Rossi notes importance of work in varied conditions

Friday, May 15, 2009
With some typically ‘changeable’ Le Mans weather expected for the rest of the weekend, as experienced on Friday, Valentino Rossi wants to be sure of his best set-up in all conditions.

Friday, 15 May 2009



After the rain in Qatar and Japan, where Rossi finished both GPs in second place, and the sunshine of Jerez, where the Italian made a surge forward on Sunday morning before earning his first win of the year, the series leader is aware that adapting to the conditions over the next 48 hours will be crucial at Le Mans.

Having finished sixth fastest on Friday in the re-extended hour-long outing which was disrupted by rainfall half way through, Rossi said of his 18 lap workout, “The conditions were quite bad and we couldn’t even do 45 minutes, so we were not able to use the entire practice. The weather here is always hard to judge and luckily we managed to still get quite a few dry laps done. We made a modification to improve the set-up and I felt quite confident, but when I went back out to try it the rain came.”

Rossi added, “We have to see what the Saturday conditions are like, whether it is dry or wet. It can change in five minutes here so we have to use today’s data and whatever we can get tomorrow to be ready for the race.”World Champion Valentino Rossi aims for his 99th Grand Prix victory this weekend and as the master of perfecting his race set-up gradually over the course of a three day meeting he knows he will need to use all of his experience at round four in France.

His team manager Davide Brivio, meanwhile, stated, “Luckily we had 30 minutes before it rained, because we know that this is going to be a difficult weekend where the weather is concerned. It looks like it’s going to be unsettled for the next two days so we have to take what we learnt today and use it to the best of our advantage. We still need to do some work because we didn’t really get the chance to check the work we did today, so we’re looking forward to more time on-track tomorrow.”

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