MotoGP: ‘Little by little’ take Iannone to second

Andrea Iannone has finished the second day of the 2017 MotoGP season in second on the time sheets, after ‘little by little’ improvements helped the Suzuki rider to find his pace after struggling on the opening day.

Jumping up the time sheets towards the end of the day’s second session after languishing outside the top ten for the first day, he says that no major changes, just gradual progress, have helped them out.

“Already in FP2 today we were able to improve a little the feel of the bike and things went better and better, little by little. At the end, we tried a new setting as a result of all the information we had gained and it proved to be effective. We are very satisfied with the result we achieved, but that´s it, because the most important thing is the race. We still have to work on finding a confident pace. With the soft tyre, now the machine is behaving well, I have a good feeling that it will pay off. We still have some little issues we can improve on and so we will work on these areas to prepare the race distance.”

And despite teammate Alex Rins being a distant 18^th overall on only his second day at a MotoGP racer, team boss Davide Brivio says that he’s pleased with the progress made by both of his riders.

“At the end of the session, in the last lap, Andrea managed to put in a fantastic lap that got him second place. In a session where it was really hard to improve on yesterday´s times, he had an astonishing performance. I hope that although this was only a single qualifying-style lap, it is also a sign of a renewed feeling for the machine, and overall improvement of the whole package. Now we will have to confirm that we can also have a good pace in the race configuration, but maybe this is a good starting point.

“Tomorrow’s FP4 will be very important, as well as qualifying, but for the moment we are happy for the extraordinary performance of Andrea. We are pleased about the job done by the crew in finding some solutions after a situation that made yesterday really hard. Alex couldn’t improve his time because, once again, this is only our first GP weekend and he is still learning the riding technique for MotoGP. Tomorrow’s FP4 will be important for him to find a comfortable pace and then in Q1 he will give his best, so we’ll see what it brings.”