Nothing to choose between Lecuona and Vierge at Barcelona home track

“I’m happy to be back here with my team and bike. We arrived having already done a lot of setup work during the recent test we had. To be honest, after spending the last weekend in MotoGP I was expecting to need a bit more time to regain that WorldSBK feeling and so I was surprised to feel comfortable and fast after just four or five laps. It was a very good session and we just weren’t able to find the feeling with a different tyre spec, basically because it’s the first time we’re trying it after having missed the chance to use it during testing due to my crash. In the afternoon I spoke with my crew chief and basically changed the plan entirely, because I thought we should focus on working on race distance. It was something I had been thinking all day and we’re very happy with the outcome of the afternoon’s session because there was much less of a drop compared to last year, despite the fact that the temperature was higher and that I always lapped alone. So I’m very happy and we will now analyse the data and see if there is any fine tuning we can do to further reduce the tyre drop. I want to thank the team for their hard work and tomorrow we go again!”

“It has been a good day for us, and I had good feeling right from the start despite a small crash in FP1. It was insignificant, in fact it was good to find the limit early, if anything. Thanks to the team because they repaired the bike in time for FP2 and that session also went well. We completed two long runs to try and understand our pace in such hot conditions and the feeling was not so bad. As ever, we need to improve a bit with the new tyres, but the race pace is there so I’m happy with how day one has gone. Now we’ll see if we can make another little step forward tomorrow. As always, our first target for Saturday is to do as well as we can in qualifying.”