Preparations begin for Tech3 on day 1 in Malaysia

Posted on Oct 23, 2015 by Monster Yamaha Tech 3

Bradley Smith started his Malaysian campaign with a firm display at the penultimate round of the 2015 MotoGP World Championship as he ended the opening day in 14th overall. When the fight commenced, Smith leapt onto his Yamaha YZR-M1 and he began to alter the base setup of his MotoGP bike to suit the challenging 5.5 kilometre circuit.

The British rider finished the practice in 15th, yet he remained confident of improving in the afternoon. There, he launched straight back into his groove as he aimed to lower his lap time and make advances in preparation for Sunday’s main event. During the practice, Smith completed 19 laps, the highest number of any MotoGP rider and his personal best time of 2’02.101 which he set on his 7th lap, left him in 14th in the combined standings. After a challenging day, the 24 year old now sets his sights on seeing out his qualifying campaign with a strong performance tomorrow ahead of the 17th round battle on Sunday.

Bradley Smith: – Position: 14th – Time: 2'02.101 – Laps: 37
“It’s good to be back at Sepang which is a track that I enjoy riding at, but I must admit that today was quite a struggle and to be completely honest, we have some work to do. As soon as I started this morning, my confidence and feeling wasn’t quite the same as usual with the bike and it’s difficult to understand why after the positive test that we had here in February. At the moment, we are unfortunately stuck inside the 2’02 bracket, which of course, is not where we want or need to be. However, a positive is that we are not just struggling with one specific factor but we need to improve the bike as a whole which means it is easier to find some solutions. Anyway, towards the end of the second free practice session, we were able to improve slightly, yet there is plenty of work to do tomorrow still. Overall, we tried a lot of different settings today in order to identify which direction to head towards and now we will have an in depth look at the data and then see what we can do. It was a tricky start today, but for sure, tomorrow we will be stronger.”