‘Unrewarding’ day for Yamaha as Alex Rins, Fabio Quartararo struggle at Aragon

Yamaha’s ongoing lack of grip, and inability to exploit fresh tyres in a time attack, taunted Alex Rins and Fabio Quartararo during Friday practice at the Aragon MotoGP.

While all riders struggled for grip on the new Aragon track surface, the pair were hit harder than most.

Despite some new parts - including aero tweaks - from the recent Misano test, Rins and Quartararo finished just 19th and 20th respectively on the timesheets.

As in Austria, they were once again beaten by the leading Hondas.

“We had a busy but unrewarding first day at the Aragon track,” said Monster Yamaha team director Massimo Meregalli.

“We had higher hopes for the new tarmac when it comes to improved grip, so much so that we were afraid it would negatively affect tyre life, but we discovered the opposite today.

“This amplified in a negative way our performance. We will spend all the available time before the next session to learn from the data we collected today to prepare something for FP2 and the qualifying sessions.

“On top of today's lack of grip, Fabio had a crash in Turn 6 but, luckily, it had no big consequences.”

Quartararo, unable to lean his bike as much as in previous years due to the poor edge grip, began the weekend with 18th in FP1 but briefly featured in the ten top during the afternoon.

However, the crash forced him to go straight into time-attack mode on a different spec (spare) bike and he was left 1.6s behind fastest man Marc Marquez.

“Today, and especially this morning, was quite tough for us,” said the Frenchman. 

“I crashed in the afternoon, so I had to go out with a different bike that I was not supposed to use because it was a different spec. 

"I had to adapt to it quite quickly. But overall, the feeling was not great today.”

Rins was just 0.001s faster than Quartararo on his M1.

“The grip was very low, and the day was quite hard,” said the Spaniard, a former Aragon MotoGP winner for Suzuki. 

“Today we gave our maximum, as always, and it looks like we are a bit further from the top guys than we were at other tracks.

“For sure, the low-grip conditions at this track don't help us. Let's see if we can improve tomorrow.”

The good news for the Yamaha duo is that track conditions are expected to improve significantly as the weekend goes on.