"Rossi Looking to Improve Pace"

The MotoGP paddock returned to action today at the Sachsenring in eastern Germany and Valentino Rossi and his team rushed to get back to work, aiming to recover the points lost last time in Assen. The warm and sunny weather today was a good respite from the rain that has been following the paddock around Europe, and a full day of dry set-up time remaining for the pilot Fiat Yamaha 4 th in the classification Combined.

Rossi, who is currently second in the championship, a good start this morning and ended the first session in third place, only 0299 compared with Casey Stoner. He hoped that more improvement this afternoon, but a small group of no change to reap the expected benefits and could not improve on his time this morning. More practice ended in fourth place, but a second gap to the lead pilot means that Rossi and his crew face a hard day's work tomorrow to compensate for lost time this afternoon. His colleague Jorge Lorenzo meanwhile made an improvement of almost half a second this afternoon and ended the day sixth.

Valentino Rossi - Position: 4 Time: 1'22 .617 Laps: 63

"Sure I'm not happy after practice today! This afternoon we tried some modifications to the establishment and
decided to try a soft start, but things did not work the way we expected and we could not improve our time. In the fast corners I was not fast enough, and I have always been a bit wider. This afternoon I could not ride the way I wanted. Clearly, this afternoon, the election is not the right way for us at this circuit and, therefore, tomorrow morning we will return this morning to start-up and try to close the gap on Casey. I did not test the new electronics today, and indeed at this point is more likely than not this weekend, but I did try different Bridgestone tyres and found one that we believe will be well for the race. I am sure that our potential is more than what today we will do our best to improve tomorrow. "

Davide Brivio - Team Manager

"We started well this morning, but unfortunately we could not improve our lap times this afternoon. We tried something different for the second session and did not have the right result so now we have to analyze all of the current information to make sure we do for this morning. We had the opportunity to test some tires and not be so bad here, but of course we need more time to improve the package as a whole in this difficult journey. "