Portimao WorldSBK test exposes “problems” for one Yamaha rider

Yamaha stayed on for an extra day at Portimao last week for a third day of WorldSBK testing, after the first two days were hit by rain, but a crash for Andrea Locatelli disrupted his progress.

The Italian went to Portimao looking to find a better feeling with the Yamaha R1 after missing the top-10 in both dry races at the first World Superbike round of the season in Australia last month.

Locatelli said he’d felt good with the bike in the morning on the third day  (13 March) of running in Portimao, but indicated that that went away after a crash entering the final corner in the afternoon.

“I found a good rhythm and a good feeling with my R1 this morning, then unfortunately I crashed in the high-speed entry of the last corner,” he said.

“For sure, we lost a bit of confidence and then we found some other problems that needed to be looked at.”

He added that he found a setup direction in the afternoon after making some changes.

“In general, it was positive until we stopped for lunch and then, in the afternoon, we tried many different things to understand how to improve our set-up,” he said.

“We have found a little bit the way, so now we have some time to come back home again to check the data and analyse everything and then decide where to start the race weekend as fast as possible.”

Vierge: “Our pace is strong”

While the test had its ups and downs for Locatelli, his teammate, Xavi Vierge, was more complete in his positivity after the third day in Portimao, feeling he’d worked well to confirm his base setup in the morning before fine tuning it in the afternoon.

“I’m super happy with the test we had in Portimao, I would like to thank the team and Yamaha for allowing us to stay to be able to complete the test today because it was very necessary for us to prepare for the next race,” Vierge said.

“I’m very happy, we did a lot of work this morning to assess different set-ups to reconfirm our base. It’s something we needed to do and during the lunch break the team did a very good job to decide what is the best package for us. 

“Then we ‘went for it’ in the afternoon to find the fine tuning. I feel comfortable on the R1 and our race pace is strong – and also, we tried the softer tyre and we were able to extract quite a lot of potential from it which is not always easy here in Portimao. 

“Overall, I’m happy with this day and it was necessary for us to reset after the first round. Now it’s time to go home and rest a bit, soon we will be back racing.”