CAFÉ RACER 76: Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo talk day 2 at Sepang

Valentino Rossi rested a little easier last night after finishing fourth yesterday, happy that he can be still be competitive and hasn’t lost his mojo and today will continue to rest easy again even though he finished fourth again.

The Italian managed to carve off half a second today and would have been able to break the 2.01 mark if he hadn’t made an error on the final turn where he lost almost 2 tenths of a second. In a interview he said that he’ll now concentrate on reducing the gap with his rivals and complete his testing programme.

“The second day of testing in Sepang is finished and the balance of the day is positive for us, especially as we finished some work on the bike. We have some different parts for the bike for this season and we continue to work on the setting. The positive is we improved compared to yesterday in terms of time on one lap with the new tyre but especially on the rhythm, I was half a second faster than yesterday which is not so bad. Fourth position is quite good especially as we are less than half a second behind Pedrosa and Lorenzo. Unfortunately it started to rain so we had to stop earlier, because our target this afternoon was to go into 2’00 but we will try again tomorrow.”

The consistency of reigning World Champion Jorge Lorenzo is always impressive. He too like his Yamaha team mate shaved more than half a second off his yesterday’s lap and was the first rider to break the 2.01 mark and worked on different set-up positions and continued to test variety of chassis and engine specifications which made him even faster.

“Today in the morning the conditions were good and I could easily do the lap times from yesterday, I improved by more than half a second. Later we tried some little parts we couldn’t try yesterday, but not so much and the bike didn’t improve a lot. In the last hour it started to rain so I decided to exit and ride in the wet. We made more than eight laps in the rain. I think it was important to find the feeling in these conditions and also try the new tyre.”