Yamaha rider Valentino Rossi used the first part of the opening free practice session in Argentina to ready his bike's setting, before putting in a soft tyre in the final part to set a solid time. Towards the end of the session he dropped a 1‘41.311s lap for seventh place, but as the majority of the riders put in a time attack in the final minutes, he was pushed back to 16th, 0.955s from first.
The Doctor went out of the gates early in the 45-minute second outing, to test the hard option rear. He used his first run solely to make his YZR-M1 fit the Termas de Río Hondo track‘s sweeping corners and hard acceleration demands, before it was time to get down to business. He gradually improved his pace, and gained nearly 0.8s on his best time from this morning with a 1‘40.531s lap, but he was unable to climb higher in the standings. He finished the day with a 1.054s margin to the top of the timesheets, again in 16th position, also in the combined times.
“We hoped to have a good feeling, like we had in the race with the bike, but it was more similar to what the feeling was like in the practice sessions in Qatar and in the tests,” he explained. “We have a lot of problems to enter the corners fast with this bike and I don't feel comfortable.”
‘I'm about one second behind, but the problem is that we are all close together and we have a lot of different riders that are very fast, so we need to improve the feeling and the setting of the bike and we hope that tomorrow morning's FP3 will be dry. We will try to improve and try to stay in the top10 for the qualifying.”
