I can try to be on the front row once again."

Rossi made a similarly strong start, spending the session working through some different setting solutions and making a steady improvement throughout. The Italian, who won his ninth world championship last time out in Sepang, finished the day just behind Dani Pedrosa in fourth place.

"It's really nice to be riding as the world champion without having to think about points and now I just want to finish the year with a good race”, he said. “Today was not so bad, I'm not happy with fourth but we're not far off and we worked well on the bike. We had some different settings to work on to try to improve our performance at this track and then at the end I was able to do some good laps all together. Tomorrow we have quite a lot of work to do, we need to try the harder Bridgestone tyre and try to make another step with the setting, but so far we have done a good job."

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