A promising start to the weekend for Team HRC at Misano

“I must be happy with this seventh place after all the problems, injuries, and the work I did at home to recover my shoulder and knee over these last months. Even if I’m not yet 100% with my shoulder, I have at least come here in better physical shape compared to recent rounds, and despite hotter and trickier conditions compared to the test, I’ve felt okay. We’ve focused on the bike setup for the race, targeting a few areas that weren’t working perfectly during the test, and I have to say that with used tyres, I was able to complete my best lap on my own, which is good. We made a step forward with the suspension, though we still have room for improvement, and with the electronics, where the engineers in Japan have taken a good step to help me better use and conserve the tyres. I’ve also used the new exhaust I tried at the test, which improved my feeling a bit. All in all, it was probably the first time this year I could ride the bike in a more relaxed way, giving it 100% without being forced to over-ride to achieve the lap times. I want to thank my crew chief and data engineer for their efforts, and everyone on my team because they worked very well and very quickly, following the plan we had made for today scrupulously. I’m pleased with myself too. We are not too close but not too far away either. Let’s see what we can do tomorrow in hotter conditions; I prefer to not have any expectations and see how it goes.”

“It has been a difficult first day for us here. The feeling with the bike has not been so good, and I struggled a lot. But we all worked very hard during the day, and FP2 went better. We improved the pace but haven’t yet achieved everything we had in our plan. If we are able to make another step to better carry the speed through the corners and make the bike turn better, we will be able to significantly improve our performance. At the moment, we are a bit on the limit in that area. We will see tomorrow.”