Yamaha ready to compete with good gesture – MotoGP news
Wilco Zeelenberg has shown some satisfaction about the performance of their Factory Yamaha Racing rider’s duo Jorge Lorenzo and Ben Spies.
The 2011 MotoGP season will be stating new history as there has been some shuffling of riders and, the performance shown by some Honda riders on, unexpected.
The Honda RC212 dominated the time charts from the first pre-season test through the second pre-season tests held at the Sepang International Circuit.
Marco Simoncelli of San Carlo Honda Gresini was the dominator of the first Sepang test, and the second test was totally stolen by the Repsol Hondas riders Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa, first and second respectively.
Simoncelli (San Carlo Honda Gresini) was following the duo in third place and the third teammate of Repsol Honda duo Andrea Dovizioso was on fourth place. Honda RC212V was standing on top-four positions by the final day.
Defending World Champion, Jorge Lorenzo met with a series of highly charged Honda machines RC212V and this is what which Wilco Zeelenberg accepts as a great challenge to face this season.
“It’s interesting I have to say because we improved the bike quite a lot compared to last year, but obviously our competitors are very strong,” said the Dutchman.
“The competition being harder is better for us, because last year Jorge won by 138 points in the end, which is too much; 25 points or two races ahead is nice, but with 138 points it means somebody made a lot of mistakes, so I hope the competition will be
very tough. He is the most consistent rider out there as we have seen last year, and so far we are going well.”
Wilco Zeelenberg and his team reached Sepang with a sense of development in the new M1, especially in the rear end of the machine. Zeelenberg was satisfied with the performance data collected from the tests at Sepang. But, still Yamaha could not match the
speed of RC212V and by the end of the test Lorenzo pointed a weakness that was to be addressed, the need of more powerful engine.
“Yes of course, especially on tracks like this,” commented Zeelenberg in response to the assertion. “We know Honda’s engine configuration is completely different from ours so we are not able to match that, but we believe that’s not always necessary because
there are 18 races and we race on very short tracks. We are not on the dyno so it’s not dyno racing, otherwise we also would have thought about new solutions. But it’s not, it’s controllable power, which is our mission. We are going the right way but we need
to continue working hard of course,” he concluded.
The last pre-season test will be held at Losail, Qatar March 13-14.
Tags: