Suzuki Ecstar rider Andrea Iannone managed to improve his feel on the GSX-RR during the opening day of practice for this weekend's French Grand Prixand had two positive sessions; placing 11th in this morning's mixed weather session and 5th in the afternoon with heavy rain falling.
Weather conditions affected the day and in particular the morning session. With the track starting off wet at the beginning of the 45 minute session, it later went on to dry up, leaving many riders on rain tyres and others switching to higher performing slick tyres.
In these conditions Iannone was able to focus on looking for improvement with the wet setup, but was not able to take advantage of the slick tyres for a proper time attack at the end of the session. The result left him out of the top ten by just 0.255 seconds.
The rain that fell in the afternoon made track conditions more congruent to wet tyres, allowing riders to focus on specific setups, and Andrea was able to improve his performance, ending in 5th.
“My feelings are not bad at all, since this morning I have had a positive feeling,” Iannone said. “Last time in wet conditions, in Austin, we struggled a lot more than here. While here, I already feel we are a lot better. Since Jerez we started to improve consistently and this positive path gave me more confidence to perform better. I'm very happy to see that we work better and better. Maybe with a little more time we could also be in a better position in the classification, but for now the important thing is to have improved.”
