Soggy Start to Le Mans Weekend for Movistar Yamaha MotoGP

The Movistar Yamaha MotoGP Team riders started their quests at the Grand Prix de France today with the first free practice sessions, ahead of Sunday's race. Valentino Rossi showed a solid pace in the mixed conditions and landed eighth place in the combined session times, slightly ahead of teammate Maverick Viñales, who posted the tenth fastest time.Rossi was true to his word, spoken in the run-up to the weekend in Le Mans. He wanted to make a strong start to the French GP and he quickly matched his pace with the front runners. Having breached into the top5, he shifted his attention to the setting of his YZR-M1. With the track drying and the pace picking up, he set a best time of 1'40.894s for eighth place, 3.427s from first.The soaking wet conditions in the afternoon, didn't stop the Doctor booking progress. He quickly moved up to provisional second place and spent the remaining 30 minutes focusing on improving his setting before putting it to the test in the final stages. He wrapped up the second session with a tenth fastest time of 1'43.006s, 1.333s from the front and held on to eighth place in the combined standings, thanks to his morning time.Valentino Rossi, 8th - 1'40.894 Movistar Yamaha MotoGP Team "For sure it's more difficult in these conditions, but for us it's also very important to try to understand the feeling of the bike in the wet, because in Jerez we suffered also a lot in these conditions. In the end I'm just tenth, so the position is not fantastic, but the feeling with the bike improved and throughout the practice I was always in a good position. I think that at the end with the new tyre I needed a few more laps to get some heat in, but the feelings are better. We worked a lot on corner entry and it's not so bad, but now we have to understand our pace in the dry and we hope for good conditions tomorrow."Massimo Meregalli Movistar Yamaha MotoGP Team Director "Today's morning conditions were exactly what we hoped to avoid. The track was still drying in the morning, which meant that we were unable to collect any really good information, like we did in the fully wet afternoon session. Even though it doesn't look like it's going to rain over the next two days, it's been important to ride in the wet, as this allowed us to make another step in terms of the set-up for rainy conditions. We expect that it will be dry from now on and we will start FP3 with the information that we collected two weeks ago during the Le Mans test, Vale will continue to evaluate the two different settings he compared in FP1 which gave him a good impression."