Progress come too late for Smith at Jerez plenty of positives

Bradley Smith struggled during the Jerez race weekend with a lack of confidence in fast corners, particularly the two right handers at the end of the lap, but during Monday’s test he made a change to  his electronics that transformed his Tech3 Yamaha.

“Amazingly all we tried was electronics and it solved the problem, which is disappointing, but at least we found the solution,” said Smith. “Yesterday we had a technical meeting, analysed a few things and went ‘ah, we know what we need to try.’ We put that in and first run it was like, ‘why didn’t we try this yesterday!’ But I didn’t think about it until yesterday night.

“And then the final thing we tried was front forks. We had a bit of an idea to try to stop this overloading problem on the front tyre and that seemed to work quite well. The idea is basically to not squash the tyre so much, keep it nice and round so the Yamaha can get on its side with a smoother transition. I think it’ll work well at other tracks. You never stop still learning the wonderful machine that is a MotoGP bike.”

Smith had his least competitive outing of the season in finishing eighth but overall his progress this year has been impressive but with MotoGP reconvening at Le Mans next weekend, at a circuit that Pol Espargaro had a front row start and almost finished on the podium, it will be very interesting to see whether Jerez was indicative of the momentum that we’ll see within the Tech3 garage for the rest of the year.